What is it with designers and low self-esteem? All of them think they're too fat, too short, too nerdy, too old, too poor, too rich. It can't be a coincidence.
I've always wanted to ask about this, but the moment never seemed right. Now, though, I'm sitting a couple of feet from Marc Jacobs and he's in an expansive mood. He's also lost a tonne of weight, discovered contact lenses (along with cheekbones, the gym, massages, nutrition and, to the delight of the gossip columns, love), got clean, and dyed his hair first blue and now black - presumably to complement his tan (which is at the outer reaches of the bronzed spectrum) and his shirt (its buttons opened to his pecs, its white almost as dazzling as the diamonds in his ears).
It all makes him look terribly handsome. If Ken Russell ever wants someone to play Rudolph Valentino playing a Bedu with 28 tattoos, Jacobs is his man. This would be fairly ironic for a geeky looking Jew from Manhattan - except that designers often look like Victorian sex offenders, sailors or astronauts, so why not throw in an Arab headdress as well?
It's been quite a transformation. But then surely it was always a bit masochistic to labour over exquisite clothes and then schlump down the catwalk for your big moment looking like a tramp - which was, once upon a time, his signature look. “First, I didn't deliberately set out to look terrible. For years I felt really ill from a stomach complaint and I was working so many hours I didn't have time to look after myself. I was permanently physically uncomfortable. And now,” he concludes sunnily, “I'm not. But while we're on the subject, what about some of the critics in the front row? Talk about the irony of going to a couture show and being frumpy! How many fashion writers should have photos so readers can see what they look like and say to themselves, ‘I'm taking advice from him or her'?”
Ahem. Let's bring this back to him, shall we, because oddly enough - for all the self-dissatisfaction - Jacobs always epitomised a certain underground New York Cool. Even though his parents were upper-middle-class agents for William Morris. Even though the clothes he designed, often ladylike or cute, cost thousands of dollars.
The legendary partying may have helped. So did the talent.
Next to Miuccia Prada, he has been one of the most influential designers of the past decade. Even when things started to wobble last year, the acolytes kept believing. But it was quite a wobble. Jacobs' shows in New York have always been epic tales of celebrity jostling, a lightning rod for popular culture and journalistic tolerance. The Louis Vuitton show last year was two hours late, a record even by fashionable standards. It was also slammed for being derivative. The ensuing sniping - from both press and Jacobs - became rancid. Jacobs was reported to have been drinking in the bar at the Mercer Hotel (he lives upstairs when he's in New York) while several hundred journalists and retailers sat waiting. (The celebrities had been warned by his PRs that it would be late.) Suzy Menkes, doyenne fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, announced that she never wanted to see a Marc Jacobs show again, publicly voicing what many felt. He retorted that people with families shouldn't work in fashion since they clearly found its long hours disruptive.
A fortnight later, under strict instructions from Vuitton, his show in Paris started almost eerily early. Afterwards, Jacobs emerged ebulliently on the catwalk, no signs of visible repentance - only his tongue, emerging at a determined angle from his mouth, taking what looked like deadly aim at Suzy Menkes.
A man who describes himself as being a former shoe-gazer, Jacobs had experienced some kind of epiphany. “I was never comfortable in some situations,” he says. “I always had a kind of timid disposition, always feeling that I didn't deserve to be where I was. And then at that show in Paris I didn't feel that any more. We had all this bulls**t about starting on time, even though what people don't realise is that when you have photographers backstage the models start to pose and everything slows down. I wasn't sticking my tongue out at anyone.”
As he himself might say, “Whatever.” He was angry, though,convinced the reviews of the New York show were prejudiced by the delay. “So yes, I may have said: If you don't want to come, stay home. We'd been working all summer, all night, all day to prepare for this show and if you guys can't wait a couple of hours...It's not like we were having some delightful dinner at the Ritz. We hadn't seen our families either for two months. So please, don't do me any favours. I don't need it.
“And I cannot tell you how many e-mails I got from other designers saying bravo. I'm talking about designers who've been in this business for a long time who had never had the nerve to say what I said.”
Goodness, isn't it extraordinary how being clean, hitting 45 (and realising that you don't mind) and falling in love can banish all your shoe-gazer tendencies? (Shortly after our interview, the internet throbbed with rumours that he had married hisboyfriend of four months, the Brazilian advertising executive, Lorenzo Martone. He hasn't.)
Jacobs has often seemed self-destructive. What's astonishing is that throughout all the dramas he drove three major fashion labels - Marc Jacobs, Marc by Marc Jacobs, and Louis Vuitton - to spectacular critical and commercial success. This is his tenth year at Vuitton, a cause for congratulation since it looked as though he might not make it past the first. His debut collection for Vuitton was well received by US and British Vogue, but the French were, at best, nonplussed by the pared-down sportswear that Jacobs imported. Vuitton had never been a fashion house before, only a generator of wildly copied monogrammed accessories. Jacobs was trying to graft New York minimalism on to Euro bling, and doing so in a city that New York minimalism had largely passed by. Vuitton never put those early collections into any of their stores, an oversight widely interpreted as bad faith.
“It was very disappointing,” he says. “It's all very fine having a show that is this pure distillation of your vision, but then you want the clothes to have a life afterwards. Not that I want to lay blame at anyone in particular. There were so many reasons why it was hard, including where I was in terms of my own sense of security and lack of experience within a big organisation. And the monogram. I had to learn to celebrate the monogram and not try and hide it in the linings of coats.”
Minimalism wasn't the only point of cultural difference. Vuitton's management always considered discretion an essential in its dealings with the press; even now it won't discuss turnover, although last year Fortune magazine estimated that Jacobs had quadrupled the brand's sales, from $1.2 billion in 1998 to $4.8 billion in 2006, maintaining profits at 40 per cent along the way.
Jacobs, to journalists' glee, doesn't have the same reverence for discretion. When he's down, when he has a controversial boyfriend (before Martone he dated Jason Preston, a retired prostitute who sat front row centre with the Marc Jacobs logo tattooed up his arm), when the drugs got too much...sooner or later the world knows about it.
The world also knew about his being fired from Perry Ellis after a notorious grunge collection back in 1992, and knew he'd had a toxic relationship with his mother, who remarried frequently after Jacobs' father died when he was 7. The notoriety ensures that the brand has penetrated the consciousness of people who don't normally consider fashion at all, although of course that's not why he embraced it.
“There's an expression: ‘You are only as sick as your secrets',” he says. “I tried to keep a lid on things when I was a kid, and that created a lot of problems. There is some kind of release in being honest and straightforward, not least because if you say it first that takes the sting out. Now I don't know how to behave any differently. Whether you can't work out the design of a strap on a shoulder bag or you're having a problem with alcohol, I always found that when I talked about it I could start to move on.”
Maybe it's the talking that has helped bind his friends together. They are a tenaciously loyal set, from his girl pals Sofia Coppola and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, the indie rock band that formed in New York back in 1981, to his business partner of some 20 years, Robert Duffy.
To this list Victoria Beckham may have to be added, although her role in the summer advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs has caused pain to Jacobs devotees who felt she was a populist step to far. Personally, I thought using Beckham was a piece of savvy, win-win irony. “Of course it was, but I genuinely like and admire her. She does what she wants. She works hard.”
LVMH (the holding company that combines Louis Vuitton, Moët et Chandon and Hennessy) owns 96 per cent of Marc Jacobs but only 33 per cent of the licences, of which there is an increasing number, including $10 flip-flops - none of which has so far dented its appeal. Such is the cult of Jacobs that Demi Moore's daughters, Rumer and Scout, were happy to get part-time jobs at the Marc Jacobs HQ on Melrose in Hollywood.
It was Robert Duffy who helped to turn the two Marc Jacobs lines into a business that turns over something in the region of $350 million. It was also Duffy who, at the start of 2007, escorted Jacobs back to rehab (the first visit was in 1999) after the latter turned up three hours late for a dress rehearsal for his show in London. And it was Duffy who recently said in an interview that scandal doesn't seem to impact a designer's sales any longer.
“He said that?” says Jacobs wryly. “Then I'm sure it's true. Either way, I am not going to hide anything so we can sell another T-shirt.”
The Jacobs approach has always been collaborative. At Vuitton the collaborative sweep has become increasingly broad. There was the graffiti bag collaboration with Stephen Sprouse, the cherry blossom collaboration with Takashi Murakami, and the lastest (and my personal favourite) pulp-lite collaboration with Richard Prince. All designers love art. But few have turned their passion to such wildly commercial ends. And fewer still would feel as comfortable sharing the limelight.
“I always says it's not my name over the door at Vuitton,” he says. “I'm just a cog.” He claims not to know his official title there - “Creative Director, Head Designer, whatever” - which of course may just mean that the ultimate title is a non-title. “I don't pretend to design everything that comes out of Vuitton. I don't even claim to know every single product we sell in Marc Jacobs. I am definitely not a control freak. I don't have a desire to know everything. Besides, I trust Robert implicitly.”
Together they have become very rich, although money genuinely seems not to have been an overriding motive for Jacobs. He spends half his time in Paris, half in New York, and doesn't claim to know what comes next.
“All I know is that you do what you do and hope people like it. I don't have radical plans. For someone who spends so much of his time generating change, I've come to value emotional consistency.”
