On his first European business trip as the new designer for Perry Ellis sportswear and flush with the raise that came with the job, Marc Jacobs treated himself to something that cost more money than he ever would have spent before.
Hardly exotic, except, perhaps for its $800 price tag, it was a boxy, three-button carcoat in a rich plaid of beige, burgundy, brown and rust that he saw hanging in the Hermes boutique in Milan. But, says Jacobs, ”I just loved this jacket and I didn`t hesitate.”
Back in New York, it wasn`t the sort of look that drew second glances on the street, but it sparked shocked doubletakes in the offices of Perry Ellis, a division of Salant Corp.
”It`s so funny,” Jacobs recalls. ”When I walked in here on the first day I was back from Europe, wearing this jacket, everyone asked, `Is that an old Perry Ellis jacket?`
”And when I said, `Why would you say that?` they told me it was Perry`s very favorite fabric. It was the weirdest thing.”
Matching plaids
Any doubts Jacobs had were dispelled by Ellis president Robert McDonald and executive vice president Claudia Thomas, friends of Ellis until his death from AIDS in May, 1986. ”They just said, `Look,` and took out two yards of this fabric and said it was Perry`s very favorite plaid. And it was the exact same fabric. It was so weird,” says Jacobs.
Weird, maybe. A good omen, perhaps. But certainly, another sign that the 25-year-old Jacobs is, indeed, very Perry.
In fact, Salant Corp. is banking on it. Shaken first by the death of former Ellis president Laughlin Barker and, only months later, by the death of Ellis himself, the division has gone through more than two years of hard times.
After Ellis` death, the design responsibilities for the Ellis signature collection, as well as the more moderately priced petites, Portfolio and America lines, passed to his two longtime assistants, Patricia Pastor and Jed Krascella. A year later, Krascella, who was credited with retaining much of Ellis` celebrated spirit of wit and whimsy, left the business to pursue an acting career.
On her own, Pastor found her designs for the signature collection increasingly bashed in the press as too safe, and shunned by retailers as too uninspired. Last November, citing personal reasons, she resigned as vice president of women`s design and Jacobs succeeded her. Somehow, the breezily happy Ellis spirit, which infused his clothes and his workplace, had gone. Salant is hoping Jacobs can bring it back.
That friendly feeling
”I want it to be here, but I don`t want to tell people that`s the way they should feel,” says Jacobs, sitting behind his new desk in an office papered with sketches and fabric swatches. ”It might become a question of finding people who really do feel that way deep down. You can`t ask people to be friendly. It`s got to be there.
”People used to come here for what this company stood for. That`s the way it`s got to become again. This doesn`t have to be a showroom where people can`t sit on the floor or where I can`t run downstairs in my socks to say hello to somebody,” says the frequently floor-bound, shoeless Jacobs.
”Let`s say we`ve thought about it. A lot. And we know what we have to do because that`s what we believe in. I think, Robert and I, we`re really in charge,” he says, nodding to Robert Duffy, his longtime business partner and now an Ellis vice president.
At first glance, Jacobs-a diminutive, dark-haired New Yorker-might seem to have little in common with Ellis-a slender, fair Virginian who galvanized the sportswear industry in the mid-`70s with what he called ”friendly”
clothes. Jacobs favors turtlenecks, jeans and motorcycle boots. Ellis was known for his oxford cloth shirts, khaki pants and Top-Siders. Jacobs is a high-energy, rapid-fire talker; Ellis was easygoing. But there are
similarities and links between the two that go well beyond the ponytail Jacobs sports now and Ellis wore in the early years of his success.
A word from `Mom`
”In many ways, although he`s a very different type, some of Marc`s spirit is what I remember from the first Perry Ellis collections I saw,”
recalls Ellin Saltzman, vice president and fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, which launched Jacobs` first major collection. Noting that she has known Jacobs since he was a 15-year-old gofer and hanger-on at Charivari, an avant-garde chain of specialty shops on Manhattan`s Upper West Side, she adds, ”He calls me Mom.”
If Jacobs had a fairy godfamily in his career, it was Selma Weiser and her children, Jon and Barbara, who own and run Charivari. ”We weren`t really his discoverers. He discovered us,” recalls Selma Weiser. ”He lived on the corner and he would just come in every day. He knew every single designer who walked into that store and ultimately, when he got older, he worked for us.” Even as a teenager, Jacob`s passion for fashion was clear. ”There was no question about it,” says Weiser. ”I have never met anybody so into fashion. I mean, just immersed in it.”
For Jacobs, Ellis was first an idol and later a mentor. ”All of it just appealed to me, in terms of sensibility, more than all the other people,” he recalls of his first exposure to Ellis designs as a 13-year-old fashion hound in 1976, when Ellis launched Portfolio. ”There wasn`t an intention to shock; the intent was to make people smile. You didn`t feel like something was thrown in your face; you were being invited to sort of smile along with it. And that`s the only way to judge the success of a collection. I mean, you can have a good time doing it, but if people don`t enjoy it also, you haven`t done your job well.”
Advice from Ellis
Two years later, while a student at Manhattan`s High School of Art and Design, Jacobs finally met Ellis when the designer came to the opening of a new Charivari shop. ”I went up to him and said, `I`m a big fan of yours. I`m in high school now but I`m thinking of going to college and I want to be a designer.`
”And he said, `Well, both my assistants are from Parsons. If you`re really serious about doing this, then this is where you should go.` So I took his advice.”
While at Parsons School of Design, where he completed the course but never graduated, Jacobs won a Perry Ellis Golden Thimble award for some handknit sweaters he designed for Charivari, and later received the 1987 Perry Ellis Award for new talent from the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
In 1984, he designed sportswear for the Sketchbook division of Reuben Thomas and then briefly designed for a Toronto-based firm before accepting backing for his own label from the Japanese conglomerate Kashiyama in 1986.
Quickly, he was noticed for his witty style, such as printing Sigmund Freud`s face on a slipdress. Good reviews followed, particularly for his last collection, which was a kitschy take on Miami Beach.
Style with a smile
”That`s the sort of excitement and fun aspect that, as serious as fashion can be, Perry Ellis always had,” says Sal Ruggiero, fashion director of Marshall Field & Co. ”There was always something there that brought a smile to your face. Especially as retailing becomes more difficult, it`s nice to leave a collection feeling good. I think Marc can do that.”
”The best thing that could happen to Perry Ellis is that it could be a Patrick Kelly for America,” said Fields` designer buyer Raleigh Glassberg, referring to the hot-selling Paris-based American designer noted for his whimsy. ”It could be Marc Jacobs.”
”If I had to pick somebody whose personality reflected that unique mixture of classic and whimsical that was Perry, it would be Marc,” says Charivari`s Barbara Weiser, who produced Jacobs` first commercial handknit sweaters.
Whatever happens, the fashion world stands ready to pass judgment when Jacobs shows his first Ellis collection on April 10, the day after his 26th birthday.
Some might find it ironic and a bit ego-deflating that, just as Jacobs`
name has begun to surface on fashionable lips, he has chosen to design under the Ellis label. ”Oh, no problem at all,” he says quickly, lighting a cigarette.
”Look, I don`t kid myself about the percentage of the population that is aware of this level of fashion. Anyone who`s aware of me and what I`ve been doing for four years knows that I`m here. I keep saying that, and it`s not like I`m trying to convince myself. We`ve never even given it a second thought,” he says, glancing at Duffy, who murmurs his concurrence.
Forget the labels
”Now, the next step is not the name on the label, but the size of the business in terms of responsibility, creativity and being able to affect more people-but that doesn`t mean in terms of a label inside their T-shirt or their jacket.”
What it means is being successful in big-time, big-scale manufacturing. From his own boutique-sized business that did about $3 million in sales last year, Jacobs will be the pivot of a $100 million company that is counting on him to sew up a projected 18 percent increase in 1989.
Scale is the key to the changes surrounding Jacobs now. He has gone from a firm that employed three people to one that has hundreds, and from overseeing one collection each season to four, not to mention the activities of 27 licensees.
There is big money now behind the young man who once handpainted white bridal pumps for a fashion show because he couldn`t afford matching shoes for his models and who said, ”It`s scary to imagine having lots of money and not having to solve budget problems creatively.”
Snap decisions
There is a huge production and support staff now awaiting instructions from the designer who once stated, ”I don`t have the luxury of being a full- time designer,” and, through necessity and choice, personally attended to every detail of his line right down to the buttons.
”I still have to do all of that. Yes, I do,” he insists. ”There`s not going to be a button on this collection that I don`t choose. That`s the shock of it. I said all of that and it still holds true. I basically have to do everything myself.
”I don`t have to run around from contractor to contractor anymore. But if you think that I`m not going to be concerned after putting this much effort into this collection, if you think I`m not going to be concerned about how it gets produced and shipped to the stores . . .,” he trails off, shaking his head.
And the man who once vowed, ”Never will someone sketch for me. Never will I hire a stylist to do my shows or accessorize my looks,” now has three assistants assigned to him.
A `great escape`
What will they do? ”Good question,” he says, admitting that, as he always has, he still sketches at night and on weekends in his West Side apartment, where he lives with his two cats, Major and Rover. When he isn`t working out with free weights, dining with friends or tooling around Manhattan on his Honda motorcycle, he sketches. ”It`s my great escape,” he says.
”I love to sketch, and no one`s going to take that away from me. I love to put on fashion shows and no one`s going to take that away from me,” he says. ”But you have to find a happy medium. There aren`t enough hours in the day to talk to everyone who`s interested in what`s going on, to be in buy meetings, and to design the collections and to do the accessories and to do the furs. There is a lot to be said for a talent like a Ralph Lauren in terms of making choices and surrounding yourself with people who reflect what you believe in.”
What Jacobs believes in, he says, is the ”mood” of Perry Ellis, a mood he has always shared and that makes stepping into Ellis` shoes more comfortable. ”It was warm and friendly and a much more soft-edged fashion approach as opposed to a hard-edged, you know, shoulders out to here, waist in to here and hips out to there,” he says. ”It was all based on very familiar clothes and, as I`ve gone on, I`ve certainly come to appreciate that because it`s just more wearable. You know, you can do a million things to make a classic blazer a not-classic blazer, but as long as people look at it and it`s still familiar enough, it`s not intimidating. You don`t want to make fashion intimidating.”
Nor is Jacobs` ideal customer intimidating. ”It`s easier to say what she`s not,” he begins. ”She`s not Joan Collins or Nancy Reagan. She`s somebody who wants to be seen as deeper than her clothing. She`s any age, she`s just young in spirit. And she`s down to Earth. It`s so hard to say that about fashion because it`s such a surface-y thing, but she`s down to Earth.”
A light approach
So, for the moment at least, is Jacobs. Much like Ellis, he wears his fashion mantle lightly. ”Life is precious-nothing else is precious. I mean, really, it`s like a sweater I`m working on now might be the most important thing to get done this week, but it`s not the most important thing in the world.
”There are two statements I`ve always loved. One is, never use the words `dress` and `important` in the same sentence. The other one is, no matter what you do, remember it`s not the cure for cancer.”`
Noting that this is a peculiarly well-balanced perspective for 7th Avenue, a visitor wonders if Jacobs will feel the same way 10 years from now. Jacobs laughs.
”The only thing I can say is that I would have said all of this four years ago. Ten years from now, we`ll see.” –
