Book Marc Jacobs
Fashion's great storyteller talks Bret Easton Ellis, AI and Daisy Buchanan.
Asking important intellectual questions like “how is Jackie Collins like George Eliot” or putting together a roundup of literature’s most potent hats offers plenty of fun week-to-week. But all due respect to deceased Lit Ladies and fictional accessories, their thrill factor pales next to a conversation with one of the culture’s most compelling creative geniuses, Marc Jacobs.
A designer of brilliant fashion, Marc is also an extraordinary storyteller who has spun decades of intriguing sartorial narratives, variously feisty, melancholy, wacky, chic, undone and over-the-top, all packed with emotion and delivered with remarkable skill and attention to detail. Despite claiming “a slight fear of the digital future,” he has also mastered an additional narrative outlet, Instagram, where his posts are the stuff of social media legend. Based on his recent activity chronicling his reading adventures, one could even call him a bookworm.
Full disclosure: I worked retail at Marc Jacobs for many happy years. But my fandom began before and thrives past that employment. Last week, Marc graciously gave up one of his last summer afternoons for a Zoom conversation with me about all things creative and literary, from the far-flung inspirations behind some of his favorite shows to AI to that most exquisite of fictional fashionistas – Daisy Buchanan. (Turns out, we’ve both codified our devotion. This humble newsletter is named for one of Gatsby’s most famous scenes. Far more globally and glamorously, Marc named the fragrance Daisy after his dog Daisy who was named after Daisy B.)
Whether christening a best-selling fragrance, cribbing book recommendations from discerning friends (Sofia Coppola, Collier Schorr), or ruminating on the future of Bookmarc (his brand’s long-standing, intimate West Village book outpost), Marc approaches literature with the same wit, care, artistic spirit and dash of provocation that enliven his fashion. Then again, what else to expect from someone who long ago spiced up a grammar-school reading assignment with some D.H. Lawrence?
Below, just in time for New York Fashion Week, part one of my conversation with Book Marc Jacobs, with part two to follow on Wednesday.
Gráinne Belluomo: Marc, thank you so much for having this conversation with me! I’m excited to talk to you about books and fashion and reading. I noticed on your Instagram that you’ve been reading a ton of Bret Easton Ellis.
Marc Jacobs: Yes. I’ve gone back. It started because a friend, Sofia Coppola, recommended The Shards, the new Bret Easton Ellis book. I was quite surprised because Sofia has very discerning tastes and interests. I love his writing, so I started reading it, and then Charly [Defrancesco], my husband, started reading it. And then my friend Nora [Burns], who I have this kind of little book club with, started reading it. So we were all reading it and loving it. I enjoyed it so much that I thought, I’m going to go back and reread some of those old ones like Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho. He paints such a perfect picture of that time. He’s a great writer, and that’s what a great writer does – they create this world and make these characters really come to life in this world. Because that was a time and a world that I know so well, it is taking me back. It’s made me nostalgic a little bit. I like it.
GB: It all started with Sofia recommending The Shards.
MJ: Yes. I was kind of shocked. As I read it, I was like, “I can’t believe Sofia would get through this book.” Because it’s pretty shocking in its descriptions of these murders and the sex, the gay sex, all that stuff. I just thought, like, “this seems a little out there for Sofia.”
GB: Selfishly, as someone who likes his work and loves hers, I’d love to see her take on a Bret Easton Ellis adaptation.
MJ: I know! Wouldn’t that be amazing? I thought that, too – “Wow, I would love to see that in her hands.” But I wouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. I’m excited about her new movie [Priscilla].
GB: I can’t wait! Her movies are for me what a new Star Wars movie is for nerdy guys in their fifties – see it opening day, without fail.
MJ: You’re right. She has an audience that would rival that of Star Wars. I mean in, their own way.
GB: I read The Shards when it came out and it was kind of like getting together with an old friend that you hadn’t talked to in years. I think of Bret Easton Ellis as one of the great pop-culture pastiche writers. Glamorama, for example, is filled with pop culture details. You get such a sense of place.
MJ: I have a cameo in Glamorama. A small one.
GB: Really? I should remember that!
MJ: He writes about me being at this restaurant, the Marley, which is in the Louvre. When I first went to Vuitton, I used to eat at the Marley every day; it was kind of my watering hole. I never got to ask him, but I’ve always wondered if he had seen me. The fact that he placed me at that restaurant, was like, okay, so this is fiction and so much of what’s been written is made up. How could he place me there unless he or someone he knew did see me there?
GB: Fiction imitating fact! Another thing that runs through Ellis’s work is the profound sense of societal disillusionment his characters feel. I thought about that in light of something you must be sick to death of talking about – the AI show notes from the gutsy Fall collection you showed in June.
MJ: No, I’m not sick to death of talking about it. It’s just kind of funny.
GB: You used AI to write your show notes. Were you giving voice to a bit of Ellis-esque modern disillusionment?
MJ: I don’t have a very good relationship with things to do with the digital age. It may be why I’m so enchanted with that moment that Bret writes about in so many of those books. We weren’t taking pictures with cell phones then; there was no talk of AI; no Zoom meetings. It was just a different time. So, I have this perverse – a slight fear of the digital future, or the AI future. It’s also that I want to hold a book and turn pages. I’m old-school, and I’m going to hold onto my old-school values as long as I can.
Nick Newbold and I have always written the show notes together. [Newbold is Marc’s longtime assistant and sometime creative collaborator. In 2020, he released a photo book of Marc’s pandemic outfits for Idea Books.] They usually have nothing to do with the collection; they have to do with what I’m feeling or thinking at the moment. We’ve always put a lot of work and effort into it. It goes on for weeks, where I write down words and look at the definitions of those words, and think, and, in the few days before the show, it kind of comes together as to what the message is that we’re going to write out and print in the program. I always feel pretty good about them: “Okay, we’ve distilled all of these random thoughts – that are obviously not just random thoughts – into this little paragraph.”.
So this time, I had this kind of weird detachment. I was like, “I really don’t know what to say. I just don’t feel anything. This whole experience has been very different for me. There’s no one here who I’m working with on music; there’s no performance aspect of this presentation.” I just couldn’t get my head around any of it. I was like, “We’ve made some clothes. That’s all I really have to say.” And my shrink had said months ago, “You should try ChatGPT. I’m not suggesting that you’d be enchanted by this. Just fool around with it and see what you think.” And then – I’m going back and forth in time – I was joking with Nick about this, saying, “I really don’t know what to say; we’re not getting anywhere.” And then we were like, “Why don’t we just let ChatGPT write the show notes?” It had been this running joke and then, “Well, we don’t really have another idea, so let’s just do it.”
GB: It became a major statement.
MJ: What was funny was that it was kind of an “I give up” idea. In my mind, it was, “I give up; I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say anymore. Let’s just let this entity…”
GB: Do it.
MJ: Yes! And I don’t like to be in that place. I like to be enamored with all the feelings and emotions. So this felt like a throwaway. There was no real performance aspect to the show. There was no violinist [as at his Spring 2023 show]; there was no [major production element], and during rehearsal, I was like, “let’s just do the finale. Because it’s much more exciting than seeing these looks one-by-one. And I don’t know what to write. Let’s just let ChatGTP….” Then the reviews made a lot out of those choices. And I just kept thinking, “What? Really?” I felt like I was being praised for something that I [initially] felt was this total defeat.
GB: But what at first felt like defeat proved salient to the cultural moment, and was interpreted as a powerful narrative.
MJ: It’s always so interesting to learn from others about yourself and about them. When I was then able to read what people said and reflect on it and discuss it with certain friends of mine that I hold in high regard in terms of the way they think and the art that they make, they were like, “Marc, you just can’t not be disruptive. You’ve got to just get over the fact that this all felt like it was outside of you, that it was an accident that you had nothing to do with. These were your choices. They may not have been the choices you’ve made in other situations, in the way you’ve made those choices, but they were still ultimately your choices. And those choices told the story.” Just like what you’re saying.
GB: It made for a full, compelling story.
MJ: I mean, there are four people who write things that I read and I take to heart. There are a lot of people who write things that just don’t matter to me. Still, I am very affected, and it set in motion reflecting on some things through the eyes and words of somebody else. You think, “Maybe I need that part of the process. It’s clear for me that I do need the audience.” I mean, a selected version of the audience, but the audience, to kind of tell me what they see so that I can then say, “Aha, maybe that was part of it.” It’s an interesting process, and it doesn’t really end, you know?
GB: The constant creative struggle – you think you know what you’re saying, and then your audience, whoever that might be, clarifies it for you.
MJ: Because we do this for an audience. Some people say that they only do it for themselves, but…I don’t really believe that.
GB: I think most writers – certainly most novelists – write for an audience.
MJ: I was thinking of books I read in school. I’ve been making a list of everything I read as a kid. We had a class, I don’t remember what grade. It was called “Art in Literature.” One book, I think it was The Moon and Sixpence [by W. Somerset Maugham], is a novel inspired by Gaugin, with the premise of art for art’s sake, that he needed to paint. He went to a place where he could paint what he felt was beautiful, and the point of his painting was that he needed to paint. I remember discussing this notion of art for art’s sake, that the paintings could have burned, could have gone up in fire and flames and it didn’t matter because it was the act of painting subjects that he loved that was the important thing for him.
GB: That’s beautiful.
MJ: It is. But I think that typically, even if people paint because they need to paint, they also paint because there’s a sale or there’s a life after making the painting that’s…
GB: There’s a joy in display, even if you take the commerce element out of it.
MJ: Yes. And I also think the reaction – when people kind of meet art halfway, it doesn’t matter really what they get out of it. It matters that by meeting the work of the artist, that there’s an experience, whether you have this primitive connection to the work you’ve met or not. It’s kind of like two to tango. It’s complete by being seen.
GB: That makes sense to me. With literature, with film – a book is done when someone reads it, interacts with it. If you make a movie and it sits on the shelf for twenty years…
MJ: You’ve still made the movie, I suppose. I just got on this kick; I don’t even know how. Oh, yes, about art and literature, and this idea of putting work out and how it needs to be seen and it needs to be thought about. That’s what makes it complete, in my mind.
GB: About the list of books that you read in school. Are there any others that really stuck with you?
MJ: I was in elementary school and we were told to bring in a book of our choice to read. I remember being very rebellious about it. I thought it was an opportunity to be provocative. It was the Seventies, and there was a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover that had a very Seventies’ graphic of a woman and her breast, her naked breast, on the cover, a super-stylized, Seventies line drawing of a naked woman. I felt like, “this is what I’m going to bring to school to read.” I was told I had to have a note from my mother saying it was okay for me to be reading the book because of the content. I also had to make a brown-paper cover so that this drawing wasn’t on display. We learned how to make book covers out of grocery shopping bags. That’s always stuck in my head.
GB: Ever the provocateur, even in grammar school! It’s funny that you bring up Lady Chatterley. In preparing to talk to you, I went through a few of my favorite collections, including Vuitton Fall 2011. I found this fantastic quote from you: “I spend a good part of my life in hotels, and I like watching their secret lives, especially the ballet between call girls, mistresses and wives. It's interesting to see what the women wear the day after.” I thought about that in the context of, for lack of a better term, the great smutty writers of the 20th century, people like D.H. Lawrence and Anaïs Nin. Did their work impact your approach to that collection?
MJ: I’ve been stimulated by those kind of decadent, or slightly dirty, darker behaviors. It’s imagery that I find very provocative and inspiring. That idea of the mistress, or a femme fatale – it’s definitely inspired me. That season, with the caps, there was definitely the reference to The Night Porter. And I do have many firsthand experiences at Claridge’s Hotel with a bunch of us being very naughty. Again, it was that thing of seeing who would be leaving the hotel the next morning, who wasn’t really a guest. It was years of partying, for me, and seeing these kinds of scenes and then, of course, being drawn to them in movies, in books.
GB: There’s delight in something that’s a little decadent, a little outré. When you’re envisioning a collection, are there books that you’ve come back to at times?
MJ: The book that’s inspired me more than any book ever, and it’s my favorite story, is The Great Gatsby. There’s a combination of reasons. I read The Great Gatsby, I don’t know what age I was, but it wasn’t very far before The Great Gatsby with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford became a film. I had read the book and I just loved the story so much. And then this movie came out and I remember going to see it with my grandmother. We went to a movie theater in Times Square. I’d never seen anything like Mia Farrow in that movie – Daisy Buchanan. I don’t even have words to describe how in love I was with this Daisy Buchanan. I named my second bull terrier Daisy, after Daisy Buchanan. And then we named a fragrance Daisy, after Daisy who was named after Daisy.
GB: Perhaps the greatest fashion novel of all time. Certainly the greatest American fashion novel of all time.
MJ: I just love it.
GB: This newsletter is named for it – Tossing Shirts. To impress Daisy, Gatsby throws his shirts around.
MJ: Yes. Yes. Yes.
GB: And now Daisy has a major fragrance legacy.
MJ: All that because of Daisy Buchanan.
GB: Daisy Buchanan. And Mia Farrow. Credit where it’s due.
MJ: I can’t think of one without the other. The book painted such a beautiful picture of everything, but then that movie was just so stylish. It just doesn’t get better than that for me.
On Wednesday, Marc discusses Bookmarc (the store), Pilgrim shoes and whorehouse lampshades.
This is a true delight ❤️❤️