Marc Jacobs Isn't Just a Designer's Designer: He's Everyone's Designer
Marc Jacobs was only the first of Louis Vuitton's many marketable creative leads — his successors, Kim Jones, Virgil Abloh, and Pharrell are equally saleable titans — but he remains the king, the original, the blueprint. No one out Marc-ets the Jacobs, at LVand beyond.
But I don't mean to imply that Jacobs, who left LV in 2013 to focus on his eponymous brand, is solely making moolah. I mean, he does, clearly, but Jacobs is so much more.
He's incredibly adept at straddling the worlds of commercial and conceptual fashion, balancing fashion's impossible tightrope. He's a designers' designer but also everyone's designer.
Jacobs somehow courts Gen Z with massively popular sub-label Heaven, storied fashion snobs with his mainline collections, and everyone in between. That's the Marc Jacobs magic.
Jacobs' runway shows are the rare fashion spectacle that also satisfy a broader audience, sort of like those immersive Van Gogh exhibits.
It's real-deal art at XXXL scale, enjoyable for all.
Jacobs' bags, meanwhile, are so ubiquitous that Google suggested "Marc Jacobs" as the third auto-fill option for a late August "tote bag" search, are such unequivocal best-sellers that I don't even need to justify that assertation with numbers (OK, but they're big: The bags are part of Jacobs' $1 billion plans).
Even Jacobs' towering Kiki boots, a hollering statement shoe, are a tangible mission statement for his brand's contemporary drive.
Like Rei Kawakubo and Rick Owens, two of his own favorite designers, Jacobs' path is grounded by reality and made aspirational through fantasy. A simple proposition but one that proves to be the ultimate test of a designer's mettle, a test few pass as nattily as Jacobs.
It wasn't always this way.
After sliding down from his Louis Vuitton peak, Jacobs' solo career carried on swimmingly at first.
But, eventually, the magic faded and the diffusion lines, while profitable, wound up so diluted that they engendered to self-parody.
By the late 2010s, media res profiles were documenting Jacobs' dipping career.
But he literally clawed his way back fashion-first after a reset spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jacobs' Fall/Winter 2021 presentation kicked the door down, plastered big logos atop bigger clothes resplendent in big colors, signaling the start of Jacobs' current-era commercial hot streak as critics hailed his return to form in a Wayne's World-ian sort of way.
Presented over a year after Jacobs' prior runway, FW21 wasn't only fun — it was essential, a visual metaphor for his native New York City blossoming back to life after a quarantine-wrought slumber.
Jacobs' catwalk shows since then have uniformly become the main off-calendar event of the season, each one huger than the last. Spring/Summer 2024's theatrical doll fashion was sublime, arguably one of Jacobs' career high points.
Marc Jacobs' metaphorical sails were rallied by industry acclaim while dollars-and-cents sales were the gust that blew Jacobs' brand into a new age.
Around the time that Jacobs' fashion comeback began, his financial wins followed suit.
The Marc Jacobs Tote Bag, a square shoulder bag with top handles and billboard-sized branding, was actually born in 2019 but it's really one of '20s Great Handbags.
It's approachably priced for a designer handbag and, perhaps most importantly, impressively utilitarian what with its canvas construction and many pockets — little wonder it's inspired literally thousands of TikTok videos.
This is the Marc Miracle, the ability to both consistently notch industry admiration and unabashedly own fashion's commercial side.
Despite this being a money-crazed business, cash does not polite conversation make. It's longstanding and unspoken fashion tradition to understate moneymaking moments and products, instead throwing the spotlight over to the art of it all.
That's why, way back when, luxury labels saturated the marketplace with mid-tier diffusion imprints in a bid to lure price-conscious consumers without cheapening their top-tier mainline labels.
The low-priced sub-label may have gone the way of the dodo but the glut of designer sneakers, $600 T-shirts, and celeb-powered scents represents a similar desire among fashion houses to have their Erewhon smoothies and drink it, too.
And still, you so rarely see designers of Jacobs' caliber freely embrace their best-sellers, metaphorically or (especially) literally.
But, there, in Jacobs' 40th anniversary campaign — held by the man himself! — is that inimitable Marc Jacobs Tote Bag.
It don't get more direct than that.
And why not? Because Jacobs knows that you can do it all and still have cred to spare. Because he fully comprehends the power of social media stunts (and pulls them off with remarkable consistency).
Because he knows that a fashion company must sell product as capably as it sells fantasy.
Because Jacobs is the master of Marc-eting.
