Marc Jacobs

A Grunge Collection, a Dismissal and a Reputation

Marc Jacobs is an American fashion designer raised in New York, and his formal training was at the Parsons School of Design. He became prominent on the fashion scene when he designed a grunge collection for Perry Ellis, leading to his immediate dismissal. The two halves of that sentence belong together. Prominence and dismissal arrived from the same collection: the work was striking enough to make his name across the fashion scene, and confronting enough, inside the house that employed him, to end his job there at once. Grunge as a theme meant bringing a rough, street-level aesthetic into a established label's collection, and the reaction shows the risk in that transfer — what reads as originality to the wider scene can read as unsuitability to an employer guarding its own image.

That early episode also establishes the pattern stated directly about his later work: Marc Jacobs has been known to design under his own free will without following trends. A designer dismissed for following his own direction rather than his employer's expectations, who then builds a career noted for independence from trends, presents a consistent character across both episodes. The dismissal therefore functions in his story not as a setback alone but as the first public evidence of the autonomy on which his reputation rests.

Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton and the Collaboration Method

Jacobs is currently the artistic director for Louis Vuitton, spearheading such collaborations as Stephen Sprouse's graffiti bags and Takashi Murakami's pastel-colored accessories. Artistic direction of a historic luggage house by a designer famous for grunge is itself a meeting of opposites, and the collaborations show how he works within it: he brings outside artists into the house's products. Graffiti bags put Stephen Sprouse's street-derived writing across Louis Vuitton bags, while Takashi Murakami's pastel-colored accessories recolor the house's accessories in an artist's palette. In both cases the underlying product remains a Vuitton bag or accessory, and the artist's contribution is the surface and the attitude — a method that renews familiar luxury goods without abandoning the forms customers already recognise.

Alongside that role, his own clothing lines, Marc Jacobs and the less expensive Marc By Marc Jacobs, are also extremely popular, and his clothes are available in many countries around the world. Running two own-name lines at two price levels beside the Louis Vuitton role means designing simultaneously for a luxury house, for his own top line, and for a more accessible line. The less expensive Marc By Marc Jacobs extends the same design name to buyers who cannot or will not pay main-line prices, a tiered structure that mirrors his position across the market as a whole — grunge at Perry Ellis, luxury at Vuitton, and accessibility under his own name.

Designing Against the Season's Theme

The clearest example of his independence is seasonal. In Spring 2004 and 2005, when designers were following the safari theme, Marc Jacobs made his collection completely lady-like, and the catwalk which the models walked on had an archway of 450,000 roses. Refusing the season's shared theme is a deliberate gamble: a safari collection would have matched what stores and magazines were prepared to promote, while a completely lady-like collection had to succeed on its own terms. The archway of 450,000 roses underlines the refusal theatrically — an extravagant, romantic setting counted in hundreds of thousands of flowers, matched to ladylike clothes at the exact moment the rest of fashion presented khaki and expedition references.

For his fall collection in 2005, he got some terrible reviews and some fantastic ones. Divided reviewing is the natural consequence of the same independence: a designer who does not follow trends gives critics no shared standard to judge him by, so responses polarise between terrible and fantastic rather than settling in the middle. Read together, the Perry Ellis dismissal, the Vuitton collaborations, the two own-name lines, the roses archway and the split fall 2005 reviews describe a single working method — designing under his own free will — tested at every level from employment to international retail, and sustained by clothes popular enough, in many countries, to support it.