As far as designers go, Marc Jacobs is pretty open about his private life. He’s been vocal about his struggles with addiction, weight, his love life and we’ve all seen his affinity for wearing women’s clothes. While the candid designer may not publicly shy away from the controversial, here are 10 things you may not have known about one of the biggest names in fashion.
- He encourages men to experiment with makeup. “I believe that anything can be for men or women. I mean, I’ve worn a lace dress before! So we decided that three of the [beauty] products were unisex — the lip balm, the brow mousse, and the Remedy concealer,” Jacobs told The Cut at the launch of his namesake makeup line. “I always loved that image of a girl putting toenail polish on a guy — her boyfriend, or something like that. Or a guy waking up in the morning and reaching over and putting on his girlfriend’s shirt.”
- The designer was considering taking over for Galliano after Galliano was fired from Christian Dior, but in the end Jacobs decided against it. “I think it would be a difficult place to work. I was flattered, but I really wanted to stay with my team. My psychiatrist asked me how this is going to improve my life and I said, ‘It’s not.'” He insists that while it was very flattering, it was months of psychodrama and it was mutually agreed upon that Jacobs would be better suited for Louis Vuitton.
- Jacobs doesn’t see much potential in the current crop of young designers, telling British Vogue, “I look at young fashion and it seems like it’s all the same — the idea of what is edgy or cool. It’s style with no substance; it doesn’t really seem born of anything. I don’t see the rebellion or edge in it. It just looks like a cliche: salad oil in the hair, Frankenstein shoes and the trappings of punk and all these other things.” This comment was thought to be directed at Alexander Wang in particular.
- The designer is consistent about his morning ritual. “I wake up at 7 a.m. I shower, shave, eat breakfast, and have a double espresso, a cigarette, vitamins, and supplements,” he explained. “I wear a kilt with a black or white shirt every day. I always eat 50 grams of oatmeal for breakfast; two chicken breasts for lunch; and drink juice, like wheatgrass.”
- Unlike so many other top designers, Jacobs admittedly loves attention. “I love attention, I’m very honest about it … [but] if I wanna wear a pink dress or a lace dress or a kilt of whatever, it’s like I’m not solely doing it for attention, I’m doing it first for myself because it gives me pleasure … there’s probably other reasons for it at that moment but I quite like getting dressed up, I feel like I’ve come to this point where I sort of feel like, I need to be able to relate to the joy and that ritual of going shopping and finding something to wear and then wearing it, like being connected to that makes me sort of better as a designer, it’s sort of like practicing what you preach in a way.”
- “I went on Grindr a couple of times. Well actually, with Harry [Louis, Jacobs’ ex-boyfriend and porn star] he was like, ‘Let’s do a profile on Grindr.’ And I did, and I met a couple people,” the designer candidly revealed.
- The designer had a hard time looking at the Louis Vuitton collections after his departure. “I think I got pretty down and depressed, but I love what Nicolas [Ghesquière] does. I really admire him and I have really great respect for him. I think they wanted a change, and I think the change they made is really good. It would be worse if somebody was doing a similar thing to me. But Nicolas does his thing, and I think it looks good and I get it. So I don’t have any problem with it.”
- Jacobs recently joined Instagram. It was only a little over a month ago that the designer said he was “so appalled by the whole social media thing.”
- You won’t be seeing Jacobs in any more movies. After taking a role as a porn baron in the film Disconnect, the designer told the Telegraph that he’s over acting. “I never wanted to be an actor. A friend of mine was directing this film and he asked me to read the part and I said ‘If I’m in New York and I can do it and my schedule will allow…’ I mean I did it and I was quite excited when I saw the trailer I have to admit because it all of a sudden felt very real but being out in Yonkers in the freezing cold like from 4pm to 9am in the morning, repeating the same lines over and over again… I would not wanna be an actor. I told him: ‘This is the first, and last film, ever.’ It’s not that there aren’t tedious moments in the life of a fashion designer but I wouldn’t trade them for the tedious moments for the life of an actor that’s for sure; I’m very happy with what I do.”
- Jacobs loves his tattoos. His SpongeBob one stands out in particular. “I just worked with Richard Prince on the collaboration for Louis Vuitton and Richard has done a series of paintings of SpongeBob. He had brought up in our conversation how he saw the artistic value of SpongeBob as the cartoon and I kind of liked it, so I did it, and now I get sent all these SpongeBob things from Nickelodeon and from the creator of SpongeBob. It’s funny.”
