from today's nyt style section:
The Survivor
By RUTH LA FERLA
CALL him a genius. Call him a junkie, an original, a shameless copycat, a winsome recluse, a brazen exhibitionist. Marc Jacobs has heard it all. And he has absorbed it all with a hard-won equanimity.
You can live with the love, you can live with the hate, Mr. Jacobs said the other day at his office in SoHo. He had placed his arms squarely on a wooden conference table so nondescript it might have been salvaged from a high schools teachers lounge. Weve been bankrupt, we been fired, he said. We didnt hang up our hat.
He was talking about a checkered career that has seen the designer, now 48, ejected early on from a prestigious fashion post; undergoing repeated stints in rehab; and dodging, intermittently, the darts of tabloid gossips castigating him, among other things, for his vanity, his choice of sexual partners and his admitted struggles with sobriety.
Such experiences would have tested a lesser mans flint. Not Mr. Jacobs, though. Dressed in a T-shirt and daisy-and-skull-patterned pants, he was the picture of high spirits and robust self-assurance.
At this point, Its easy to get past the detractors, he said evenly, alluding to insiders forever debating his relevance. Is Mr. Jacobs in his prime, they wonder, or has he coasted past his sell-by date? And, more pointedly, how much longer will he hang on to his status as New York fashions chief arbiter of hip?
As long as he cares to, Mr. Jacobs would like you to know. It takes a lot these days to shake his confidence or to get a rise out of him. But the announcement that the Council of Fashion Designers of America would give him its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award on Monday seems to have done the trick. It should have been a half-lifetime award, he was heard to grouse. He was joshing, right?
It wasnt a joke, Mr. Jacobs replied, reddening perceptibly from his cheekbones to his neck and even, it seemed, through the SpongeBob SquarePants and Liz Taylor tattoos that decorate his biceps. Lifetime achievement, he repeated sourly. That seems very final, like Im done.
But Im not done.
Indeed Mr. Jacobs, the wily Pied Piper of American fashion, is hardly played out. To many in the business, he is regarded as a cultural bellwether. His shows, in which models flash their panties, parade their bosoms in hourglass dresses or vamp Night Porter style in hot pants and harnesses, are as intently scrutinized as the Rosetta Stone.
His dossier seems all but unassailable. His string of stores on Bleecker Street, opened with Robert Duffy, his longtime business partner, has turned a retail backwater into lodestone for cool-seekers and busloads of style-obsessed tourists.
He has transformed the French fashion house Louis Vuitton, a once-musty purveyor of leather goods, into a cash cow. And, as he likes to remind you, legions of teenagers, aching to own a piece of his brand, snap up his flip-flops, fragrances and trinkets.
Mr. Jacobss inventiveness has earned him the Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, his particular pride, and nine previous C.F.D.A. awards, among them the coveted womens wear Designer of the Year title last year.
Awards generally mean stuff to other people more than they do to me, he said. But, he added, gesturing expansively, they give me a chance to thank those people publicly who are a part of all this.
Through it all, Mr. Jacobs has marched to his own baton, pivoting, when the mood took him, on a polished heel. We react to a whim, he said last week, be that a fascination with the objectified eroticism of the photographer Guy Bourdin, with the social constraints of the Eisenhower era or with the druggy excesses of the Hollywood elite. Such whims have impelled him over the years to jettison the chaste fashions of his formative years for vividly sexy, voluminous dresses one season, and in the next, an aggressively streamlined, curve-clutching silhouette.
His habit of confounding expectations has made his show the reliable high point of every New York Fashion Week, a magnet for the likes of Debbie Harry, the artists John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, the porn star Michael Lucas and, on occasion, a Saudi noble or two. Those collections have nodded obliquely to rehab chic, to his fabled ode to grunge in the early 1990s and to post-Weimar Berlin. And they have spawned what passes in the fashion community for an intellectual spectator sport, with insiders splitting hairs over whether Mr. Jacobs is being brilliant, playfully trite or just trite.
It depends on whom you ask. To his champions, he walks on water. His shows have impact, said André Leon Talley, Vogues editor at large. They become the major, pivotal, prophetic moment of the season.
But others insist he is merely treading water. He feels to me less like a designer than a great producer or casting director, and theres a lot to be said for that, said Eric Gaskins, who comments blisteringly on some of fashions sacred cows in his blog The Emperors Old Clothes. But at times, the overall message is pretty banal.
The Survivor
By RUTH LA FERLA
CALL him a genius. Call him a junkie, an original, a shameless copycat, a winsome recluse, a brazen exhibitionist. Marc Jacobs has heard it all. And he has absorbed it all with a hard-won equanimity.
You can live with the love, you can live with the hate, Mr. Jacobs said the other day at his office in SoHo. He had placed his arms squarely on a wooden conference table so nondescript it might have been salvaged from a high schools teachers lounge. Weve been bankrupt, we been fired, he said. We didnt hang up our hat.
He was talking about a checkered career that has seen the designer, now 48, ejected early on from a prestigious fashion post; undergoing repeated stints in rehab; and dodging, intermittently, the darts of tabloid gossips castigating him, among other things, for his vanity, his choice of sexual partners and his admitted struggles with sobriety.
Such experiences would have tested a lesser mans flint. Not Mr. Jacobs, though. Dressed in a T-shirt and daisy-and-skull-patterned pants, he was the picture of high spirits and robust self-assurance.
At this point, Its easy to get past the detractors, he said evenly, alluding to insiders forever debating his relevance. Is Mr. Jacobs in his prime, they wonder, or has he coasted past his sell-by date? And, more pointedly, how much longer will he hang on to his status as New York fashions chief arbiter of hip?
As long as he cares to, Mr. Jacobs would like you to know. It takes a lot these days to shake his confidence or to get a rise out of him. But the announcement that the Council of Fashion Designers of America would give him its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award on Monday seems to have done the trick. It should have been a half-lifetime award, he was heard to grouse. He was joshing, right?
It wasnt a joke, Mr. Jacobs replied, reddening perceptibly from his cheekbones to his neck and even, it seemed, through the SpongeBob SquarePants and Liz Taylor tattoos that decorate his biceps. Lifetime achievement, he repeated sourly. That seems very final, like Im done.
But Im not done.
Indeed Mr. Jacobs, the wily Pied Piper of American fashion, is hardly played out. To many in the business, he is regarded as a cultural bellwether. His shows, in which models flash their panties, parade their bosoms in hourglass dresses or vamp Night Porter style in hot pants and harnesses, are as intently scrutinized as the Rosetta Stone.
His dossier seems all but unassailable. His string of stores on Bleecker Street, opened with Robert Duffy, his longtime business partner, has turned a retail backwater into lodestone for cool-seekers and busloads of style-obsessed tourists.
He has transformed the French fashion house Louis Vuitton, a once-musty purveyor of leather goods, into a cash cow. And, as he likes to remind you, legions of teenagers, aching to own a piece of his brand, snap up his flip-flops, fragrances and trinkets.
Mr. Jacobss inventiveness has earned him the Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, his particular pride, and nine previous C.F.D.A. awards, among them the coveted womens wear Designer of the Year title last year.
Awards generally mean stuff to other people more than they do to me, he said. But, he added, gesturing expansively, they give me a chance to thank those people publicly who are a part of all this.
Through it all, Mr. Jacobs has marched to his own baton, pivoting, when the mood took him, on a polished heel. We react to a whim, he said last week, be that a fascination with the objectified eroticism of the photographer Guy Bourdin, with the social constraints of the Eisenhower era or with the druggy excesses of the Hollywood elite. Such whims have impelled him over the years to jettison the chaste fashions of his formative years for vividly sexy, voluminous dresses one season, and in the next, an aggressively streamlined, curve-clutching silhouette.
His habit of confounding expectations has made his show the reliable high point of every New York Fashion Week, a magnet for the likes of Debbie Harry, the artists John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, the porn star Michael Lucas and, on occasion, a Saudi noble or two. Those collections have nodded obliquely to rehab chic, to his fabled ode to grunge in the early 1990s and to post-Weimar Berlin. And they have spawned what passes in the fashion community for an intellectual spectator sport, with insiders splitting hairs over whether Mr. Jacobs is being brilliant, playfully trite or just trite.
It depends on whom you ask. To his champions, he walks on water. His shows have impact, said André Leon Talley, Vogues editor at large. They become the major, pivotal, prophetic moment of the season.
But others insist he is merely treading water. He feels to me less like a designer than a great producer or casting director, and theres a lot to be said for that, said Eric Gaskins, who comments blisteringly on some of fashions sacred cows in his blog The Emperors Old Clothes. But at times, the overall message is pretty banal.