A Very Good Marc Jacobs Interview
credit: Tina Tyrell / IMG Lens
Marc Jacobs and his husband Charly Defrancesco are renting a 1959 ranch-style house in the New York City commuter belt that looks like it could be the set of a Todd Haynes film starring Julianne Moore. It’s a 15-minute drive to their permanent residence, a historic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed waterfront property on the northern tip of Manursing Island, but the longest way around is the shortest way home: their place, where they got married last spring and resided last summer, is still being restored. For now, they are occupying the rental, which suits Jacobs, the 57-year-old native New Yorker who lately favors housewife drag and often suspects he is living a movie version of life. The designer’s worldview holds that memories are sortable by genre, the present can be lent enchantment, and when the unexpected happens, he can chalk it up to missing revision marks on his copy of the script. Some of his closest friends are directors, including Sofia Coppola and Lana Wachowski (who calls him Sissy, short for Sisyphus; the two have matching tattoos based on the myth). The rub is that Jacobs still feels like he has to audition.
“I think it's maybe habitual,” he says, “when someone impresses me or when I want to make an impression, I start to try to change myself to be the person I think they want me to be. And I don't want to do that, but it's that Zelig trigger that goes off: become what you imagine they want and you'll be safe, they'll like you. That part of me never dies. And in fact, I think it's probably a little bit more amplified when it's somebody I really care about. I'm afraid of losing them, so I should curtail my behavior or make sure my conversation is interesting or that I'm paying attention. It's a lot of work for me to just be myself and not the person that I think they want.”
While he was quarantined in his Mercer suite, spending the majority of his time safest alone, Jacobs began to feel like his younger self again. He watched the documentary Martin Margiela: In His Own Words and identified with the reclusive Belgian’s childhood reveries. The two designers share a birthday; each learned to sew from their grandmothers. The Leuven-born couturier grew up watching his mother sell wigs out of his father’s salon, whereas the Manhattanite Jacobs saw his parents off to work at William Morris. The latter’s daydreams took wing after his father’s death from ulcerative colitis and his mother’s progression into bipolar disorder. As the eldest of his family, Jacobs drifted unnaturally into the role of caretaker for his two younger siblings. “My mother was in and out of institutions. She remarried very quickly after my dad died and we had this horrible stepfather. We went through a few divorces, marriages,” Jacobs says. “The good that came out of that was I was able to create an alternate reality.”
