appreciating gorillas with hair gel

Marc Jacobs Hypnotized by Jersey Shore

When you are a super-famous, superstar designer, leading a bi-continental life between Paris and New York, designing for two of the world’s most influential and adored labels, you learn to appreciate life’s simplest pleasures, Marc Jacobs tells Hal Rubenstein in the August issue of InStyle. Things as simple as sitting, staring.


Designing for two houses doesn’t leave you with a lot of free time. So what do you do when you aren’t working?
I’ve come to covet doing nothing. I am happy to sit in my garden in Paris, which is surrounded by jasmine hedges, or walk my dogs in the park around the Eiffel Tower. Frankly, I love to take naps. I don’t sleep really. I just stare at the wall and kind of drift off. And then, of course, there’s the gym.

But Jacobs also appreciates things even more simple than sitting in a fragrant garden and taking his pets to mark their territory at one of the world’s great monuments. He also appreciates mankind at its most baseline, gorillalike, pre-evolutionary nature, as Jersey Shore so brilliantly documents.

No guilty pleasure? No vice? No cheesy reality TV you must see?
OK, recently I watched every episode of Jersey Shore’s first season. I don’t know if it was any good and I certainly didn’t learn anything, but it was definitely hypnotic and it gave my brain a vacation. As for music, I know everyone associates me with edgy rock, but there are times when I just want to hear Britney Spears singing ‘Womanizer, Womanizer…’ over and over. I know, I know, it’s Britney! But I told you. I love imperfection.”

How brilliantly summarized: a brain vacation. Or, in these recessionary times, one could look at it as a great way of examining Darwinian theory without going all the way to the Galápagos.

On His Marc [InStyle, not online, via DFR]

Marc Jacobs Hypnotized by Jersey Shore