The New Yorker has an interesting (although what isn't interesting in the New Yorker...?) profile piece on uber-designer Marc Jacobs and chronicling his ascension in both fashion and popular culture, as well as his "super-heroesque" physical metamorphosis.
Jacobs used to be a chubby Jewish guy with long hair and glasses who made his name—and got fired—by designing a “grunge” collection (of very expensive silk shirts printed to look like flannel, and fine cashmere sweaters with the appearance of thermal underwear) in 1993, as the head of womenswear at Perry Ellis. Five years later, he was hired as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, France’s premier luxury-goods house, where he was seen as an enfant terrible, and nobody was quite sure if he would make it work. But, in the decade since Jacobs arrived at Vuitton, he has quadrupled its business and, with the company’s backing, watched his own Marc Jacobs Collection and his less expensive secondary line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, grow into a global business, with a hundred and sixty stores, in nineteen countries. You see his handbags, with their quilting and clunky hardware, on every other girl in Manhattan—like flip-flops, except that they cost thousands of dollars.
Jacobs’s physical appearance has come to reflect his success. At the age of forty-five, he is no longer remotely plump. His hair is cut short (and was, briefly, bright blue), and he has started wearing contact lenses. He looks like a cartoon superhero: muscular, bronzed, shining with diamonds. And he has accomplished the comic-book feat of transforming himself from hardworking Everyman (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Peter Parker) into something elevated and different and not merely human. But this is fashion, not crime-fighting, so the goal isn’t to fly or to leap tall buildings or—God forbid—become invisible. No. What one wants is to be a cultural touchstone, to represent and embody a life style, the way Karl Lagerfeld does, or Donatella Versace, or Carrie Bradshaw.
Read more here.