Jacobs with diamonds on his “lobes lobes.”Photo: Martin Schoeller /GQ
Considering his unrelenting ubiquity, we didn’t really think there was a whole lot of new information to report on Marc Jacobs. But GQ did. They’ve got a profile of Jacobs in the May issue, and we actually learned some things about him we didn’t already know. For instance, his personal trainer is named Easy and had no idea how famous Jacobs was when he started training him. Eventually, Easy asked him something along the lines of, “If you’re a big designer, why don’t you have diamonds on your neck neck?” Thus Jacobs discovered his love for bling and wound up with diamonds on his lobes lobes. Cute, right? Here are nine other things we rather enjoyed learning:
1. He struggled with his sexuality at sleepaway camp as a child.
“[I was] the only kid in a big group that [didn’t] want to play football and buy stereos and drive cars. When I went to sleepaway camp, I just kind of wanted to sit there and make an ashtray or do a lanyard necklace or paint my jeans…”
2. His babysitter changed his life.
“I’d look at my babysitter and her boyfriend and long to be at an age where I could wear what they were wearing,” he says. Clothes had the stirring, transformative power of music — of rock, punk, and particularly grunge. “There was a beaten-down glamour about the whole thing,” Jacobs says, “something so kind of romantic and beautiful.”
3. He doesn’t have any contact with his family and doesn’t care what they’re doing right now.
“I never believed that idea that you’re supposed to love the members of your family. I hate the idea of obliged feelings — I just think that’s a huge waste of time. But I’ve had enough conversations with people to realize that I’m the oddball in this category. I can’t think of anyone as detached from their family as I am. Or as detached as I say I am.”
4. He loves working out because Easy just tells him what to do.
“The thing I love about the gym is not having to make choices,” he notes. “My trainer says, ‘You’re gonna lift this; you’re gonna do that ten times.’ Okay, great — just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. It’s the same thing with my nutritionist. All I have to do is follow instructions. I love that.”
5. He calls Easy his “BFF.”
“The fat guy that I kicked?” says Jacobs.
“The fat guy that we’d beat up if we saw him on the street,” Easy laughs.
6. Rehab is not a cure-all.
According to Jacobs’s business partner of twenty-five years, Robert Duffy, “Marc is a very emotional person, and he takes his work extremely seriously. Some days it’s hard and some days it’s not—it depends on his mood swings. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with a drug addict,” Duffy tells me over the phone while Jacobs sketches a shoe a few feet away. “Even though he’s been in recovery now for a while, it’s not an easy process. There’s the continual process of staying sober.”
7. He might get plastic surgery, thanks to Tom Ford and that time he ran into a glass door and busted his face.
“I look at Tom [Ford] and he looks great. Whatever he’s doing works for him. And I don’t know if he does anything, but I’m not opposed. Whatever makes me feel good, I want more of.” He’s already had a little work done on his nose, an approximation of the swelling that resulted when he ran into a glass door. “It got so swollen here,” he says, indicating the bridge, “and I thought, This is so hot.”
8. Just because he looks different doesn’t mean his sex life is.
“It’s still only a façade,” he says. “I’m still the same person. My sex life, my sexual interests, my libido, are exactly the same as they always were. It hasn’t changed my wiring or my instincts.”
9. He has no shame.
“Yeah, I want a bunch of muscle queens at David Barton Gym to think that my body looks dope. And I might think that was an awkward and dumb thing to say, but I still like that I’ll throw it out there. Because it’s true, you know?”
MARC JACOBS DOESN’T GIVE A F*** [GQ (not online)]
