aterrier

From the Bark Jacobs dog line

Marc Jacobs is the most influential creative voice in luxury fashion today. As creative director of Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury goods company, Jacobs oversees the studio that in the last decade has produced sumptuous and witty versions of the classic Vuitton monogram handbag – like the denim jacquard one trimmed in chincilla – that have sold by the millions. Yet Jacobs sees what he does at Vuitton as the antithesis of luxury today. “The way I define luxury isn’t by fabric or riber or the amount of gold bits hanging from it,” Jacobs says, sitting in his Paris office, sucking on his umpteenth cigarette of the day as his bull terrier Alfred gnaws on a soup bone. “That’s an old definition. For me, luxury is about pleasing yourself, not dressing for other people.”

Dana Thomas. Deluxe.

Marc Jacobs and his bull terriers

And at the time it was a very different set of circumstances here at Vuitton. I basically broke the rules. I was told point-blank that I couldn’t change the canvas or do anything to it. And I got fed up with doing what I thought would please the head of communications. I got tired of playing by the rules. And I thought, The only time I’ve ever made a difference, and the only time anything ever changes, is really when you’re respectful and disrespectful at the same time. Just as I’d been fired for the grunge collection I did at Perry Ellis, I thought, Whoa, you know, this is what I think we should be doing, and we’re going to send it out anyway . . .
There was a different president here at Vuitton, and a different head of communications. But the press responded so well, and there was such fervor for these bags. They were knocked off immediately. So I forced the company into getting behind something that they didn’t want me to do in the beginning. It was the public that really said, “This is what we wanna see. This is what makes an old thing that our mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers and great-grandparents carried into something that we actually want now.” And so, there was a lesson in this for me. Not that I really needed to learn it, because it was doing what I instinctively wanted to do.

Interview Magazine. June 2008. Marc Jacobs talks to Glenn O’Brien