The two individuals perhaps most responsible for transforming the West Village from what it was ten years ago into what it is today are Carrie Bradshaw and Marc Jacobs. The former is a bubbly, self-involved, inordinately chic blond journalist who chronicles the lives of New York women, her own life in particular. The latter is a fashion designer who has become famous as the creator of the shoes and clothes and, most prominently, handbags worn by the women whom Carrie chronicles and the women who wish that they could be her. Carrie Bradshaw, of course, is make-believe, the protagonist of the “Sex and the City” franchise, whereas Marc Jacobs is a real person. Or he was once.
Jacobs used to be a chubby Jewish guy with long hair and glasses who made his name—and got fired—by designing a “grunge” collection (of very expensive silk shirts printed to look like flannel, and fine cashmere sweaters with the appearance of thermal underwear) in 1993, as the head of womenswear at Perry Ellis. Five years later, he was hired as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, France’s premier luxury-goods house, where he was seen as an enfant terrible, and nobody was quite sure if he would make it work. But, in the decade since Jacobs arrived at Vuitton, he has quadrupled its business and, with the company’s backing, watched his own Marc Jacobs Collection and his less expensive secondary line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, grow into a global business, with a hundred and sixty stores, in nineteen countries. You see his handbags, with their quilting and clunky hardware, on every other girl in Manhattan—like flip-flops, except that they cost thousands of dollars.
Jacobs’s physical appearance has come to reflect his success. At the age of forty-five, he is no longer remotely plump. His hair is cut short (and was, briefly, bright blue), and he has started wearing contact lenses. He looks like a cartoon superhero: muscular, bronzed, shining with diamonds. And he has accomplished the comic-book feat of transforming himself from hardworking Everyman (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Peter Parker) into something elevated and different and not merely human. But this is fashion, not crime-fighting, so the goal isn’t to fly or to leap tall buildings or—God forbid—become invisible. No. What one wants is to be a cultural touchstone, to represent and embody a life style, the way Karl Lagerfeld does, or Donatella Versace, or Carrie Bradshaw.
Jacobs could almost be in one of the Annie Leibovitz photographs that make up his current Louis Vuitton ad campaign. (They feature Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola relaxing in a field with a monogrammed Vuitton tote; Keith Richards playing guitar in a hotel room next to a custom case; Mikhail Gorbachev and a Vuitton satchel in the back seat of a limousine near a remnant of the Berlin Wall—all in a golden, larger-than-life light.) Almost, but not quite, because Marc Jacobs’s brand of success is unapologetically less dignified. Jacobs has twenty-eight tattoos, among them one on his left arm that says, “Bros before hos,” a phrase borrowed from pimp culture that expresses a credo of allegiance to men before women, comrades before conquests, or, as Jacobs puts it, “friends before a piece of ass.” Until recently, he had a boyfriend named Jason Preston, seventeen years his junior, who was a retired prostitute, and who had the Marc Jacobs logo tattooed in large letters up the length of his forearm. The couple issued regular updates on their romance on their respective pages on MySpace.
Jacobs’s retail domain stretches across several blocks of Bleecker Street, rendering the surrounding area a kind of Marc Jacobs theme park and, naturally, a prominent stop on “Sex and the City” bus tours, which regularly crawl along the cobblestones, shuttling young women to the Magnolia bakery to sample the cupcakes favored by Carrie. A handbag that Jacobs designed for Vuitton was so prominent in the movie that it was more a character than a prop.
All this makes Jacobs very happy. There is nothing he loves more than seeing his work woven into the culture. With the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, he created a series of handbags featuring the stately Vuitton monogram reimagined in candy colors on a white backdrop and, more recently, interspersed with a camouflage print, which was named “monogramouflage.” The collaboration has been so successful that its biggest problem has been the frequency with which the purses are knocked off and illegally hawked on street corners. Jacobs, delighting in copying the copycats, installed faux street venders selling real bags at the opening of Murakami’s recent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. It was possible, that night, to buy a three-thousand-dollar handbag off a folding table from a guy in a skullcap and a sweatshirt who was being paid an hourly wage to wear that costume. Jacobs is amused by such things—things that seem like other things. His collections often include trompe-l’oeil.
Jacobs also enjoys the idea that the brand is the product being sold. (This is unusual for a fashion designer: designers tend to think of their work as art and get snippy at the suggestion that they are simply peddlers of schmattes and image.) A recent print campaign for the Marc Jacobs Collection shows Victoria Beckham, née Posh Spice, wearing Marc Jacobs clothes and sunglasses and emerging from boxes and bags that bear his name—she is a human product, wrapped.
Jacobs is a human product, too, as famous for what he means as for what he does. In market research conducted for Daisy, a perfume he was introducing (named after one of his dogs), women at a mall in the Midwest were asked if they’d heard of Marc Jacobs. Many said yes, but when they were asked who he was, they often replied “a rock star” or “an actor” rather than “a fashion designer.” Probably, they had noticed his name in a gossip column. They might have seen pictures of Jacobs smoking cigarettes at parties with celebrities. Or perhaps they’d just felt his potent commercial presence when they were riding a red bus down Bleecker Street.