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Here is a Guy Trebay article on Marc Jacobs, done for the New York Times back in May 2002. I thought it was a good article. Enjoy!
Marc Jacobs mixes it up
PARIS - Is it possible that the people who call Marc Jacobs an idea thief have never heard of sampling? Is it plausible that those selfsame people (and why be coy? It was Oscar de la Renta in the pages of The New York Times Magazine) may have missed school on the day when the key chapters on postmodernism were being assigned?
There is hardly a 13-year-old alive who could not explain that we inhabit an age of image saturation and appropriation, a time when some of the most interesting and widely accepted forms of the creative act involve recycling. When Moby turned a trove of obscure Southern spirituals into an irresistible compilation of ambient music, he won Grammys and made millions. When Quentin Tarantino stumbled onto Hong Kong cinema and translated it onscreen for a mass American audience, he was hailed as a wunderkind. Universities are packed with students who use other people's art and architecture as launch pads. Yet in fashion, for some reason, a charmingly antiquated, Edith Head-era notion of fashion as a pure creative effort stubbornly hangs on.
"Recently, I saw a photo of a coat I made in 1967," de la Renta said with sardonic amusement in an interview published in The Times Magazine on Sunday. "It's a full-length white vinyl with scattered sequins. Three years ago, Marc Jacobs made the identical coat."
That Jacobs' coat was not identical barely matters: A bald copy might have been even wittier. Probably better than any designer at work, Jacobs, 39, comprehends something fundamental about changes in how people make, and understand, fashion. Unlike the many brand-name designers who promote the illusion that their output results from a single prodigious creativity, Jacobs makes no pretense that fashion emerges full blown from the head of one solitary genius.
True, it is his name on the Marc Jacobs line, and on the lucrative secondary Marc by Marc Jacobs line, whose signature flat shoes and jeans are "impossible to keep in stock," according to Alain Snege, a buyer at Colette in Paris. True, it is his name that has come to be associated with the constant purring of computer registers in Louis Vuitton stores worldwide, where one after another of the bags he has produced, as the company's artistic director, has hit the consumer jackpot. And his is the name that turned up in three separate nominations (women's wear designer of the year, men's wear designer of the year, accessory designer of the year) for the 2002 Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, to be announced on June 3. Yet Marc Jacobs is the first to admit that the credit, in many ways, doesn't really belong to him at all.
"You would have to be out of your mind to think that I do all this alone," Jacobs said here last week.
It was a cool, moody Thursday in the city where Jacobs now lives more or less full time. Watery gray light filtered in through the windows of his vast office in Vuitton headquarters, located hard by the Pont Neuf on the Right Bank. As Jacobs talked, his closest associates, the influential stylist Venetia Scott and a designer, Joseph Carter, pinned hot pants on a model with pale freckled legs.
The windowsills and office tables in Jacobs' office were jammed with what looked like a collection of Freudian Post-its: scraps and clippings and old periodicals and anything that might be considered a potential memory jog or source of inspiration. There were vintage fabric samples. There were Vogues from the 1960s. There were old issues of Seventeen. There was, centered squarely on Jacobs' desk, a picture of a wizened geezer, un-self-consciously wearing a plaid jacket over a shirt of shockingly contrasting checks.
Will fashionable women 10 months from now be encouraged to dress this way, as if they were tumbleweeds that had drifted right out of Richard Avedon's "In the American West"? Why not? "I happen to love referential material, music that refers to something, and anything where the reference is sort of lost and not in your face," Jacobs said.
There is a useful example of Jacobs' method that illustrates how much more closely his technique resembles that of, say, a frankly appropriationist band like The Strokes than a more traditional designer's. "When Venetia went out to get fabrics for a collection we were working on," he explained, "I said, 'Look at fabrics we don't ordinarily like.' I was into richer textures."
Scott returned from a vintage store with a passel of rented clothes that included a 1920s lame shirt and a 1960s dress with a goofy floral design. "I got the idea to take the '60s print and do it in a subtle way on the lame," Jacobs said. "It was not 1960s and not 1920s. It was not of the past and not in the future. It was all of those things and none of those things."
It was, in other words, like a riff or a lick that a musician might use on a record, subtle and just identifiable enough that the consumer experiences it teasingly as familiar, and also, somehow, not. "The days of the designer in his ivory tower inventing a 'look' that he dictates is fashion" are over, Jacobs said. "That whole old-school narrative of 'I just took a trip to India, and the colors and the spices and the sky and the seashells on the beaches inspired my new collection' is kind of ridiculous."
"I'm not being falsely humble," Jacobs said, in suggesting the cult of inspiration is nearly kaput. He was not being reflexively politic, either. De la Renta's fall 2002 collection was indeed inspired by a trip to the Indian subcontinent.
"People want to think of designers as these creative types who spend all their time feeling beautiful fabrics," the designer Anna Sui said, "and draping it around mannequins and drawing and having lunch." Because Jacobs, perennially unshaven and wearing rundown Adidas and striped T-shirts from Hysteric Glamour in Tokyo, does not fit the conventional image, she said, he gets "misunderstood a lot."
But can this really be so? "Oh, come on," said Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale's. "Ever since grunge, which I loved, it's been clear that Marc had a tremendous amount of talent, that he was really good at looking for a core idea."
Jacobs' status as the insider's outsider, Ruttenstein suggested, is well cultivated. When Jacobs told this reporter, "I'm so not hip," and when he insisted that "I so don't know what I'm doing," he was, it seemed, being sincere.
Yet Jacobs' modesty is a bit hard to credit, given that his social Rolodex includes the boldface names who define the geography of global style. And his "Who, me?" demurrals are difficult to take seriously when the designers council has honored him with a shelf-load of statuettes.
"He is one of the few designers who make feminine clothes that women want to wear, but remains slightly underground," Sarah Lerfel, an owner of Colette, said.
It really is simple enough, Ruttenstein explained: "He's a cult."
'super-feminine'
