The Great Fashion Designers (45 page)

By the early 1990s, the designer had already achieved an exceptional status, paradoxically fuelled by his reluctance to meet the fashion media, let alone give interviews. Innate shyness was certainly one reason for this. However, he also preferred people to look at his clothes rather than him. A statement from Maison Margiela said: ‘The withdrawal of a designer's profile creates a space that the garments may fill.' Back in March 1993 he briefly relented and invited a handful of journalists (including Roger Tredre) to his atelier on the boulevard Saint-Denis. Wearing his trademark navy blue peaked cap with black jeans and a black T-shirt, he explained why he was so media shy: ‘I wanted to express myself through the clothes, and consolidate in that way.' The veil of secrecy was reimposed shortly afterwards, with interviews conducted by fax or email with the team rather than with Margiela the individual. The first Margiela label, a scrap of muslin inscribed with no name, no words, was in itself a statement questioning the modern designer system. From 1997, Margiela introduced a series of labels differentiated only by numbers.

Margiela has often preferred to present his clothes on real people rather than models. In an interview with
The Independent
newspaper in 1999, he and
his team commented: ‘It remains … important for us that someone finds their way of dressing as opposed to a way of dressing as prescribed by anyone else or an overriding trend.' All of the house's collections are identified with a number system, from 0 to 22. At the top of the scale of numbers in price terms is number 4, a line of classic Margiela pieces. Number 1 is the fashion show collection, which is shown in Paris. Margiela's arrival at Hermès in 1998 shocked both insiders and outsiders at the venerable French house. Hermès boss Jean-Louis Dumas had become aware of Margiela's work through his daughter, an actress, who had modelled for the designer. Dumas invited him to lunch at his home in early 1997 and considered him ‘a good rider for a good horse,' using equine terminology in keeping with the house's tradition. His first show was a low-key kind of triumph, the Margiela iconoclasm tempered by his new role. The versatility of the clothing was a key note, including a coat that could be turned into a cape and seamless sweaters that could be worn inside out.

Writer Rebecca Mead, in a profile for
The New Yorker
, called them ‘quietly subversive. Stripped of all ostentation, they were to be valued from the inside, even if the wearer risked drabness.' In 2003 Margiela was succeeded at Hermès by his onetime mentor, Jean Paul Gaultier.

Margiela's long-time uncompromising approach did not translate into overnight business success. Development was slow and often difficult. His first store did not open until the year 2000, in Tokyo. Most of his stores were in hard-to-find locations with fascia that were only intelligible to the insider. Financial pressures recurred, hindering the development of the house. By 2002, the company found a sympathetic investor and kindred spirit in Renzo Rosso, owner of Diesel, Italy's innovative denim brand. Rosso became a majority shareholder and replaced Jenny Meirens as president, helping to bankroll retail openings in key fashion cities, including London and New York. But Margiela and Meirens continued to run the business and make the creative decisions. ‘I love this man,' Rosso said, promising a hands-off approach. ‘This is not an acquisition. I'm not buying a fashion company like other groups have done. I'm investing in Margiela so two friends can work together to grow a very special brand.'

The deal was a pivotal moment for Margiela's business. After a low-key start to the new relationship, a period marked by heavy investment in shops and production, sales shot up in 2007 by 50 per cent to 60 million euros, driven by the designer's popularity in Japan. Margiela moved into new territory, launching both a fragrance and jewellery. A shop was opened on Via Spiga, Milan's celebrated fashion street. A new wave of professionalism swept through the company. That the business changed dramatically in character is not in doubt. Some voices suggested that Margiela was ‘selling out', a charge rejected by Giovanni Pungetti, Margiela's chief executive, in an interview in 2008. ‘The brand is exactly the same. It's very, very close to what we bought six years ago.'

In fact, Margiela has become part of a larger experiment by Renzo Rosso to create an alternative kind of luxury fashion group for the twenty-first century. Margiela, together with designers Viktor & Rolf, who are also part of Rosso's Only The Brave group, represents a wave that is unashamedly conceptual and serious minded. Rosso has said: ‘My dream is to represent a fresh, modern group for the future—I don't look for establishment designers but someone with important creativity.' In 2008, Margiela's twentieth year in business, rumours circulated that the partnership was in trouble and that Margiela himself was considering retiring. But it was anniversary nonsense, put in its place by an exhibition held in Antwerp, titled simply Maison Martin Margiela, and by the energy of his spring/summer 2009 show, which featured models with their faces shrouded with stocking masks and tumbling hair. By early 2009, the house was exploring new opportunities in home decoration and hotel design.

As for the elusive Margiela himself, his lasting influence as a designer can be observed everywhere, including the denim sector, where the recycling and deconstruction of styles are well-established. A new generation of young designers, led most notably by Nicolas Ghesquière, has also drawn inspiration from his work. In the twenty-first century,
when environmental issues of sustainability lend extra fuel to the vintage boom, Margiela may come to be seen as a true pioneer of a new way forward for fashion.

Further reading:
Academic Rebecca Arnold makes interesting observations in
Fashion, Desire and Anxiety
(2001). Margiela was well profiled in ‘The Crazy Professor' (1998) by Rebecca Mead for
The New Yorker. WWD
has reported his career thoroughly, not least through the writing of Paris editor Miles Socha. ‘Art versus Commerce: Can Margiela Expand Without Selling Out?' (2 May 2008) explores the challenges for Margiela in recent years.

If you want to feel the pulse of modern fashion, then Marc Jacobs is invariably the best designer to turn to. Although his career has had its fair number of fashion missteps, no other designer has so consistently influenced the broader clothing market in the modern era, a period when fashion moves with oft bewildering speed from one extreme to another. To his critics, the American designer's collections are dominated by too many pastiches of previous periods, particularly the 1970s, a decade to which he has returned time and time again. To his fans, including most fashion editors and many fashion industry professionals, he is the endlessly inventive New Yorker who has injected a fresh street-inspired spirit into designer fashion. Anna Wintour, editor of American
Vogue
and a long-time admirer, highlights his knack for ‘making the conservative seem cool … and making the cool seem conservative.'

In a fashion world more competitive than ever before, Marc Jacobs is one of a very small group of designers to have survived the buffetings of building a label from scratch. He has established a status likely to ensure his longevity—with the potential to match American names such as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. For that, the patronage of Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, the world's largest luxury conglomerate, has been critical. Although his celebrated grunge collection of 1993 established him as a designer with a street touch, the primary note of most of his work in the first decade of the twenty-first century has been a simple sense of elegance. Consider his collection of autumn/winter 2007, an homage to the Yves Saint Laurent of the 1970s, thoroughly grown-up and (like all of his clothes) eminently wearable. Marc Jacobs may not have created any striking new design innovations or silhouettes, but he has enthusiastically responded to the fast turnover of trends in the modern period and is the designer of his generation most copied by the international chain stores. Although considered by many of his supporters to be the ultimate downtown designer, in truth Marc Jacobs is uptown by origin, growing up in his grandmother's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Perhaps it is the fusion of uptown sophistication mixed with downtown youthful energy and street vibe that best explains his attraction to a wide cross-section of customers.

The full story of Jacobs's childhood is shrouded in some mystery, but the bare facts are that his father, who worked at the William Morris talent agency, died when he was only seven; his mother remarried several times and spent time in various hospitals. The young Jacobs was brought up by his grandmother rather than his mother. Materially, he was comfortably off, although one can only guess at the psychological impact of losing a parent so young. His grandmother took him to New York department store Bergdorf Goodman and encouraged him in his interest in fashion. ‘One big thing she taught me was that quality was more important than quantity,' Jacobs recalled many years later. Jacobs grew up fast, realising at an early age that he was gay, checking out copies of
Playgirl
magazine, but has spoken of his insecurity as a young man. At the age of just fifteen, his uncle, who was president of the same agency where Jacobs's father had worked, arranged work experience for him in the company's mail room. One of the agents, covering music, secured him guest-list entry to gigs: ‘I loved anything
garagey rough—the Speedies, the Screams or Gang of Four,' he recalled decades later in an interview with
Rolling Stone
. ‘I would get turned on by a band's look first, and once I did, I found I actually liked the music.' This love of music has remained a constant through his career.

He enrolled in the High School of Art and Design and worked at the fashionable New York boutique Charivari, encouraged by buyer Barbara Weiser who took him (aged just twenty) with her on a tour to Japan. The story goes that the designer Perry Ellis walked into Charivari one day, whereupon Jacobs asked him for career advice. Go to Parsons, said Ellis, referring to New York's Parsons School of Design, the preeminent fashion design college in America. At Parsons, Jacobs made an exceptional impact, creating a student collection in 1984 of sweaters handmade by his grandmother and inspired by the British artist, Bridget Riley. They won him two prestigious Gold Thimble Awards. Among the guests at the awards event was Robert Duffy, a young and ambitious businessman, who swiftly became Jacobs's long-term business partner, sticking with him and guiding him through a decade of see-saw swings in fortune. Duffy, who worked for Reuben Thomas, a Seventh Avenue dress company, persuaded his boss to launch a new collection, named Sketchbook, designed by Jacobs. The first collection, for spring 1985, included spectacularly large hand-knitted sweaters with bright pink smiley faces. From the very beginning, Jacobs has been a designer who believes in an upbeat smiley message for a young generation.

Jacobs's career trajectory in the late 1980s went through a series of twists and turns. Dropped by Reuben Thomas, he worked briefly with Canadian clothing magnate Jack Atkins, followed by a company called Epoch-3 and then Kashiyama-USA. His breakthrough came in 1988 when he was appointed vice-president of design at Perry Ellis (the designer had died in 1986), with his business partner Robert Duffy as president. This was a remarkable achievement for a designer who was only twenty-five, sparking a storm of media interest and gossip on Seventh Avenue. For five years, Jacobs's creative progress at Perry Ellis was scrutinised, analysed and discussed in merciless detail. Already, the Jacobs's signature—youthful, playful, ironic, accessible—was apparent. His steady creative evolution reached a peak with his spring 1993 collection, the so-called grunge collection, inspired by the street and music scene in Seattle, Washington, and the music of Sonic Youth. Ironically, that scene was defiantly anti-fashion, favouring vintage store clothes and combining styles and influences in a deliberately haphazard manner. Jacobs's catwalk take on this Seattle style caused a maelstrom of media excitement, not all of it complimentary. It was an important moment for high fashion, prompting a reassessment of what designer fashion could mean. Although many designers before Jacobs, most notably Jean Paul Gaultier, had plundered the energy of the street and music scene, few did so with the assurance of Jacobs. Looking back more than a decade later, he said: ‘It was my vision and interpretation of street clothes, with the imperfection that I've always loved. It was also a reflection of the attitude of young people towards fashion.'

However, the response from the designer's bosses at Perry Ellis, who had shown courage in approving his appointment in the first place, was unremittingly negative. They considered the grunge collection a step too far, believing it trampled on the Perry Ellis signature and would spell commercial disaster. Jacobs and Duffy were summarily fired. It was a shock, but Jacobs bounced back within three seasons, showing on a shoestring budget in a downtown loft, with star models lending support and the entire New York industry begging for a ticket. Jacobs moved on to another plane in 1997, when Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, signed him as creative director to develop ready-to-wear for Louis Vuitton, the jewel in the crown of his luxury group. The challenge for Jacobs was to develop a signature style for Vuitton, which was known almost exclusively as a luxury luggage and accessories brand. ‘My designs are more eclectic, romantic and quite small-scale,' he acknowledged to
WWD
. ‘Louis Vuitton is an international name … It has to be simple, clean and luxurious. I think it should look contemporary, but not trendy. It's kind of overwhelming to be in a position where nothing has been done, so you start to set your own rules.'