Excellingis the Marc of the man

Design star Marc Jacobs resigned from Louis Vuitton this month to focus on his namesake label. Rachel Marie Walsh looks back at his transformative tenure with the luxury fashion house.

Marc Jacobs once compared his relationship with LVMH Moët Hennessy boss Bernard Arnault to the bond between Babe the Pig and Farmer Hoggett. When Arnault suggested he resign as artistic director of Louis Vuitton, the group’s major profit and revenue contributor, to focus on Marc Jacobs International, he certainly listened. He has already been replaced by Nicolas Ghesquière, late of Balenciaga. This is not a sad split. Marc Jacobs left to prepare for the public offering of his eponymous company, itself majority-owned by LVMH. Over sixteen years, he spurred Louis Vuitton’s transformation from fusty luggage company to the world’s most valuable luxury brand. Louis Vuitton’s Paris Fashion Week show this month was indulgent, replete with references to Jacobs’s “greatest hits” at the house. It was a sentimental ending to the tale of a very special American in Paris.

Jacobs began his career remarkably early, once joking with Vogue that “I was 25 when I was 12.” At 13, the New Yorker got a job folding clothes at Charivari, a chic boutique frequented by the coolest designers of the day. One such was Perry Ellis, a luxury sportswear designer who embodied hip for the teenager. Ellis encouraged him to enrol at the prestigious Parsons School of Design after high school. His graduate collection of Op-Art sweaters charmed clothing manufacturing executive Robert Duffy, with whom he founded his namesake label in 1984. Before Perry Ellis died in 1986, he expressed a desire for the pair to join his label.