On August 26, Marc Jacobs will receive MTV’s first-ever Fashion Vanguard Award at the VMAs in a partnership between the television network and the Council of Fashion Designers of America. It couldn’t go to a more worthy individual. After all, it’s impossible to separate Jacobs from the music that’s influenced his 30-plus-year career. His Perry Ellis Spring 1993 collection was inspired by the grunge scene and featured supermodels parading down the runway in slouchy flannels and floppy beanies. (It famously got him fired and was reissued in 2018). Around the same time, Jacobs worked with Sonic Youth on the music video for “Sugar Kane,” which featured splices of that very same dressed-down Perry Ellis collection—plus a nude Chloë Sevigny! Jacobs also created clothes for a House of Style commercial back in the ’90s, making two little black jersey T-shirt dresses that said, “I love rap, I love disco, I love rock.”
Fast forward a couple of decades, and Jacobs used a reworked vintage MTV logo on sweatshirts in his Spring 2017 Resort collection. (Fun fact: Jacobs’s head of knitwear Laura Zaccheo found the vintage MTV dud in a thrift shop.) He’s also dressed the likes of Lady Gaga (the superstar walked his Fall 2016 runway) and Cardi B (for her video “I Like It”). He tells Vogue: “I’ve always been seduced to learn about different bands or different music by the way they look.”
Here, the designer discusses his grunge beginnings, his musical influences, and what MTV has meant to him.
Your grunge collection for Perry Ellis is legendary. Do you remember seeing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video for the first time?
Nobody had introduced me to Nirvana. It was like a magnet, and that’s how I feel a lot of my life was. It wasn’t something I sought out; it just affected me immediately. I had a primitive connection to Sonic Youth and Nirvana and a lot of other things at that time. But again, it felt very authentic and not that I had to learn it or find it. That was my same experience with punk rock back in the ’70s, when I just saw how cool the kids looked who were a part of that scene that it drew me to hear those bands.
I remember traveling to Europe—I was in Berlin, and I walked into a bar with some friends, and I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Then I went to San Francisco at some point, and it was playing, and I was just like, “This is so big.” It felt very big even in kind of under-the-radar places. Even my thoughts about MTV then were that, although it seemed like it had a commercial responsibility, it was definitely aware of what was cool.
How did the phenomenon trickle into other parts of fashion?
At that time, there was also a shift in fashion photography, which was very inspired by Larry Clark, with no glamour and no frills and no fancy lighting, just cool kids going out with a camera, taking pictures of other cool kids wearing clothes.
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