Marc Jacobs was only the first of Louis Vuitton's many marketable creative leads — his successors, Kim Jones, Virgil Abloh, and Pharrell are equally saleable titans — but he remains the king, the original, the blueprint. No one out Marc-ets the Jacobs.
But I don't merely mean that Jacobs, who left LV in 2013 to focus on his eponymous brand, solely makes moolah.
I mean, he does, clearly, but Jacobs is more. He's incredibly adept at straddling the worlds of commercial and conceptual fashion, balancing fashion's impossible tightrope. He's a designers' designer but also everyone's designer.
Even putting massively popular sub-label Heaven aside, the name Marc Jacobs is itself indicative of a cultural and critical juggernaut.
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Jacobs' runway shows are one of the rare fashion spectacles that also satisfy a broader audience, sort of like those immersive Van Gogh exhibits. That's not a diss: his fashion shows blow up the authentic artistry behind Jacobs' mass appeal to XXXL scale, tangible manifesting his inarguable brilliance.
In fact, I'd argue that perhaps more capably than most of his peers, Jacobs has perfected the art of packaging fantasy. Not only that, but he sells it to the olds, the youngs, and everyone in between.
It wasn't always this way.
After sliding down from his peak at Louis Vuitton, Jacobs' solo career carried on swimmingly for a while. But, eventually, the magic faded and the diffusion lines, while profitable, wound up so diluted that they gave way to self-parody.
By the late 2010s, Jacobs' career had dipped, as documented via in media res profiles.
But he clawed his way back fashion-first, literally. It was Jacobs' reborn and suddenly vital runway shows that kicked open the door to his current domination.
