Marc Jacobs Was Fired for Grunge in 1993. He Was Just Early.
In November 1992, Marc Jacobs sent fourteen looks down the Perry Ellis runway in New York. The clothes were flannel shirts layered over silk slip dresses, knit beanies pulled low, combat boots scuffed in all the right places, baby-doll dresses paired with cardigans that looked like they had been borrowed from a roommate’s hamper. The press flogged him. Anna Wintour, six years into her Vogue reign, was reportedly so unimpressed she sent the samples back to the showroom unworn. Four months later, Jacobs was out of a job.
The collection had a name in retrospect: grunge. The label that fired him, Perry Ellis, would shutter its women’s line three years later. And the silk dresses Jacobs had paired with thermal underwear — the ones every editor hated — are now sitting in the windows of Reformation, Aritzia, and Urban Outfitters with $300 price tags. The grunge resurgence in 2020s fashion didn’t sneak up on anyone in the industry. It just took the industry thirty-one years to admit Marc Jacobs had been right the first time.
The Collection That Burned a Career
Jacobs had taken over Perry Ellis in 1989. He was 29, hot off a CFDA New Designer of the Year nod, and he had been watching his nieces and their friends — kids who shopped at Salvation Army and listened to Sonic Youth and dressed like they were one bad day from giving up. He bought $25 thrift flannels, sent them to a Milan mill, and had them reproduced in cashmere and silk-blend wools. The slip dresses were custom — they looked like lingerie because they were modeled on lingerie. Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Kate Moss walked them. Steven Meisel shot the lookbook.
The reaction was vicious. The fashion press wrote it off as the collection nobody asked for. Vogue ran almost nothing from it. Perry Ellis brass called Jacobs into a meeting in April 1993 and let him go. He was 30 years old, jobless, and would spend the next four years scraping together a label out of his own apartment in Manhattan.
