Enchanted - The Transformation of Marc Jacobs : The New Yorker September 1, 2008

[MissMagAddict]

Source | The New Yorker | By Ariel Levy


Jacobs in Paris: “That’s what I think everyone should aspire to in life—being shameless.”
Photograph by François-Marie Banier.

The two individuals perhaps most responsible for transforming the West Village from what it was ten years ago into what it is today are Carrie Bradshaw and Marc Jacobs. The former is a bubbly, self-involved, inordinately chic blond journalist who chronicles the lives of New York women, her own life in particular. The latter is a fashion designer who has become famous as the creator of the shoes and clothes and, most prominently, handbags worn by the women whom Carrie chronicles and the women who wish that they could be her. Carrie Bradshaw, of course, is make-believe, the protagonist of the “Sex and the City” franchise, whereas Marc Jacobs is a real person. Or he was once.

Jacobs used to be a chubby Jewish guy with long hair and glasses who made his name—and got fired—by designing a “grunge” collection (of very expensive silk shirts printed to look like flannel, and fine cashmere sweaters with the appearance of thermal underwear) in 1993, as the head of womenswear at Perry Ellis. Five years later, he was hired as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, France’s premier luxury-goods house, where he was seen as an enfant terrible, and nobody was quite sure if he would make it work. But, in the decade since Jacobs arrived at Vuitton, he has quadrupled its business and, with the company’s backing, watched his own Marc Jacobs Collection and his less expensive secondary line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, grow into a global business, with a hundred and sixty stores, in nineteen countries. You see his handbags, with their quilting and clunky hardware, on every other girl in Manhattan—like flip-flops, except that they cost thousands of dollars.

Jacobs’s physical appearance has come to reflect his success. At the age of forty-five, he is no longer remotely plump. His hair is cut short (and was, briefly, bright blue), and he has started wearing contact lenses. He looks like a cartoon superhero: muscular, bronzed, shining with diamonds. And he has accomplished the comic-book feat of transforming himself from hardworking Everyman (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Peter Parker) into something elevated and different and not merely human. But this is fashion, not crime-fighting, so the goal isn’t to fly or to leap tall buildings or—God forbid—become invisible. No. What one wants is to be a cultural touchstone, to represent and embody a life style, the way Karl Lagerfeld does, or Donatella Versace, or Carrie Bradshaw.

Jacobs could almost be in one of the Annie Leibovitz photographs that make up his current Louis Vuitton ad campaign. (They feature Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola relaxing in a field with a monogrammed Vuitton tote; Keith Richards playing guitar in a hotel room next to a custom case; Mikhail Gorbachev and a Vuitton satchel in the back seat of a limousine near a remnant of the Berlin Wall—all in a golden, larger-than-life light.) Almost, but not quite, because Marc Jacobs’s brand of success is unapologetically less dignified. Jacobs has twenty-eight tattoos, among them one on his left arm that says, “Bros before hos,” a phrase borrowed from pimp culture that expresses a credo of allegiance to men before women, comrades before conquests, or, as Jacobs puts it, “friends before a piece of ***.” Until recently, he had a boyfriend named Jason Preston, seventeen years his junior, who was a retired prostitute, and who had the Marc Jacobs logo tattooed in large letters up the length of his forearm. The couple issued regular updates on their romance on their respective pages on MySpace.

Jacobs’s retail domain stretches across several blocks of Bleecker Street, rendering the surrounding area a kind of Marc Jacobs theme park and, naturally, a prominent stop on “Sex and the City” bus tours, which regularly crawl along the cobblestones, shuttling young women to the Magnolia bakery to sample the cupcakes favored by Carrie. A handbag that Jacobs designed for Vuitton was so prominent in the movie that it was more a character than a prop.

All this makes Jacobs very happy. There is nothing he loves more than seeing his work woven into the culture. With the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, he created a series of handbags featuring the stately Vuitton monogram reimagined in candy colors on a white backdrop and, more recently, interspersed with a camouflage print, which was named “monogramouflage.” The collaboration has been so successful that its biggest problem has been the frequency with which the purses are knocked off and illegally hawked on street corners. Jacobs, delighting in copying the copycats, installed faux street venders selling real bags at the opening of Murakami’s recent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. It was possible, that night, to buy a three-thousand-dollar handbag off a folding table from a guy in a skullcap and a sweatshirt who was being paid an hourly wage to wear that costume. Jacobs is amused by such things—things that seem like other things. His collections often include trompe-l’oeil.

Jacobs also enjoys the idea that the brand is the product being sold. (This is unusual for a fashion designer: designers tend to think of their work as art and get snippy at the suggestion that they are simply peddlers of schmattes and image.) A recent print campaign for the Marc Jacobs Collection shows Victoria Beckham, née Posh Spice, wearing Marc Jacobs clothes and sunglasses and emerging from boxes and bags that bear his name—she is a human product, wrapped.

Jacobs is a human product, too, as famous for what he means as for what he does. In market research conducted for Daisy, a perfume he was introducing (named after one of his dogs), women at a mall in the Midwest were asked if they’d heard of Marc Jacobs. Many said yes, but when they were asked who he was, they often replied “a rock star” or “an actor” rather than “a fashion designer.” Probably, they had noticed his name in a gossip column. They might have seen pictures of Jacobs smoking cigarettes at parties with celebrities. Or perhaps they’d just felt his potent commercial presence when they were riding a red bus down Bleecker Street.

While Marc Jacobs the brand is at least as prominent a resident of the new West Village as Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress who played Carrie Bradshaw (and who lives around the corner from the Bleecker Street Marc Jacobsland), Jacobs himself resides in Paris, in a sparkling Batcave filled with millions of dollars’ worth of contemporary art, and many, many ashtrays. (If he were to be in one of his own Vuitton ads, the signature accessory would be a monogrammed cigarette case.) “I’m going to smoke a lot,” he said one evening in early summer, returning from the gym after his daily superhero workout. “Forgive me.”

Jacobs smokes at the office, at the table, in his bedroom, in the car on the way to and from exercising. He smokes and smokes Marlboro lights, and he talks and talks about working out at the gym, his favorite place lately. “The gym to me is like in ‘A Chorus Line’ it’s the ballet,” he said. “Everything is beautiful at the gym, everyone looks amazing. You just think it’s like one big healthy circus going on out there: the bodies are great, people are jolly, and, even when they’re complaining about how strenuous it is, there’s, like, a kind of very good, positive, we’re-all-doing-something-good-for-ourselves . . . And it’s two and a half hours that I’m not smoking.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “I am a true addict in that whatever makes me feel good I want more of, whether it’s good for me or not.”

He wore a thick gold Rolex and a white shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and he had carefully trimmed black stubble on his tan chest and his strong chin. He was sitting on one of two brown velvet settees he has in his living room, a grand space accented by a fluffy white life-size sculpture of a sheep (the work of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne) and an astounding view of the Eiffel Tower. On the coffee table were silver bowls of sweet peas and peonies and green, unripe strawberries that were so expertly arranged they looked like jade carvings. When you are in the home of Marc Jacobs, every tabletop vista of purple glass and silver objet, every clever combination of exquisite furniture and costly sculpture is so refined that, despite the cigarette smoke wafting through the rooms, you get the sense that you are breathing rare and expensive bottled air.

Jacobs doesn’t have a butler like Bruce Wayne’s Alfred Pennyworth, but he does have a chef, Susan, a Californian with wild gray hair who was wearing red tights, red high-top sneakers, a white smock dress, and a flowered apron, and who kept bringing out plates of bacon-wrapped figs and very small vegetables. “Susan brightens up the grayest of days,” Jacobs said, with a kind of wistful gratitude. He also has two bull terriers, who were upstairs in their crates that night, because, Jacobs said, if they were let out the barking and the chaos would be unending. (As it was, there was a lot of barking. Every ten minutes or so, Jacobs would call, “Daisy, it’s O.K.!”) He has selected dogs that require an unusual amount of attention.

From where he was sitting on the sofa, Jacobs could see works of art by Andy Warhol, Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Prince (with whom Jacobs collaborated on an extremely successful line of handbags). Jacobs collects art the way he lifts weights, the way he smokes: with great fervor. “All this is mine for the time being,” he said. “Where it’ll end up and who it’ll go to, what other places it’ll be, I don’t know.” He glanced at the paintings and drawings on the walls. “I don’t think they’re mine forever. They’re just mine now.”

Jacobs is well aware that he has shapeshifted from a withdrawn schlump in eyeglasses into something . . . special. “Somewhere along this nutrition-gym thing, I started to develop a sense of, I don’t know, a sense of confidence,” he said. For Bruce Banner, it was gamma rays; for Marc Jacobs, it was free weights. He went on, “All of a sudden, before I knew it, I started to say, Gee, I’m really happy with the work we’ve been doing. I’m really happy with the house I live in. I’m really happy with the way I look when I look at myself in the mirror. I spend hours in the bathroom now. I used to spend five minutes! But I like taking a shower. I like shampooing my hair. I like putting on moisturizer. I like wearing jewelry. All of these things I used to think, That’s not for me. I’m on the floor picking up pins or I’m sketching all day, what does it matter what I look like? And then I discovered, you know what? It does matter. It makes me feel good. I get it! I went for a manicure and a pedicure this morning, and I understand when I look at my hands and they’re not, like, scabby and bleeding—it’s great!” He has made his home a museum and his body a work of art beautiful enough to reside there.

Jacobs has the word “perfect” tattooed on his right wrist. “Because I am a perfect being in a perfect world where everything that happens must be completely . . .” He let that thought go. “It was from something that I was studying at this rehab that I went to.” Jacobs has been to rehab twice, once in 1999 and again in February, 2007, for alcohol and cocaine abuse. “It felt so right to me when I read it: that I have a choice. We all have a choice in how to look at things, and when things don’t go the way I like I tend to think they’re a problem. Well, you can look at something as a problem or look at it as a learning experience or an opportunity for growth or whatever. This idea that everything happens for a reason and is perfect and you will benefit from it even if you can’t see the benefit—it’s just a nicer ideal to subscribe to than ‘Oh God, I’ve got all these problems and life is full of obstacles.’ ” Rubbing his finger over the word on his wrist, he said, “I put it there to remind me, for when I’m looking at myself and wishing that I could be stronger in this way or better at that thing, and I can just go No. I’m exactly how I need to be. So, perfect.”

Earlier that day, he had been expressing these ideas—firmly—to his current boyfriend, a handsome Brazilian advertising executive named Lorenzo Martone. According to Jacobs, Martone was upset by the avid coverage that Jacobs’s (and, consequently, Martone’s) romantic life receives in tabloids and blogs. (On May 6th, the Web site Gawker ran a photograph of Jacobs and Martone, looking dashing in tuxedos, along with the post: “Trendy Wendy fashion designer Marc Jacobs escorted yet another new gentleman friend to last night’s Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Gala. . . . He could be another MySpace find, or some aspiring hanger-on who stumbled into one of the stores one day. . . . What a revolving door this man has! Keeping all the hookers, p*rn stars, and Mensa members straight—heh—can be difficult.”) Jacobs told Martone to “man up” and not pay any attention to the stories.

Jacobs may think that all difficult things are opportunities rather than obstacles, but the truth is that being a tabloid star is not something that he finds particularly difficult. “There is definitely part of me that just loves the idea that I’m the headline—I do get some weird thrill out of that,” he said. “I’m human. I love attention. Actors don’t go onstage because they don’t want attention. If you show your art, if you show your fashion, that’s also a very human thing, and, in terms of contemporary life and the twenty-first-century fascination with personalities, I like that I get out of that fashion-designer box and become, I don’t know, personality box or celebrity box. I love that! It’s fun.” Jacobs recently named an ostrich-skin handbag the BB, after a blogger named BryanBoy, who writes about him frequently.

 

[MissMagAddict]

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Jacobs is a reality-television star without a reality-television show. His personal traumas and dramas are tracked by a wide audience, some of whom care that he is perhaps the most influential and talented American designer of his generation, and some of whom are interested in him exactly the same way they are interested in the characters on “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” Jacobs’s vision has transformed the luxury-goods market—you can feel the reverberations of his early inspiration that a sloppy flannel shirt could be rendered in fine silk, that the low could be high, and that streetwear could be fashion, in everything from the advent of the now ubiquitous two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans to the frayed hems and distressed elbows on the jackets that Karl Lagerfeld has designed for Chanel in recent seasons. “Marc is a great, great designer—his talent is stronger than it’s ever been before—but he also has a very acute sense of how to deal with the media, how to use the media,” Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, said. “If you look at the kind of women he’s drawn to, whether it’s Sofia Coppola or Lindsay Lohan, he always taps into them at exactly the right time. To be honest, I don’t think Marc would be in the press the way he is if he didn’t want to be.”

Of an item that ran in Page Six, Jacobs said, with outrage and delight, “Last Tuesday, they had me making out with my ex-boyfriend Jason Preston at Pastis and bad-mouthing someone I went out with for four days. Well, first of all, I did not bad-mouth the person I went out with for four days, second of all I was not getting back together with Jason Preston, and, fourth—or first!—of all, I wasn’t even in the city of New York on that Saturday! I was in Paris, France. My current boyfriend said, ‘Marc, you know I don’t believe it, but so many people have asked me about it.’ I was, like, ‘You put me on a plane Friday night! How can you be listening to this?’ ” Last month, Page Six misreported that Jacobs had married Martone.

Jacobs walked outside to the back garden, to take in the evening amid the boxwood. “I like the fact that people are sort of commenting on my appearance,” he said. “I work on these things! So to have them recognized, even if sometimes I don’t like the way they’re recognized, I like that they are, and I feel good that I can admit that, instead of being ashamed.” He paused. “I’m going to get a ‘shameless’ tattoo next,” he said, the Eiffel Tower sparkling behind him in the night sky. “That’s what I think everyone should aspire to in life: being shameless.”

Afew days later, Jacobs was in his fashion-designer box, sitting in a stuffy conference room (smoking) at the Vuitton headquarters, on the Rue du Pont Neuf. He was listening to Madonna on the stereo and going through fabrics with several members of his staff, in search of the prints and textures they would use to design the Spring, 2009, collection. “Gross, gross, gross,” Aisling Ludden, an outgoing Irishwoman in patent-leather peep-toe pumps, who has worked with Jacobs for eight years, said. They were looking at a fuzzy purple fabric with a geometric pattern. “That’s a horror, isn’t it?” They moved on to a cream-colored silk embroidered with little tree branches.

“It’s always tough at the beginning,” Jacobs said. “We all want to be responsible in terms of not overbuying fabric. But it’s kind of unavoidable, because we have to get started, and there are deadlines, and the thing is, it’s often not the first thing you respond to that you care as much about in the end. But you kind of can’t get to point Z without going from A to Y.” It’s only in movies that fashion designers think, Eureka! This season, Eskimos, or whatever it is. In actuality, a collection comes together in fits and starts, and there’s no guarantee that it will come together at all. Even when Jacobs’s work overtly reflects his current obsessions—as in the early grunge collection he made while he was besotted with Nirvana and Hole, or his Spring, 2008, collaboration with Richard Prince, in which models dressed as the eerily erotic nurses that Prince likes to paint (Jacobs owns several of Prince’s paintings)—the concept congeals incrementally.

“That’s a crazy one,” Jacobs said, flipping through a book of sequinned netting samples. “A couple of crazies. I think we’ve gone down this road before—”

“Get rid of it!” Ludden shouted.

“And I don’t think it ever goes really far.”

Madonna was singing “Ticktock, ticktock.” Jacobs sighed. “Sometimes I think other people have this ability to do it differently and know exactly what they want to do and say,” he said. “The way my mind works is somebody else has got this so down that they don’t make mistakes and their process is so much more linear than mine. I’ll think that, but, at some point, you know what? This is my process and I don’t know how to do it any other way.” He didn’t stop and look at his “perfect” tattoo, but, of course, he knew it was there. “I’m sure there are people who can’t afford—who don’t have the luxury of being quite as organic as we are,” he went on. “We work up until the last minute.” As a result of this tendency to work until the bitter end—and past it—Jacobs’s Fall, 2007, show in New York started two hours late, prompting the critic Suzy Menkes to say, “I would like to murder him with my bare hands and never see another Marc Jacobs show as long as I live.”

“Are you going to the gym today?” Jacobs asked Joseph Carter, the head of womenswear for the Marc Jacobs Collection.

Jacobs’s assistant came in and told him that Angel was there to see him. People looked at one another in a funny way. A few moments later, a very beautiful, very tall young woman wearing an enormous hat made of feathers, many strands of pearls, a four-tiered black lace skirt, and hot-pink satin high-heeled shoes came into the room. “I bring something for you!” she said triumphantly, and thrust a bottle labelled “Tokaji aszú” at Jacobs.

“Oh,” Jacobs said. “Is that alcohol?”

“Ees sweet wine!” Angel replied.

“Mmm. Thank you. I don’t drink, but I’ll serve it to my guests.”

Angel was led away to change into a dress. “That’s a girl who goes to my gym and she wants to be a model,” Jacobs said, “so I told her she could come by and I’d take her measurements. You should see what she wears to the gym—you know, outfits. Spandex and stretch tulle.”

Angel came back and Jacobs asked her to show him her walk. She marched down the hallway in a dramatic fashion. “Perfect,” Jacobs said.

“Zatseet?”

“Yeah,” Jacobs told her. “That’s it. Come spend a few minutes with me and then I have to get back to work.” He led her into his office, which is wallpapered with pictures of pills on a brown background (a gift from Damien Hirst), and closed the door.

“That’s a particular case,” Ludden said. “She’s really invaded his personal space.” Ludden smiled. “That’s very Marc—he’s definitely always got one eye on the underdog. If there’s a bunch of people in a room, Marc will pay attention to the sadster.”

Jacobs gave Angel a good fifteen minutes, returned, and lighted a cigarette. “Every girl in the world wants to be a model.”

“Was that outfit a joke?” Ludden asked. “Like, is this a reality-TV-show trick, do you think?”

Jacobs laughed. “If you think that was weird, you should’ve been in there,” he said, exhaling smoke in the direction of his office. “I am definitely going to the gym today.”

Superheroes tend to be orphans of sorts, and Marc Jacobs is no exception. His father, an agent at the William Morris agency in New York, died when Jacobs was seven. His mother is still alive, but he doesn’t see her. “I haven’t spoken to her or my sister and brother in years and years,” he told me. “I never feel like it’s a bad thing. I mean, my mom’s very, very sick—mentally ill. She didn’t really take care of her kids.”

Jacobs was brought up by his paternal grandmother, in an apartment at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. “She had a very bad relationship with her sister, whom I never knew, but I guess there was some argument and they never spoke again,” he said. “Whenever I would mention something about my family, my grandmother would bring up the story of her sister and she would say, ‘We haven’t spoken in years, so you’ll get no argument from me.’ ”

When Jacobs was in his teens, and a student at the High School of Art and Design, he would go to Studio 54 all night, sometimes bringing his books along so he could go straight to class in the morning. “I had a ball,” he said. “I mean, I really did.” He went to France for the first time at seventeen, and “cried like a baby” on the plane home, because he felt so sure that he was meant to be a Parisian. “Living with my grandmother, I just kind of grew up feeling like I’m not going to be obliged to spend Thanksgiving with a bunch of people I didn’t like—or who didn’t like me! I shouldn’t do anything, or shouldn’t feel anything. I either do feel or I don’t feel. I’m not going to should feel. Whether we’re talking about contemporary art or we’re talking about family, pretending that I feel something I don’t feel doesn’t really achieve anything. People say, What if something happened to one of them? Well, if that happens and I regret that, that’ll be the way it is. But right now it’s not something I’m regretting, so I can’t act on that.” When Jacobs says that people should be shameless, he is talking about something more than exhibitionism. He seeks a kind of relentless authenticity.

 

[MissMagAddict]

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His grandmother died in 1987, but in his adult life Jacobs has had another guardian: Robert Duffy, a tall, tanned, silver-haired man of fifty-three, who has been Jacobs’s best friend and his business partner for twenty-four years. When he was thirty, Duffy, the son of a steel executive, wanted to go into business with a young designer. Jacobs was attending Parsons School of Design, and Duffy went to see the fashion show he put on for his graduation. “These three sweaters came out that were just like the most awkward proportions and shapes and colors, and they just looked so right on those girls,” Duffy told me. “There was nothing intimidating about the clothes—I found them very friendly, and I still to this day do. He’s never lost that childlike quality that he has in him when he’s designing, and it’s just something that I love the consistency of. Wherever his influences come from, whatever it is, I can always tell if he’s had a hand in something.” Duffy has “1984” tattooed on his right hand, in honor of the year that he and Jacobs formed their partnership.

Every year, Duffy travels to Asia to visit the Marc Jacobs stores there—forty-six in Japan, seventeen in China, sixteen in Korea, ten in Taiwan, eight in Hong Kong, four in Malaysia, three in Singapore and in Thailand, two in the Philippines, one each in Vietnam and Indonesia, and another about to open in Macau. The day before he was to leave on this year’s trip, Duffy was sitting at a table in the Marc Jacobs office in Manhattan, where he works with Jacobs for about five weeks before every show, when Jacobs is in town. “That’s our desk,” Duffy said, pointing across the room at two desks, back to back, in front of the windowsill, where the seven Council of Fashion Designers of America award trophies that Jacobs has won stand in a row. “Mine’s the left side and his is the right side, but when I used to work over there”—Duffy pointed to the left side—“he used to work over there, too. So then the whole desk became his. So I moved over here.” Duffy pointed to his seat at the table. “So now he sits where you’re sitting”—across the table from Duffy. “It’s horrible! I’ll have all my papers and my notes and my margins and my, you know, audits and my **** on the table and I’ll come back and there’ll be spinach on my audit. Or he’ll take this thing that says ‘confidential’ and all of a sudden he’ll flip it over and start sketching things, and I’m, like, where’s that confidential audit that no one’s supposed to be touching or looking at? And then I’ll find it months later in the design studio.”

Duffy says that his relationship with Jacobs has been one of the few constants in Jacobs’s life during the past two and a half decades, and, in spite of that—or because of it—he is never surprised by Jacobs. “When he decided, or we decided, or originally I decided, to get him clean and sober, I got him to a doctor and I got him to a nutritionist, and so his body started changing, and he started taking an interest in his health. He started morphing into this person that he always sort of didn’t ever want to be. He always took a certain pride in being an outsider and sort of chubby and nerdy and wearing glasses, having awkward muses and friends and things.” Before Victoria Beckham, Jacobs’s ads starred women with more obvious glamour, like Jennifer Jason Leigh and Winona Ryder.

“People were reacting to him very differently, in a way that I don’t think he ever thought he would like,” Duffy continued. “That just led to his fascination with celebrities, and he started watching these reality shows that I’ve never watched in my life, and then he started dating Jason, the call boy—a self-promoter.” It was the exposure moment, and Duffy said he never doubted that it would “play itself out.” Leaning against a wall near the windowsill was a framed cartoon of a woman selling her soul to the Devil for tickets to a Marc Jacobs show.

“Marc becomes enchanted with certain things at certain times,” Duffy said. He watched Jacobs’s interest in art, for instance, flower into a penchant for collecting (which has at times necessitated borrowing large sums of money). “He was buying art until I was, like, ‘Marc, stop! You’ve got to pay your taxes!’ ” Duffy predicts that this particular passion will persist, but that it has peaked. “He took it from collecting personally to getting artists to work at Louis Vuitton,” Duffy said. “He made what he was doing personally a trend, a cultural thing.” Then, there was the matter of the bull terriers. “When he wanted to get a dog, it was, like, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to get two, and they’ve got to be bull terriers, and they’ve got to be crazy and they have to be brought into the office every day.’ ” Jacobs has tattooed likenesses of both his dogs on different parts of his body.

“I’m terrified of the day that he decides he wants to start gardening,” Duffy said. “Because we’ll have, like, Central Park in here or something.” He was happy that Jacobs seemed to be finally—if impermanently—content. “You never know what’s going to trigger something,” he said. “He’s hypersensitive, and so insecure. About his talent he’s so insecure.”

It’s fun to watch people turn into pictures. You start out with a short, frizzy-haired woman in a pants suit and high-heeled boots, but then she lights a cigarette and makes a grouchy smirk, the flash explodes, and, voilà: Fran Lebowitz.

On the evening of the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards gala, at the New York Public Library, the little courtyard in front was crawling with beautiful women making faces, and assuming poses not found in nature, for the cameras clicking all around them. The exception was Victoria Beckham, who was wearing a pouf of a dress made from hundreds of heart-shaped pieces of fabric (by her date, Marc Jacobs), and who always looks as if she’s having her picture taken, no matter what she’s doing. Hebrew lettering was tattooed down her long, lean neck. “It’s in Jewish,” she said. “My husband’s part Jewish.”

Jacobs walked toward the library entrance with Harvey Weinstein and his wife, the fashion designer Georgina Chapman. “That Murakami thing!” Weinstein barked.

“Oh, it was great!” Jacobs said, smoking.

“It’s ridiculous!” Weinstein shouted. “You made him! Ridiculous!”

“That’s a great color on you,” Jacobs told Chapman, who was wearing a dark-crimson gown. “No, it really is.”

“I designed it,” Weinstein joked, pawing at his wife’s shoulder.

“Oh, he does everything!” Jacobs retorted. “I want to be you when I grow up, Harvey.”

“You stole all your ideas from me,” Weinstein said.

“What?” Jacobs asked.

“I’m kidding! I’m kidding!”

Jacobs had been nominated for the accessories and womenswear-designer-of-the-year awards, but he won neither. At his table, after the ceremony, he stayed on his BlackBerry, text-messaging Martone, while Victoria Beckham, Robert Duffy, the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim, the comedian Amy Poehler, and their dates attempted to have a conversation. After an appetizer of tiny turnips was cleared away, Poehler got up to say hello to other people she knew, and when she returned she found that the entire table had evacuated, before the main course had even arrived. “Are they afraid of food?” she asked.

Jacobs said later that he and his celebrity entourage had gone to meet David Beckham at Nobu. “It’s been years since I’ve wanted to go to the C.F.D.A. awards,” he said. “I feel a bit obliged, and, again, when I go against what I feel and do what I’m obliged to do, I’m always unhappy.” Victoria Beckham had given a little speech about Jacobs during the awards presentation, in which she remarked that, from season to season, Jacobs’s collections tend to be “diametrically opposed, yet completely signature.” It was perhaps the only element of the evening that pleased him.

“I love frogs,” he told me. “This sort of fairy-tale frog that became a prince, and the chameleon who changes colors with his environment. ‘Zelig’ is my favorite film. I understand that. I can hang out in a sports bar with a bunch of straight guys and say ‘Go, Knicks’ and I can run around in the art scene and I can also be at the Met ball and be Mr. Fashion Designer with Anna Wintour. I can go wherever I want; I can be whatever I choose.” This, in the end, is Marc Jacobs’s superpower: “I can change colors—for my own amusement and, perhaps, the entertainment of others.”

 

[Spike413]

Thanks for posting MMA. I was just in the other Marc related article posted a few hours ago from The Observer.

My comments in that thread would fit just fine in this one, so if the journalists can't bother to write different stories I'm not gonna bother writing different replies.

I mean, I get why he's acting the way he is lately. He never felt very confident before, now he has some things that he feels good about. It's the self esteem equivalent of being nouveau riche.

In a way I think the press has just as much to do with this hype as Marc does, if not more. He's kissing his own a**, which is fine, I mean if anyone has a right to kiss their own a** it's him....but with the press kissing it too it's just too much to tolerate. It makes me miss the days when he was the charming little geek who just happened to be the coolest person at the party. Now he's become the arrogant pretty boy that everyone only pretends to think is cool.

 

[4n98]

interesting artical

 

[cristeena]

Great article! Thank you!

 

[redpoppy]

Fascinating look into MJ this is. I have to say, I can't imagine him not being overwhelmed designing for Louis Vuitton, and his 3 MJ lines. He must have some very helpful design teams. I love his luxury handbag designs, especially for LV Spring/Summer '09. However, when I think about it he REALLY must have big design teams because often his ideas are merely recycling old ones...

 

[Street_a_Licious]

Daisy was named after a bull terrier???

oh, halleluja.

 

[redpoppy]

I'm curious as to why the author feels the need to mention that Marc Jacobs used to be a "chubby Jewish guy" before his physical and emotional transformation. Though more successful and muscular now, he is still Jewish.....

 

[ponytrot]

I swear every article about Marc says the same things these days..

either he's just not very deep, or the journalists are out of things to ask aobut.

 

[Miss Marc]

I liked the article.

He's just too interesting...

And I can't ever seem to get bored with him.