Marc Jacobs
A look at the career of a legendary designer
Even while he was in college at New York’s Parson’s School of Design, Marc Jacobs was establishing himself as a force in the fashion industry. In 1984, he designed his first Marc Jacobs label collection, the same year he won the school’s Design Student of the Year Award. Over the years, he’s shown a wide array of looks, but even when he was just starting out his design aesthetic introduced him as someone who was closely attuned to street fashion. “Now I’m into t-shirts, underwear, slips, stockings,” he said in 1987. “So I’m making clothes for [women] who run around the city in nothing but their underwear—they throw a sweater over a slip or they put on a pair of stockings and some stilettos.” Later that year Jacobs would become the youngest designer to win the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent.
The Perry Ellis label quickly snatched Jacobs up—making him creative director/vice president in 1988. His work at revitalizing Perry Ellis’s womenswear won him his second CFDA award but the infamous “Grunge Collection” (watch the runway show below) he produced for the brand in 1992 was deemed a misfire by the powers that be and he was dismissed. Jacobs insists his vision was just too ahead of its time. “It’s still my favorite collection, because it marked a time when I went with my instincts against instructions, and I turned out to be right. It came out of a genuine feeling for what I saw on the streets and all around me.”
After leaving Perry Ellis, Jacobs went back to focusing on his own signature line—and then got tapped to be creative director at Louis Vuitton, where he set out to make the brand far less stuffy, even going so far as to—in collaboration with designer Stephen Sprouse—add a shocking graffiti twist to the label’s signature handbag. The result was an astounding success.
Although Jacobs has had high-profile personal problems along the way—he admits to having been an addict since his late teens, finally giving up his drugs of choice, heroin and cocaine, in 2007 after a second round of rehab—his professional life has been marked by a consistent creative genius. Jacobs admits that there’s no one silhouette or style that undeniably screams his name because he’s been more focused on embracing the ever-changing nature of fashion. “I love how the reality of fashion is all about something for that moment and then the extremity of dismissal,” Jacobs has said. “I have often been criticized for doing an about-face from one season to the next…but that is what I love about fashion. I love that kind of dedication, devotion, obsession with what looks so amazing that you have to have it now. And then saying next season, ‘well I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’ I love the obscenity and the perversity of that.”
It’s that kind of joy that Jacobs both infuses into and gets out of fashion that makes him one of the most influential designers of all time. That’s also why the CFDA presented Jacobs with yet another prize—the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
