MARC Jacobs concluded Women's Wear Daily's recent CEO summit with a jolt of glamor, candor and unabashed enthusiasm for fashion. The artistic force behind Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs stressed the power of tenacity and conviction.
But he also acknowledged the randomness of inspiration, especially in the beginnings of the seasonal design process.
"It's the same in both places, at Marc Jacobs and Vuitton," he said. "I'm usually so exhausted after a show that I leave (the teams) alone for a little while. They get a bunch of stuff together, I start to look at it, something sticks, and then it just develops and evolves. It's funny when I read how people analyze a collection because I know for us, for me, it starts in this really arbitrary fashion. 'We just did this, so let's do something completely different.'
"For fall, we had just shown this very 1980s, very tough (collection) with black and bright colors, a very graphic look; so for spring, we found ourselves looking at very feminine ruffles. And we said, 'well, it's probably not right, but it's different'."
Keeping the Marc Jacobs and Vuitton collections distinct is a natural result of channeling ideas through a six-month process of experimenting, adding and editing by the respective teams.
"If I love the color red, I'll love it Monday in New York and still love it Friday in Paris, but that red could become burgundy in Paris or pink in New York. It manifests itself differently," he said.
"I'm most at home in New York. I have so many friends and such a large creative community that I feel I'm a part of here."
But partly because of his bicontinental life, Jacobs doesn't identify strongly with the American fashion community.
"Sometimes I get really adamant when I hear designers make blanket statements like? 'American fashion should be ...' This whole idea of American fashion or Seventh Avenue fashion is nonsense. It's archaic and old. We work out of a loft in Soho and we show wherever we want. So if we want to show a dress made of 50 yards of taffeta, who says that has to be couture?"
Asked to name the next Ralph Lauren or Donna Karan, he declined, saying many young people have talent and passion, then mentioned Alexander Wang. When a question about celebrity designers came up, Jacobs noted Lindsay Lohan's failure at Ungaro, but complimented Victoria Beckham.
"She is someone who has always wanted to design clothes. She knows the body, she loves it and she's working her ass off," he said.
