Excerpts from a New York Times Style Magazine online article (February 10, 2020)

“People want newness, and they want it from a new person. I understand that I’m not the 25-year-old who was given this incredible job at Perry Ellis, or who created the grunge collection, or who was the bad boy of the 1990s,” he said. “I am a 56-year-old man who still has the privilege of doing a collection.” But his voice was calm as he said this, full of acceptance and experience.

“THE DRIVING FORCE in my life is fear,” Marc Jacobs said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQko6umk9Y0

IT WAS A bright December afternoon, a week or so before Christmas, when Jacobs and I met for the last time. I waited in the reception area of his atelier next to a sculpture of Neville, Jacobs’s bull terrier, whom I had recently begun following on Instagram (he has over 200,000 followers). I thought I could finally understand why Jacobs commands such devotion from those around him. He exudes a precariousness that is deeply affecting to anyone even dimly aware of the mysterious connection between creativity and tragedy. If he attracts protectors, it is because one cannot speak at any length to him without feeling that, as Oscar Wilde wrote about his titular character in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “a note of doom runs like a purple thread” through “the gold cloth” of his talent.

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