Marc Jacobs Profiles

Marc Jacobs is an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for his own fashion label, Marc Jacobs, as well as Marc by Marc Jacobs, a diffusion line. He was the creative director of the French design house Louis Vuitton from 1997 to 2014. This profiles page tells that career in order: the two New York labels that carry his name, and the long Paris appointment that ran alongside them. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

The designer's official website is linked in the references, together with the biography searches. The collections, fall, spring, fashion week and runway pages in this series file the work itself; this page keeps the chronology of the career behind it straight.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

Two Labels, One Name

The structure of Jacobs' career is unusual: one designer, two labels of his own, run in parallel. The Marc Jacobs label carries the main collections — the runway shows filed on the runway page in this series — while Marc by Marc Jacobs, the diffusion line, carried the same design language to a wider audience at lower prices. Running a diffusion line alongside a main line is a statement about who fashion is for: the signatures are not diluted, they are distributed.

Across both labels the range is a complete wardrobe world — ready-to-wear first, then the handbags, shoes and accessories that complete the looks. The handbag in particular became one of the label's public signatures, photographed across the collections filed in this series.

Paris: Louis Vuitton, 1997 to 2014

In 1997 Jacobs took the creative direction of Louis Vuitton in Paris — an American designer appointed to lead a French house then known almost entirely for leather goods and luggage. Across the years to 2014, the house built the ready-to-wear business that turned it into a complete fashion house, with Jacobs' runway shows among the most theatrical presentations on the Paris calendar.

The two halves of the career illuminate each other. The New York labels show the designer's own language at its most personal; the Vuitton years show the same language scaled to a heritage house — its Monogram, its trunk-making standards, its global audience. The Louis Vuitton pages in this guide file that house's own record, and the news page in this series gathers the continuing coverage of Jacobs' work since.