The Deep Shallowness of Marc Jacobs

In a way, Marc Jacobs is what made this scene possible. It is Jacobs, with bipolar tastes for high fashion (Louis Vuitton) and low celebrity (Lil' Kim), who helped popularize the current enthusiasm for perversity and art, overt cuteness (teddy bears!) combined with classic cool (Sonic Youth). Like West and Murakami, Jacobs has a pop artist's hunger to be adored by the right people, and by all the people at the same time — a desire for the kind of fame that is widely in conflict, and tends to foster personal insecurity.

Tonight, this modern sensibility is being celebrated. Midway through his fifth decade, Jacobs has become the rare designer whose aesthetic transcends the clothes he produces, whose name is known to the masses, is endlessly mythologized in the media and whose reach extends far beyond a label. Jacobs no longer dresses people for the world; he helps create the world itself.

"This is what's happening in fashion in America right now — all the kids look so animated and weird," Jacobs pronounces, referring to the museum crowd. Pausing, he adds a Warholian thought: "I feel like everyone should have a black outline drawn around them, like a cartoon."

Earlier this decade, Jacobs came to prominence for essentially mainstreaming the trust-fund chic of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for making androgynous girls in ballet flats and bespectacled boys in tucked-in shirts sexy, for mainstreaming prissy looks like Chloë Sevigny's. Now the head of a multibillion-dollar business that spans nearly all major fashion markets, with his own label and as the chief designer of Louis Vuitton, he is considered the only American fashion designer who matters, with Calvin, Ralph and Donna checked out. Sofia Coppola has long been his muse, and other Marco-lettes include Courtney Love and Winona Ryder, who famously shoplifted his clothes from Saks. "I love fallen angels," he has said. "There are certain girls who make mistakes, and I just love that. I love the strength to move forward. It's very hard to be someone publicly and then to be human and honest at the same time. It's a dark angel, not dark like an evil spirit, but a melancholy, broken soul. It's a good thing."

In the past couple of years, Jacobs has undergone a shocking physical transformation from a pudgy, Rufus Wainwright-loving nerd to a trim Chelsea boy patterned with 31 tattoos, in part because of his notions about where the culture is today (a midlife crisis might also have come into play). Surfaces are all that matter, and privacy doesn't exist. "Young people want to be exposed, and the idea of nobody being interested in your personal life is the worst horror," says Jacobs. "Whether they are Cameron Diaz or not, they want everything they do to feel as important as when you see a celebrity with a cup of Starbucks." The same could be said for Jacobs. "I'm very interested in Marc and his evolution," says Stefano Tonchi, style editor at The New York Times. "Going from that kind of shyness to Marc Jacobs the persona. I think Marc could talk about Marc Jacobs in the third person."