“Who Is Marc Jacobs?”

His fear is at odds with his reputation for effortlessly setting trends, yet his reputation belies his real talent: setting a trend on its head. In 1992 he showed his infamous “grunge collection” for Perry Ellis, perennially cited as the reason he was fired four months later and, since being fired made him sound like a rebel, as a groundbreaking moment in fashion. “I had no idea I’d be fired,” Marc tells me. He laughs. “I’d never had any idea I’d be fired. But it’s still my favorite collection, because it marked a time when I went with my instincts against instructions, and I turned out to be right. It came out of a genuine feeling for what I saw on the streets and all around me.” Indeed, grunge was already everywhere, from the streets to the malls to the collections of two other New York designers that very same season, but only Marc’s dream of the zeitgeist was so lucid, so precisely appropriated from what he saw, that the zeitgeist came to look like his creation. By taking $2 flannels from St. Marks Place and copying them in silk — a trick akin to his parents’ switching a “c” for “k” in his name — Marc made the familiar uncommon.

In this week’s T, Sarah Nicole Prickett profiles Marc Jacobs, and it is…perfect. Marc Jacobs is such a specific kind of American fashion designer that is still so, so rare, both in terms of design sensibility and personality: his clothes are strange, and unexpected, and he has always embraced the perpetual motion machine that is ready-to-wear fashion with enthusiasm and a sense of humor. Sarah’s profile is an incredible description of Marc Jacobs, the brand, the Marc Jacobs customer, and Marc Jacobs, the man, as he prepares his company to go public. Read it!!