Vogue article on MJ

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Vogue January 2012
Marc Jacobs: A Man for All Seasons
by Jonathan Van Meter | photographed by Annie Leibovitz
http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/marc-jacobs-a-man-for-all-seasons/



With his brilliant transformation of Louis Vuitton, soon to be celebrated in a major exhibition, Marc Jacobs is at the top of his game. Jonathan Van Meter goes behind the scenes with fashion’s biggest rock star.
It’s mid-afternoon on a bizarrely hot, humid day in Paris in early October, and Marc Jacobs, in a black T-shirt and long shorts that can only be described as a cross between jodhpurs and harem pants, is sitting at a worktable in his atelier at Louis Vuitton headquarters on rue du Pont-Neuf. A Spice Girls hit from the nineties is blaring over the sound system. It’s just 36 hours before his Vuitton ready-to-wear show, and despite the fact that he is exhausted and claims he is “not going to make much sense today,” he is as engaging—and drolly opinionated—as ever.

Three weeks ago, in New York, I watched him do this very same thing—which is to say, execute with fussy precision 40-some fittings on 40-some cranky models well into the night for a show that was imminent. There he pranced around on the balls of his feet like Mick Jagger in his prime, wearing white jazz shoes and black dance tights that showed off his impressively muscular 48-year-old physique. Today, perhaps in a capitulation to the fact that he is human after all, he mostly stays seated and rolls around the room in an office chair with wheels. Watch Marc Jacobs as he zooms over to his ashtray for a drag on a perpetually lit cigarette and then zips back to a long worktable covered in fantastical pairs of heels and then rolllls back for another drag, then glides over to rows and rows of newly stitched Vuitton Speedy bags, like so many freshly painted Easter eggs.

No designer has a longer slog through the fashion season than Marc Jacobs, a punishing weeks-long period during which he appears to survive on caffeine, nicotine, and the fumes of a mania that comes from little to no sleep. Traditionally, he kicks off the fall shows in New York in early September with his spring ready-to-wear collection at the Lexington Avenue armory; a month later, he closes Paris Fashion Week with his collection for Vuitton at the Louvre’s Cour Carrée. The fact that both are the most anticipated—and lately, the most elaborately staged—shows every season only serves to ratchet up the pressure for the Little Big Man who seems somehow to embody all that is crazy and great about fashion in this strange new century.
 
The sound track moves through Kate Bush, Rihanna, the 1980 Visage song “Fade to Grey” as the model Kinga Rajzak gets fitted. She walks for Jacobs, and he says, “You are so pretty, Kinga.” She stops and smiles and then twirls in her pale-blue feathered skirt. “This is so pretty,” she says with a wanting in her eye that reminds you why a certain kind of girl goes gaga for everything Jacobs does. Assistants wearing white cotton gloves scamper about with white canvas bags and whitewashed crocodile purses and white-on-white monogrammed leather carryalls, all of them with sterling-silver hardware—the first time Jacobs has replaced the house’s traditional gold. A young, nervous-looking fellow appears in front of Jacobs holding a piece of fabric. They speak to each other in French (“I am not sure you will get a pant out of that fabric,” says Jacobs, switching to English). When did you learn to speak French? “I never studied it,” says Jacobs, who has been living half the year in Paris since he started at Vuitton in 1997. “I have a very small vocabulary, mostly fashion words, and I don’t know how to conjugate verbs, so everything is in the present tense.” He laughs. “As it should be!”

Hovering over all of this like a giant treasure map is an inspiration board bursting with collage: There are tacked-up stills of Mia Farrow and Catherine Deneuve, Elizabeth Taylor and Anne Bancroft, from their sixties glory days; there’s Courtney Love and Amanda de Cadenet, in their silk nightgown–and–tiara phase; seventies-era Playboy covers; Britney at the height of her Lolita powers in a soft blue sweater; a Meisel’d Madonna in pigtails; pictures of frosted cupcakes, Barbie dolls, and a komondor, one of those shaggy dogs covered in dreadlock-like white corded fur. And then there are illustrations of carousels. And carousel horses. What is going on here?

Jacobs can be a bit testy when talking about an upcoming collection. When I asked him about his inspiration for the New York show, he hemmed and hawed and then finally said, “I can’t really tell you much. Something usually gels that just makes you feel like, This is saying something to me, and so we want to do more of it, and then we try to figure out what more should look like.” When talking about fashion, Jacobs also has a funny tic, often starting with “I don’t mean this to sound pretentious. . . .” I run this by his friend of more than 20 years, Sofia Coppola, and she laughs and says, “That sounds like him.” And then: “I feel like he just doesn’t take it all—or himself—too seriously, but then can make these really beautiful, high-luxury things. Those two qualities are usually not contained in one person.”

As Peter Copping, who worked as a designer with Jacobs at Vuitton from the beginning until he left to design Nina Ricci three years ago, says, “He is just a simple, ordinary guy. He doesn’t overintellectualize things, even if he is completely capable of doing so. He doesn’t try to justify himself.”
 
Today Jacobs seems more willing to open up about his process. “I wouldn’t say we started out thinking about bed linens and nightgowns, but we thought of soft colors and soft fabrics and light textures, femininity. . . . It’s a puzzle. We started with this broderie anglaise thing and we thought, It should have a veil over it, and then we thought, It should be embellished, a 3-D version. It went in stages.” He takes a big gulp from his giant plastic cup of Diet Coke. “Our process here is more like a couture process.”

Perhaps wanting to show rather than tell, Jacobs, cigarette in hand, jumps out of his chair and takes me over to the racks. As we walk through the collection, he is a jazz-talker, improvising, flitting around an idea—but almost always arriving at something worth waiting for: “The idea of lightness, prettiness, gentleness, but strong shapes. Organza overlays, feathered, studded, stoned, plastic flowers.” He picks up a bracelet. “Cuffs with bells, but with pearls inside that tremble and rattle.” Then we consider another rack of dresses. “Bed linens. Beautiful fagoting and tufts on pillowcases. Beautiful beds, women in bed, nightgowns, evening gowns, lots of layers, cellophane, layers of transparency. . . .” He drifts off for a moment, drags on his cigarette, and says, “Air.”

None of the above, by the way, prepares me for the astonishment that is Jacobs’s Vuitton show a couple of days later. It’s a beautiful morning as the audience files through the Cour Carrée into what is essentially a giant white box. Inside is a round room, in the middle of which there is a runway circling a giant white cylindrical curtain. As we take our seats, there are dozens of LV-monogrammed young ladies wearing white aprons and serving white chocolate–covered cherries, White Russians, and white macarons from silver trays. (“Creamy, powdery, glazey!” Jacobs had shouted in the atelier two days earlier.) A song from the Dario Argento horror classic Suspiria, about a haunted ballerina, is cued up, and the curtain rises to reveal a carousel so crazy-bananas beautiful that the air gets sucked right out of the room—a collective gasp unlike any I have ever heard. A cranking sound, and then the carousel begins to spin as the music segues into the Björk song “Frosti,” and the models start their procession, stepping off their horses and then off the carousel one by one, and walk around the stage in dresses so pretty they practically sing. For eight minutes, the fifteen hundred people packed into this rotunda sit motionless and silent, the better to take in every nanosecond of this flawless, fleeting vision of loveliness.
 
I make my way backstage, and the roar is unreal. There are people drinking champagne, models undressing, hors d’oeuvres being passed. Kate Moss stalks past, looking bewitched. I find Jacobs at the center of a crush of editors, friends, celebrities, all pushing in toward him. By the time I get squeezed up to him, he is maniacally smiling and laughing, his eyes lit with the kind of joy that a boy who has just scored his first home run might evince: I did it!

I am reminded of a moment I had with Jacobs back at the Vuitton atelier. “I’ve been struggling with using the word carousel,” he said, “because I keep thinking merry is the right word: merry-go-round. And I don’t want to sound too silly or pretentious about this, but, you know, I love being in Paris. I love working at Louis Vuitton. I love fashion. That’s why I do it. No one’s forcing me to do this. And nobody forces anyone to buy it. It’s a real love affair. It can be difficult, like any relationship that has its ups and downs. This merry-go-round idea is such a simple thought. It’s like, You get on it, it’s a pleasure, and it just kind of never ends—as long as you’re enjoying it.”

There is no doubt that Marc Jacobs is, as his friend Naomi Campbell puts it, “on a roll,” doing the best work of his career for Vuitton. In fact, on March 6, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs will open the doors on “Louis Vuitton–Marc *Jacobs,” an exhibition that will explore the parallels between the simple trunk-*maker from small-town France who went on to found one of the most enduring brands in the world and the brash New York designer who has pretty much single-handedly turned the 158-year-old leather-goods company into a serious fashion house in a little more than ten years. They will each get their own floor. And if the bizarrely long lines of logo-crazed shoppers outside the LV flagship super*store on the Champs-Elysées are any indication, the show will surely find its audience.

But during Paris Fashion Week, all of this—the gloire, the triomphe—is being overshadowed by rumors of Jacobs’s leaving to take over Dior. There is, along with the anxiety, a sense of real sadness about the prospect of a Jacobs-less Vuitton. In many ways, Jacobs is Louis Vuitton—or the spirit of the brand as it is perceived today, anyway, which is some winning alchemy of near-sacred heritage meets ostentatious luxury meets whimsical postmodern cool.

It is hard to overstate Jacobs’s importance to Louis Vuitton, one of the oldest Parisian companies, with 459 stores around the world and among the most profitable luxury-goods businesses ever. Shortly after Jacobs arrived in 1997, the company started seeing double-digit growth every year. Though it is difficult to recall a time when Vuitton wasn’t such a trend factory, before Jacobs arrived, there was, he reminds me, “no ready-to-wear, no fashion shoes, no fashion handbags, no fashion for men or women, no fine jewelry; none of that stuff existed, and it now does.” Yves Carcelle, the chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton, agrees. “If we have built a fashion business inside Louis Vuitton, it is due to Marc. He started it from scratch, on a white page.” But Jacobs’s bigger contribution, says Carcelle, is more abstract. “He has liberated the creative energy of the company. Just for people to cross Marc in the corridor gives them a creative jolt. I hope he stays many more years, but whenever the moment is that he leaves, I think the company will never be the same.”

As Pamela Golbin, the curator of the exhibition, says, “Louis Vuitton was a company. Marc made it a house, something that looked impossible fifteen years ago. And his intervention has made it that much more Parisian. You did need someone from the outside to come in to do that.

Jacobs arrived in Paris at an interesting time, during an invasion of international designers: John Galliano at Dior, Alexander McQueen at Givenchy, Michael Kors at Céline. “This was a major shift in Paris fashion,” says Golbin. “Jacobs turned out to be one of the most important players in the end.” She attributes this in part to a kind of daring. “It’s very New York,” she says. “He’s lived through so much, he’s seen so much, but he knows exactly what to appropriate. Some people have described him as a sampler, but it’s more than sampling; it’s really about appropriation. So that a collaboration with Richard Prince just seems so organically normal. In French there’s this phrase that I think is really great for Marc: le mot juste—the just word, which means the right word at the right time. It’s the right thing for the right time in the right moment."
 
There is no more perfect example of le mot juste from Jacobs than his idea for Vuitton to collaborate with Takashi Murakami shortly after 9/11. As Carcelle tells it, Jacobs came to his office one day to discuss his ideas for the spring 2002 ready-to-wear collection and said that he was ready to move on from fashion’s dour mood—gray and sad and black. “We can’t mourn forever,” he told Carcelle. “My next show will be colorful and naive. Fashion should bring joy to the world.” With Carcelle’s blessing, Jacobs e-mailed the Japanese artist, whose work he had seen in an exhibition. Murakami flew to Paris and soon enough was working on what would become the now-iconic Murakami bags. “In all honesty,” says Murakami, “I didn’t know much about fashion at the time. However, my assistants were very excited, so I knew it was a big chance and decided to challenge myself.” Jacobs, he says, “was the best partner I could ask for,” adding that working with him was like “a long game of catch.”

The collaboration between Vuitton and Murakami was a monster hit. “It was a success because there was a strong meaning behind it,” says Carcelle. “This was what impressed Bernard Arnault the night he met Jacobs socially in 1996—Marc tries to give meaning to everything he does. Despite the fact that you see him arriving in a skirt, or his tattoos, he is a very big intellectual.” It brought back the days of Elsa Schiaparelli collaborating with Dalí and Cocteau in the late 1930s. Jacobs turns to artists not only because he avidly buys art but because many of his friends are artists: John Currin and Rachel Feinstein; Elizabeth Peyton; Richard Prince, with whom Jacobs did another Vuitton collaboration. (“I didn’t know **** about handbags,” Prince tells me. “But after looking at all the luggage and the various collaborations . . . I began to see the handbag as some kind of functional architecture. I told Marc to send me samples of the LV logo, and I stayed up for 48 hours silk-screening the **** out of it.”) It’s almost as if Jacobs saw the future, one in which luxury handbags and contemporary art would be the only things still selling during an economic meltdown.

But, as Golbin says, “Fashion is not an art world.” We are walking through the eye-popping Hussein Chalayan exhibition currently up at Les Arts Décoratifs. As we pass by a glass case with a dress inside that is also its own laser-light show, she adds, “At the end of the day, you have to sell clothes. Sure, you can make fashion that is spectacular and looks great in a museum show, but it’s unwearable and inaccessible. Fashion is an industry, and what makes Marc so special is he does make fashion—but with clothes. Which is quite rare today.”

Which is why Vuitton is probably thrilled that the Dior offer is off the table—for now. “I am at Vuitton, and I am very happy there,” says Jacobs. “I’ve been saying that for a long time. There have been on-and-off conversations about Dior. I don’t know; maybe someday in the future, maybe years from now, I may end up going someplace else, maybe Dior. But right now I am at Vuitton, and all that matters to me is that that’s where I am and I’m going to keep doing my thing.” He pauses for a moment and then, as if he can’t help himself, goes on: “The irony in all of this is that I don’t dream of doing anything else, or I didn’t. My greatest challenge is to do something better than we’ve done the season before. The idea of couture doesn’t hold that thing for me. It’s archaic—in my opinion. I mean, I am really interested in the craftsmanship behind couture. But I can explore all that in ready-to-wear. With couture, one dress each season is photographed by a couple of magazines; there’s no advertising; it reaches 20 customers. I don’t feel there is anything lacking in what we do. I get to work with these amazing craftsmen. Maybe not the same ateliers that would make a couture dress, but, again, we are not in a deficit for working with people who create beautiful things. I am not sure I ever looked at couture as this great opportunity.” With that, he lets out a big laugh, surprising even himself with his candor.

A lot has been made of Jacobs’s Clark Kent/Superman transformation a few years ago—from glasses-geek in baggy sweaters to toned, tanned, and tattooed hot guy who poses nude. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. As he himself pointed out to me, by the time he was sixteen, he had gotten his first piercing at Body Manipulations in San Francisco and his first tattoo on Sunset Boulevard. (Granted, he now has 33 tattoos—it’s almost as if he’s trying to cover himself in tiny logos.)

The fact is, Jacobs has always had a louche glamour. You’d run into him a lot in the early nineties at one nightclub or another; there he’d be, scruffily handsome in a dark corner with a group of people you wished you knew. Half the gay men in New York had a crush on him. (I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that my 25-year-old self tore a picture of Jacobs out of a late-eighties Vanity Fair and stuck it on my fridge. Let me conjure it for you: nude but for a pair of black motorcycle boots, lying in a bed with strategically arranged sheets.) When the press turned on him in 2008, I felt like saying, Listen up, people, this is what a childless gay male midlife crisis looks like.
 
Jacobs has been honest about his drug-use and addiction issues over the years. He says Naomi Campbell “really helped me get sober,” and his business partner, Robert Duffy, steered him through “the darkest time in my life.” But Jacobs has only recently revealed what really motivated him to clean up his act once and for all: ulcerative colitis. And because of Jacobs’s abysmal daily habits, it was getting progressively worse, even as the cortisone and steroids treatments stopped working. His doctor recommended that he have his colon removed. (“I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ ”) Instead, he went to a nutritionist who promised to relieve the symptoms, as long as Jacobs committed to a strict regimen of diet and exercise. Naturally, he took it to the extreme, working out obsessively. “My opinion about myself is so based on what other people think of me. So when people said nice things about the way I looked, it helped me to feel like I wanted to do more of it.” (He is clearly pleased with the results, too: “I look much younger now than I did 20 years ago.”)

Ironically, all of this awakened Jacobs—at long last—to the pleasures of the very thing he nearly kills himself to create: fashion. “I never cared about buying things for myself, like clothes,” he says. “And then all of a sudden I realized how great it is to be very precise about the shirts that I wear and all the things that are a part of my closet. So the ritual of fashion and shopping became very personal to me.”

Back when Jacobs had become an object of ridicule, it was not only because of his flashy new look but also because he was suddenly keeping some rather unseemly company. As his on-again, off-again, on-again relationship with a former male escort, Jason Preston, became excruciatingly public, their fights spilling out into the streets in front of the Mercer Hotel, where the paparazzi were always coiled and ready—well, it did sort of feel like Jacobs was actively courting bad press. He calls their time together a “situation-ship” and blithely concedes that his life became “a gossipy nightmare.” But his most recent relationship, with Lorenzo Martone, a 32-year-old Brazilian who works in fashion PR, though also very public, felt a bit more dignified. The couple seemed inseparable, moved in together, and announced they were getting married—and then broke up in the summer of 2010. Are they still close? “Yeah, we are best friends,” says Jacobs. “We speak to each other, I don’t know, six times a day.”

Though he’s been in therapy for 20 years, Jacobs is not particularly interested in self-analysis outside of his work. He is so utterly frank about everything else, you can’t help thinking there’s some kind of blind spot there. In some ways, he is fashion’s Woody Allen, a man Jacobs deeply admires (“He turned neuroses into high art”). Both men are gifted originals with fascinating, funny minds, on the couch for most of their lives, and both have sometimes made mystifying choices of romantic partners. Allen had a vexed relationship with a difficult mother, but there, Jacobs has him beat. Jacobs hasn’t seen or spoken to his mother, Judy—or his younger brother and sister—in 20 years. He has always maintained that there is no love lost, insisting that it’s not “a sad situation,” that they just don’t “get along very well.”

When I ask him about Judy, he is all two-word answers. How long has it been? “Two decades.” Where is she? “Don’t know.” But when I tell him I am fascinated by public figures who don’t speak to their mothers, the floodgates open. “I hate this idea that you have to love somebody because they are your family. Nobody can tell me what I’m supposed to feel and who I am supposed to feel it for. I don’t blame them, I don’t hate them, I just know that I don’t feel love for them. That’s all. And I am not going to make the call or try to stay in touch because society says, But it’s your mother. Oedipus, Schmoedipus.”

Both of Jacobs’s parents were agents at William Morris, but Steve Jacobs, his father, died from complications after surgery when he was in his early 30s and Marc was six. I could find only one reference to him, in a book about agents, The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up, in which David Geffen, who worked in the legendary William Morris mailroom, cites Steve Jacobs as one of those “accomplished young guys” whom he modeled himself on. (Turns out Steve Jacobs was also Joan Rivers’s agent when she was just taking off. “He was a rising star, had all the hot young acts,” Rivers says. “He was really smart, very ambitious—and cute.” So that’s where it all comes from.)

Although there is something heartbreaking about the idea of Jacobs’s being without family, it is quite clear that he has created his own, an incredibly loyal support system of friends and co-workers. “He is like family to me,” says Sofia Coppola. “I’ve known him for so long.” And as Naomi Campbell, who met him as a teenager, tells me he fits in anywhere. “I’ve been all over the world with Marc, and it doesn’t matter where he is, he adapts—it becomes his world.” His friends also point to his apartment in Paris overlooking the Champs de Mars, right near the Eiffel Tower, as something that finally grounded him in a place, a home. “At one point,” says Peter Copping, “he seemed not to live anywhere. And then he got his apartment in Paris and put a lot of effort into making it a beautiful place where he is just happy to be at home with his dogs watching a DVD rather than being out having too much of a hedonistic time.” Coppola agrees. “It’s so fun to go over there,” she says. “Sometimes he makes what we call ‘grown-up dinner.’ And then he has this beautiful art collection, a mix of more formal things and then a lighter side, which I feel is so specific to him. He has a Kurt Cobain photo in the bathroom, and there are little tiny Andy Warhol flowers and beautiful Ed Ruscha paintings. There is art just all over the house.”
 
As for the New York half of his life, after living at the Mercer Hotel in New York for ten years, Jacobs finally bought a home in Manhattan in 2009, a town house in the West Village. He moved in, in August, after a long renovation and says, “I am kind of just going from room to room and smoking cigarettes. Learning how to use the TV and iPod dock and adjusting cushions on the couch and making sure the ashtray is perpendicular to the edge of the table.”

One can’t help wonder how he feels about being single. “Good,” he says brightly. “I thought it was going to be very sad moving into my house. I’d planned to move in there with Lorenzo. But it turns out, I am so kind of engaged in work, I am just not having those dark, sad, lonely feelings.” He laughs. “But I always sort of want to end a statement like that with . . . today. I imagine I will have days where I think, What’s this all for if I can’t share it with someone? But that’s not the way I’m feeling right now.”

A few weeks after Jacobs’s show in Paris, I meet him at the Mercer for lunch. Relaxed and easy, he has clearly caught up on his sleep. Halloween is just around the corner, and Jacobs is, as usual, going to heroic efforts to outdo himself for the party he’s attending, which has a Cabaret theme: “Any excuse to get all dressed up in a silly costume.”

If Marc Jacobs appreciates Halloween more than most, perhaps it is because it is a “silly”—and relatively safe—way to explore the darker, hedonistic side of life with which he is all too familiar. This is a man who, let’s not forget, nearly destroyed himself. But when I bring up the notion of the fashion designer as tortured artist, as embodied most recently by McQueen and Galliano, Jacobs doesn’t mince words. “I am not an expert on addiction,” he says, “but from my experience, I believe that a self-destructive nature has to do with one’s own issues about oneself. In a perfect world, if we could all get healthy and feel good about ourselves, we wouldn’t destroy ourselves or the things that we worked so hard to create.”

It’s no coincidence that his New York show was inspired by Bob Fosse and All That Jazz, which is about a man so obsessed with his work—with putting on a show—that he loses everything. “On a superficial level, the things that interested Fosse—the seedy side of life, a sort of decadence and corruption—I find very appealing. But then there’s this crazy paradox, this drive to work so hard and the seeming need for approval. There’s just so much of his life and work that I can relate to.”

Indeed, Jacobs has begun putting on shows to do Fosse proud. “I’ve gotten more theatrical about the presentation because it’s a pleasure,” he says. “But also the shows got bigger and the audiences became more illustrious, and I thought, you know, We’ve got to entertain them. We can’t just send out a couple of skirts and tops.”

If his carousel show was an expression of pure childlike joy, perhaps it’s because Jacobs is, after years of struggling with his demons, finally “in a good place,” as he says.“For the last six months,” says Coppola, “he has seemed very light, the funny Marc that I first met years ago.” Jacobs has been sober for only four years. Are we just now beginning to see what he is capable of?

Jacobs has a more measured view. “To me, success is not a fait accompli. Next season, if we do something they like more, they’ll say, Yeah, that carousel show, you know, it was nice, but it was so sweet and it was so pretty. And, you know, that’s just the way it goes.” As good a description as you are ever likely to get about fashion’s fickle nature. But at the end of the day, Jacobs knows that the critic’s opinion is not the one that matters most. “Honestly, I think any woman who comes into our shop—she buys a dress because she likes it. She doesn’t really care what the references are or what a critic writes. Fashion isn’t a necessity. It pulls at your heart. It’s a whim. You don’t need it. You want it.”