Marc Jacobs, 2005

Amy Larocca of New York Magazine wrote a quietly riveting article on Marc Jacobs in 2005 and I only stumbled upon it a few days ago. As is typical, I'm never interested in something immediately, and stashed it away in my left-of-the-screen-oriented menu bar for a rainy day. Obviously, the "rainy day" idiom is just that, but today it's pouring.

A few highlights:

On his clothes:

“It’s more psychological,” Jacobs says. “For people that don’t have any interest in the psychology of nuance, who need everything to be in their face, who don’t want to analyze . . . those aren’t the people I romanticize about dressing.”

“I don’t have any problem with what people refer to as sexy clothes,” Jacobs says. “I mean, everybody likes sex. The world would be a better place if people just engaged in sex and didn’t worry about it. But what I prefer is that even if someone feels hedonistic, they don’t look it. Curiosity about sex is much more interesting to me than domination. Like, Britney and Paris and Pamela might be someone’s definition of sexy, but they’re not mine. My clothes are not hot. Never. Never."

"I like romantic allusions to the past: what the babysitter wore, what the art teacher wore, what I wore during my experimental days in fashion when I was going to the Mudd Club and wanted to be a New Wave kid or a punk kid but was really a poseur. It’s the awkwardness of posing and feeling like I was in, but I never was in. Awkwardness gives me great comfort. I’ve never been cool, but I’ve felt cool. I’ve been in the cool place, but I wasn’t really cool—I was trying to pass for hip or cool. It’s the awkwardness that’s nice.”

“When I first moved here [Paris], my life was just like a frustrated version of what my life had been in New York,” Jacobs says. He didn’t (and still doesn’t) speak French. He didn’t like the food, the pace, the absence of multiethnic, all-hours takeout food. But, sober, he began to enjoy the city’s gentler rhythms: the quieter nightlife, the diminished options and temptations. Now his life is centered around two dogs and an apartment in a bougie corner of the 8th Arrondissement by the Champs de Mars, surrounded by families and diplomats and the odd tourist on his way to the Eiffel Tower. “I always get this certain anxiety when I’m in New York,” Jacobs says. “I see these billboards and Websites and movie openings and galleries and everyone’s like, ‘Have you seen Desperate Housewives? Have you seen The O.C.?’ I start hyperventilating. How can you stay on top of the art scene and what’s on TV, and read all those books? In New York, I just feel paralyzed by all that I’m missing. I feel stupid, uninformed. I don’t feel like that as much in Paris. It’s healthier for me.”

[Ed. Around this time in 2005, everyone should recall the worldwide proliferation of neon-tinted Louis Vuitton prints printed on white or black traditional bags. They were designed by someone arguably more creative than Jacobs' himself, Takashi Murakami, who recently collaborated with Kanye West.]

“It’s not like I can make the Murakami moment happen again,” he says. “It’s not like if I went to the beach for a week and thought about it, I could come back with an answer. There are moments where it’s like, Oh, God, everything’s okay right now, but if I don’t come up with something soon, how are they going to feel about me then? This is the root of my psychological problems. There’s an exercise that I learned in therapy to be present, to be open to new experiences and then let go of the results. That’s what’s worked for me in the past. Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me in the future."

“There are nights when I can’t sleep. I go into a fantasyland and tableau sort of thinking, like, Tonight would be the perfect night to say, ‘Honey, I’m really tired and worried about work. And tell me about your day. Do you think someone will read this and try to get in touch with me?” He looks hopeful. “If I read that about someone, I’d drop him a note.”

Well, my day was fine, Marc, what about you?