THE SHEIK OF TONGUE-IN-CHIC : He’s the heir to the $750-million house of Perry Ellis. But after four years at the helm, it’s still business as usual for Marc Jacobs. He may be nearing 30, but there’s no sign he’s changing his outrageous style.
Four years ago when designer Marc Jacobs took over the helm at Perry Ellis, he was known as a flip, hip, 25-year-old enfant terrible who zinged the fashion Establishment with his brash, witty creations like neon-colored “Miami Beach Towel” wrap minis and “Freudian Slip” dresses emblazoned with the venerable doctor’s portrait. Not to mention his provocative photo in Vanity Fair wearing a buttercup yellow sheet or his penchant for a ponytail and motorcycle boots.
Now, the aging wunderkind --he celebrates the big Three-O in a few months--sprawls in a chair in his Seventh Avenue showroom and insists that reigning as the tongue-in-chic sheik of a $750-million fashion empire hasn’t much changed his life.
“Really, nothing is very different,” says Jacobs over a breakfast of black coffee and Marlboro Lights. “I live in the same place I’ve always lived. I eat in the same restaurants. I have the same friends. Maybe I travel a little more doing trunk shows and I spend more time on the phone dealing with magazines and stores. But the work is still the same and I still feel the same, sort of happy and sort of miserable.”
Certainly, Jacobs is the same 5-foot-8 sliver of nervous energy he always was. With his pale angular face, soulful hazel eyes and long tangle of brown hair, he could pass for Daniel Day-Lewis’s Angst -ridden kid brother. And his get-up--a trio of tiny hoop earrings, a ratty black sweater, black jeans and gargantuan fuzzy black goat boots--is as Downtown as ever.
Yet, indeed, there have been changes. With his last couple of collections, Jacobs’ reputation among the rag trade’s movers and shakers has evolved from scrappy Young Turk to Major Star. Next month, the Council of Fashion Designers of America will honor him with its “Womenswear Designer of he Year” award.
“He’s become much more confident and sure of his talent,” observes Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, who has long championed the designer. “In the beginning, he was quite cautious, but now he’s not afraid to push fashion to its limits.”
Which is just what he did in his quirky, streetwise spring collection that won him the sobriquet, “the Guru of Grunge” from Women’s Wear Daily. Models in deliberately messy hair and army boots clumped down the runway wearing tiny shrunken sweaters, bell-bottoms, crocheted boleros, fluttery flower child dresses and all sorts of funky, in-your-face creations.
The show left no doubt that Jacobs was following his own muse and taking the Perry Ellis label far from its whimsical, WASPy-chic roots. Although he shares with Ellis an irreverent, playful, young approach to fashion, Jacobs is wilder, more daring, more a mirror of what’s cooking in the streets than a reflection of some genteel, Ivy League ideal. Ellis took inspiration from the nostalgic movie score of “Chariots of Fire”; Jacobs percolates to the beat of Pearl Jam and Nirvana.
“I wanted to visually translate the clash and noise of the music into pattern and color,” Jacobs explains. “But I never called it ‘grunge.’ I hate labels. I don’t like the idea of putting things in a niche.”
Several store buyers and fashion critics were put off by the jumble of designs Jacobs sent spinning down the runway.
The collection’s “a bummer,” sniped a retailer to Women’s Wear Daily. “Grunge in general is not that appealing. The concern is that the look is for a very young customer who perhaps is not interested in spending that kind of money.” (A long silk floral dress is $750; a pastel leather jacket, $900; a cropped top, $250.)
“You can’t change fashion by parading 25 navy suits down the runway,” scoffs Wintour. “Marc isn’t about investment dressing. Yet when you go to the showroom and see the clothes, you realize they’re eminently wearable.”
Jacobs doesn’t design with sales potential in mind. “You never know what’s going to sell,” he says with a shrug. “Last season I did a huge leopard taffeta skirt with a little white pique vest and a black Spencer jacket. I never though it would sell because it was kind of funky and the skirt was $4,000. Well, guess what? It’s one of our best-selling pieces ever. Blaine Trump was photographed in it and Candice Bergen is wearing it on ‘Murphy Brown.’ ”
He pauses to light another cigarette. “I hate to think of fashion as a commodity,” he says. “It’s more something you respond to from your heart.”
A native of Manhattan’s Upper West Side whose parents were talent agents for the William Morris agency, Jacobs wanted to be a designer since grammar school. His baby-sitter showed him how to embroider his jeans while his grandmother Helen indulged his passion for clothes and taught him to knit.
“She was probably the biggest influence on my life,” Jacobs says softly, reminiscing about his grandmother who died shortly before he joined Perry Ellis. “She encouraged me and supported me and was very, very proud of me. She’d carry around press clippings and show them to the butcher, the beautician, the checkout girl at Food City.”
Jacobs lived with his grandmother while he attended the High School of Art and Design. Family relations were--and are--strained. “I really don’t get along very well with my family,” admits the designer, who rarely sees his mother and his younger brother and sister. (His father died when he was 7.)
“To me, it’s not a sad situation. It’s just that we all lead different lives and don’t have any interest in what the other is doing.”
At 15, Jacobs talked his way into an after-school job at the trendy Upper West Side Charivari boutique. It was here that he happened to meet his idol, Perry Ellis.
“He embodied cool to me,” Jacobs says. “He had long hair, he didn’t wear a suit and tie and he made funky clothes that were a big success. He gave me a lot of hope.”
On Ellis’ advice, Jacobs later enrolled at Parsons School of Design where he distinguished himself as a talented workaholic who presciently won the Perry Ellis Golden Thimble award in 1984.
After Parsons, his career saga reads like something out of the “Perils of Pauline.” With partner Robert Duffy (who is now president of Perry Ellis Sportswear), Jacobs was constantly going in and out of business, scrambling to find financial backing while coping with such disasters as a robbery the week before a collection and a fire that destroyed his new showroom.
When the House of Ellis, which had taken a fashion nose dive after its founder died of AIDS in 1986, made Jacobs an offer in 1988, he couldn’t refuse--even if it meant relinquishing his name on the label.
“It doesn’t bother me at all,” Jacobs says. “As long as I’m designing clothes, I’m happy.”
He took over the couture collection division, a tiny portion of the conglomerate, but the golden engine that fuels the publicity machine that sparks sales of licensed items such as sheets and eyeglasses. (Eighteen months ago, the less expensive Portfolio line was resurrected and is also overseen by Jacobs.)
“Jacobs is a great self-promoter,” says Alan Millstein, publisher of the Fashion Network Report. “If the goal was to regenerate the hype machine, then he’s done it.”
When Jacobs made a personal appearance at Bloomingdale’s last month, he was mobbed by throngs of eager fans, according to Kal Ruttenstein, senior vice president for fashion direction. “We were surprised--and delighted,” says Ruttenstein, adding that the store plans to showcase the designer with a major ad campaign in February. “Perry was a tough act to follow, but Marc has brought back the excitement.”
Adds Gabe Doppelt, editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle: “Marc’s on a roll. He’s way, way up there now.”
You’d think that such glowing tributes would provide a warm security blanket for Jacobs, a self-confessed worrywart. Forget it.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” he sighs. “Even though I’m not as worried about what other people think, I’m still insecure. I’ll say, ‘Who cares if people don’t like red, I’m doing red.’ But then I’ll think, ‘Hmmm . . . Do I really want to do red? Maybe I should do blue.’ ”
Jacobs is interrupted by an assistant who reminds him he is due downtown at a fashion shoot for Paris Vogue in 15 minutes.
“Don’t get me wrong. I love this business more than anything I can imagine,” he insists, as he zips into a red parka and grabs a shopping bag from the door. “But I don’t think of fashion as something precious . At the end of the day, it’s all just clothes.”
