Marc Jacobs remembers 2004
John Currin, Rachel Feinstein and Jodie Kidd all feature in Jacobs’ early noughties recollections
Marc Jacobs Illustrated is a beautiful book, featuring over 50 collections created by the fashion designer Marc Jacobs over the past 25 years, all illustrated by American Vogue’s creative director at large Grace Coddington.
Grace’s pictures are great fun, and Marc’s recollections are equally engaging. Here’s how he recalls the events surrounding both his Spring / Summer and his Fall / Winter shows of 2004.
The early 2000s were a turbulent time, with the foundation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, the re-election of George W Bush, and the theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. However, Jacobs reached beyond simple, contemporary references when drawing up his Spring / Summer show “Among the inspirations for this collection was the documentary The Cockettes, about the legendary performers in San Francisco in the 1970s,” he writes in our new book. "Also a bit of The Great Gatsby, my favourite book and literary character: Daisy Buchanan.”
Jacobs brought things a little more up-to-date for the following season, though. “John Currin’s painting Rachel in Fur inspired this collection,” he writes of his Fall / Winter 2004 designs. “Rachel (Feinstein, Currin’s wife and muse) would then appear in the ads reproducing that painting. Jodie Kidd was the new model that season I was so excited by.”
For more on Rachel Feinstein, go here; meanwhile, for more from Marc and Grace, order a copy of Marc Jacobs Illustrated here. For more from Grace go here; and if you like to look back on fashion photographs from collections gone by, take a look at Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines which surveys the incredible fashion magazine collection of New York-based Vince Aletti.