Marc Jacobs: An Overview of the Fashion Designer’s Career

Marc Jacobs is an American fashion designer from New York City with a nearly 40-year tenure in the fashion industry. Growing up in Manhattan, he spent his teenage years working as a stock boy for Charivari, a clothing boutique known for its avant-garde fashions. After graduating from the High School of Art and Design in 1981, Marc enrolled in the Parsons School of Design, where he stood out among his classmates by winning both the Perry Ellis Gold Thimble Award and Design Student of the Year in 1984. In 1986, Marc established the Marc Jacobs label with his business partner Robert Duffy.

In 1987 Marc became the youngest designer ever to receive the Perry Ellis Award for "New Fashion Talent.” Shortly after, Jacobs joined the women’s design unit of Perry Ellis as creative director. In 1997, Marc was appointed creative director of luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton, where he created the company’s first ready-to-wear clothing line. He is now the head designer for his own eponymous fashion label, Marc Jacobs. Marc is a five-time recipient of the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s (CFDA) Womenswear Designer of the Year Award, has received both the Accessories and Menswear Designer of the Year Award and won the 2011 Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award.

Marc has been designing for his eponymous label since 1984, and since then, the brand has expanded into a series of diffusion lines that cover a number of price points and customer bases. Here is an overview of the Marc Jacobs brand.

• Marc Jacobs Collection: The Marc Jacobs flagship brand is Marc’s luxury ready-to-wear line, encompassing womenswear, menswear, accessories, and fragrances. He has been designing for this label since 1984.
• Marc by Marc Jacobs: In 2001 at his spring/summer runway show, Marc debuted this lower-price-point secondary line Marc by Marc Jacobs, which offered womenswear, menswear, and accessories with the quality and creativity of his luxury line until the label closed in 2015.
• Marc Jacobs Beauty: The Marc Jacobs beauty line offers skincare products, eye shadows, foundation, and lipsticks.
• Marc Jacobs Fragrance: With popular lines like Daisy, Violet, and Perfect, Marc Jacobs Fragrance is owned by beauty brand COTY, but keeps the whimsical quality of Marc’s flagship label.
• Little Marc Jacobs: Marc’s children’s line applies Marc’s colorful, cheeky design aesthetic to children’s wear.
• The Marc Jacobs: in 2019, Marc released his newest diffusion line The Marc Jacobs which offers contemporary clothing and reintroductions of previous popular styles at a lower price point.

From 1997 to 2014, Marc was the creative director of Louis Vuitton, the legacy French fashion house. During his time there, Marc not only created the company’s first ready-to-wear clothing line but also collaborated with a number of bold visual artists to bring a creative, modern flair to the French design label. Here are four collaborations that Marc worked on in his time at the label.

1. 1. Marc Jacobs and Takashi Murakami: Marc worked with the popular Japanese illustrator Takashi Murakami to give the brown and taupe “LV” monogram signature pattern a rainbow makeover. Murakami’s inspirations included anime and manga, with some characters appearing between the rainbow monogram stamps.
2. 2. Marc Jacobs and Stephen Sprouse: Marc and artist Stephen Sprouse—who is known for his graffiti-style art—collaborated on a collection of bags and luxury goods that used graffiti-style accents on the classic “LV” monogram pattern. Marc’s first collaboration with Sprouse was in 2001, and a second tribute collection followed in 2009.
3. 3. Marc Jacobs and Richard Prince: For the Louis Vuitton spring/summer 2008 fashion show, Marc collaborated with artist Richard Prince to present an entirely nurse-themed collection. Inspired by Prince’s Nurse painting, models wore “LV”-monogrammed black lace face masks, exaggerated nurse bonnets, and sheer nurse gown-style shirt dresses.
4. 4. Marc Jacobs and Yayoi Kusama: Japanese visual artist Yayoi Kusama brought her colorful and surreal spotted motifs to this collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Marc designed a collection of bags and clothing accented with Kusama’s prints.

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