“We’re unique in that we’re able to maintain the image of a cool company that sells luxury products and sells what I call ‘the stuff.’”
By SALLY SINGER

The question I hear most from designers is, “How can I find a Robert Duffy?” By which they mean a business visionary, creative collaborator, and imperturbable ally. Formally, he’s the president and vice-chairman of Marc Jacobs and studio director of Louis Vuitton. Less formally, he’s the man who shepherded Marc Jabobs, man and brand, from the Parsons runway to one of the most profitable – and very probably the coolest – lifestyle fashion enterprises in the world. I recently met Duffy in his Spring Street Office in SoHo to discuss “the stuff,” the drugs, Chanel, and the difference between his world and “Marc World.”

SALLY SINGER: Every designer in the world wishes they could have met someone like you, and probably every business person in the world wishes they could have met someone like Marc Jacobs. I’d love to know what you saw in Marc at the start and how your perception of him has grown and changed over the years.
ROBERT DUFFY: It’s very simple. It was 1983. I was at Ruben Thomas [a New York clothing manufacturer] and I wanted to leave. They asked what it would take for me to stay. I said that I wanted to find a designer and develop my own collection. They said okay. So there were a number of people that I looked at – people like Stephen Sprouse. At the Parsons graduation dinner I saw Marc’s three sweaters on the runway and I knew immediately this was the person. Handknit by his grandmother with really awkward proportions and shapes: it was everything I loved, the friendliness, the color. It was really grunge back in 1985. Then the sportswear came out. I went to the dean and asked if I could have his number. The next day the school called and said, “Yes, he wants to talk with you.” We met for a drink or lunch, and a day later he came to work.

What sort of business person were you in 1985? And what was your interest in fashion?
I had worked at Bergdorf Goodman for a number of years. It was during the transition when the Goodmans were still there after the sale to Carter Hawley Hale. I loved working there when Mr. Goodman was still around. Then Dawn Mello came. I was part of that time when they were introducing Versace and Armani to the States. Then my father passed away and I had to get a real job: I couldn’t just be a buyer making $150 a week. So I went to Ruben Thomas, which owned a number of different lines: clothes sold at Bergdorf, mostly private labels. Mr. Ruben Thomas was an amazingly generous man. He taught me about the industry, about manufacturing. But I didn’t love the product. Perry Ellis had just started up as a designer, and he asked me to join him. But he couldn’t really pay me. I thought, I have to figure out a way to work on a designer line I’m going to be happy with and have some control over.

Did you see yourself as a “merchant”?
More as a producer, akin to a movie producer. At Bergdorf Goodman, I’d learned how to do “a buy,” manage a store, do inventory control. But I wanted to learn how to manufacture. And what I really enjoyed was bringing the creative together with the business and the editorial – imaging, marketing, choosing the stores … my boyfriend was a producer in Hollywood and I watched him try to put movies together. I thought, this is the same thing.

Why don’t more people choose to do that? So many want to start a line and put their name on clothes, but very few want to do what you set out to do.
First of all, Marc and I were pretty naïve. The one thing we forgot was the money. I think unless two people are like us – fearless and with so much faith in the other person – it’s pretty risky. I can understand someone talking to a person who has a billion dollars – Mr. Arnault – and wanting to partner. It’s better than partnering with someone who has $120 in the bank and a house in the country that he can mortgage. That’s what Marc had. And I had Ruben Thomas at the time, which was bankrolling part of it.

How long did you two stay at Ruben Thomas?
Just a year. Then where did we go? This Canadian company for a couple of months. I was in Japan for Mitsubishi (we’d do all these freelance projects) when the Canadian guy went bankrupt, and I literally walked across the street from Mitsubishi to Kashiyama and asked, “Can you help?” The owner of Kashiyama happened to be there. He knew me and said, “If you take over all these lines – Dolce & Gabbana, Helmut Lang, Jean-Paul Gaultier – and become the vice president of that whole group in America, we’ll finance Marc Jacobs.” So I did that for a few years until we went to Perry Ellis.

When Perry Ellis called [in 1989], it was the first time we thought about splitting. I was really into my job: I liked
Helmut; all those designers were very interesting in their own ways; and Kashiyama had asked me to become president. So when Marc was offered the job at Perry I said, “Maybe that’s the good thing for you, maybe I should do something else.” But the Perry Ellis offer was not just for one person: it was for two. That was very clear. I became president of the women’s collection and Marc became vice president of design.

Did your negotiations with Perry Ellis help inform your later negotiations with Louis Vuitton?
Perry Ellis was a completely different thing because Perry had offered me a job when he was alive and he’d offered Marc a job when he was alive. And Laughlin Barker had been Perry’s boyfriend and then his business partner. So there was this personal thing. Laughlin thought, I know Perry wanted both of these guys and basically gave us what we wanted to come. He unfortunately died shortly thereafter. And when he died we didn’t have the support of anyone else at the company. When we did the grunge collection [in 1992], forget it, it was over. Goodbye. Fired.

Did you and Marc think of splitting up?
You don’t know what to do. It was such a public firing. It made me feel very insecure because I thought the grunge show was the best thing we’d ever done. When the press came out, the people at Perry Ellis were like, “You people are idiots, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

But some people were very kind to us. Gianni Versace called. He flew us to Italy, because we didn’t have any money. He said don’t ever split up. He said, “It will be harder for you than for Marc at the beginning.” He instilled a lot of confidence in me. Then I went back to New York and started to negotiate severance and health insurance packages – for us and for twenty employees I needed to keep onboard for six months until I could get financing to restart the company. (Some of those people are still here with me at Marc Jacobs.) And I did it. I put together a licensing deal with Mitsubishi in Japan that we still have. I just put together a number of deals. We were able to restart the company. And Gianni came to that first show.

Had Marc ever thought of splitting with you?
Not to get too deep into his addiction problems, but Marc’s way of dealing with these problems was to get high. He wasn’t sitting in the negotiations with Perry Ellis lawyers. He never even met the Perry Ellis lawyers.

Not to get too deep into Marc’s addiction problems, but do you ever say no to him?
All the time.

What do you say no to him about?
There are a lot of things. You’re not partners with someone for 25 years if you don’t have this incredible respect and trust. Marc’s my best friend. He unconditionally loves me and he will do anything I ask him to do. I just don’t want to treat him like a child and I don’t want to be his father. When he gets out of hand or when he was at his worst, when he could be so mean to people or so rude, I knew it was the drugs talking. And I knew it was time to pull it together for him.

The last rehab?
No, the first one. The first time I took him [seven years ago]. I knew either I was going or he was getting straight. And he knew that he wanted to get straight. I needed to educate myself at the time on how to do this the right way. People recommended different doctors. Once I got him there and cleaned up, there were a lot of changes in our lives, personally.

What was the biggest one?
Just getting through the day. Just not doing smack or … well, Marc Jacobs not doing drugs.

Were you in Paris with him during that time?
I went to Paris, got him, dragged him onto the plane, dragged him to Arizona and put him in a place.

Were there times during that process and before when he was high that you thought: brand crisis! When he got off a plane somewhere and went to a hospital somewhere …
He didn’t go to a hospital; they put him in a hospital!

But you guys are so tied and connected in so many ways: personally, professionally, as friends. As the head of the company, did you ever think about the health of the brand?
I never think brand crisis. The one thing that I said to Marc is that all drug addicts lie. You are going to tell the truth. I’m done lying for you. I lied for you for years, at Perry Ellis and stuff, and I don’t know what I was protecting. I was killing him by lying. I was allowing him to behave in certain ways because I thought that it would be the worst thing for our careers if people knew. If people knew! People in this industry were doing it with him! I got to the point where I cared more about him than I did about the business. And if people don’t know he’s a drug addict then … well, everybody knew. I said, “You’re going to tell the truth. I am not going to lie. We’re going to go to see Mr. Arnault, we’re going to tell him you’re a drug addict. Tell him that I’m taking you to rehab. And then if anybody calls – Mr. Carcelle, Bridget Foley at Women’s Wear – it’s going to get out and you’re going to make a statement and accept responsibility for your behavior.”

That was the first time. And Mr. Arnault was kind and said, “Get your act together”?
He felt bad. Mr. Arnault is a decent human being. He really did care. I’m not saying other people in the company did. But he did. He said, “You do what you need to do. We need him.”

But then the second time …
There have been many times.

Well the last time, a couple of years ago, when Marc’s entry into rehab was on the CNN ticker …
Maybe because it’s known I’m the person who takes him there, I literally get thousands of letters and emails from people, strangers, saying I’ve been in this position and understand. I’ve never heard anything negative, never had a customer come into the store and say I won’t buy anything here because he’s a drug addict. I’ve had that happen because of the political windows I do. We all know designers who are drug addicts. We all know designers who are gay – designers who are gay but are married to women. I don’t buy into that. Marc is a gay man, who is a drug addict, who hires hookers. It’s what he does, so why lie about it? Every time I go to some party and see some guy who I know is dating my friend and he’s with his wife, it drives me crazy. How can you live like that? I try not to judge. But just be honest.

Did you ever think that some part of his genius might be beholden to drugs?
I never thought that. I met Marc when he was 23 years old. Everyone I knew at that time who was 20–25 was taking drugs. I’m certainly not a virgin to that behavior. But at a certain point I stopped, and other people stopped, and Marc wasn’t stopping. I was around his peers who were all doing it. I just kept thinking there are a lot of high functioning drug addicts. I’ve known many and I’ve known them into their eighties.

I didn’t want to judge him either. But once Marc’s personality started changing and he became mean and it started affecting the people who were working around us, then it had to be addressed. I never felt it was part of his creative process. He was just trying to escape. I knew he had an unhappy childhood. I knew he was unhappy. I knew he hated himself. I knew all of this. We talked about it.

I know you are best friends, but do you live in “Marc World,” which, as the public perceives it, involves a certain set of pals who appear in the ads and sit in the front row?
The world I live in is completely different from his world. When Marc last got out of rehab, he came to my house and I was having a dinner party. [The novelist] Francine Prose was there, who you know I’m close with, and her kids and other people. I was having a party with just my friends. And Marc came to the party and we were sitting in the house on Bank Street and he started crying, and I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “You have a family. There are kids here. I see how close you are to everyone here. And I knew all these years that you were friends with these people, but I didn’t know they were family.”

All the friends he had weren’t really friends. When I made phone calls to his supposed best friends when he was in rehab, they were like, “He’s what?“ These are not your best friends. There were the people he was honest with – which was zero except me – and the people he did drugs with. And then there were the people who sat in the front row. There was never any group that knew everything. The people he did drugs with didn’t really know his personal life, that he had a boyfriend. The people who sat in the front row didn’t know he did drugs, or simply thought he did it occasionally. One of the hardest things for me when I sent him away to rehab was to figure out, when he came out, where the safest place would be, who would be his support group.

How do you, as a friend, manage that? You aren’t in Paris that much.
I know who I trust in his life. I know who cares about him. I know who is friends with him because of who he is or what he does. And I know about the ones who don’t really care about him.

So you have a brotherly relationship with him?
We text all the time even when we don’t see each other all the time.

And when you’re here, in your own life, managing 140 stores and a staff of hundreds, how much time do you get when you’re off-duty, when you’re not doing anything for Marc Jacobs the man or Marc Jacobs the brand?
This is my time to do this. This is what I have to do right now. It gets harder but I love it. I’ve been traveling solidly for the last two months. We’re opening new stores in Hong Kong, Macau, Manila, and Vietnam; and I had to go. We’re adding production in Peru and I had to go.

How big do you think it can go? People who work in fashion fret about it quite a lot. Marc Jacobs was this extremely expensive thing, and now as there is more and more Marc Jacobs in the world, it becomes not less luxurious but less closely held. The insiders who buy it don’t want to see it everywhere and they don’t want the logo to grow too big.
I don’t look at the Marc Jacobs collection as a growth vehicle. It is in certain countries. But in the United States, I’m not adding another store; I’m not adding another door. I don’t need to. If anything I want to take it back. It has a very specific customer; it has a very loyal customer. And it has a young customer. What initially started the Marc by Marc line was the idea that we need to make clothes for a young customer – well, the real Marc Jacobs customer doesn’t want Marc by Marc. The Marc Jacobs customer doesn’t even think about what happens on Bleecker Street. It has nothing to do with it. On Bleecker Street you’ve got to put Jacobs on everything and Marc on everything and Marc Jacobs on everything. Everything has to be stamped and whatever. The woman who wears Marc Jacobs really wants to wear well-made clothes – she looks inside them and is incredibly well educated. But the growth is not there.

The growth is with Marc by Marc?
That and everything else we do. You know how I always wanted to do a third line? With “the stuff,” I essentially have. We sell millions of units every year and not haphazardly. Marc has things that he wants to do in the company. I have things that I want to do. And I need to have a vehicle that makes money. I have to spend a million dollars a season on a fashion show. I’m not going to make it on the collection line at Mercer Street; it’s just not going to happen. The collection line is always going to lose money. The collection ready-to-wear line is so expensive to produce: we do most of it in the United States and it’s so complicated, even if it looks simple. We have to find things to support that. It’s my job to make sure we have things going on and it’s also my job to look at the big picture. My feeling three years ago was that our collection business was getting too big in the United States. Too many doors, too many locations, too many specialty stores, whatever. I don’t need to build any more of my own collections stores in the US except maybe Chicago. But I’m covered. Between Neimans and Barneys and Bloomingdale’s and Saks I’m covered. Done. But the company still needs to grow and I wanted to have something different from everybody else. We are a very young company – I mean, I’m the oldest person here – and it’s easy for me to reach that audience at the right price point. It’s easy for me to do and I enjoy it. Everyone thought it would cannibalize what we had, but in fact it hasn’t. Everyone thought if we did Marc by Marc handbags it would cannibalize the collection handbags; but it hasn’t.

Do you think of these projects as luxury businesses?
I think we’re unique in that we’re able to maintain the image of a cool company that sells luxury products and sells what I call “the stuff.” All that stuff has integrity too. If I’m doing a straw hat I’m making it in Panama and selling it retail for $20. It has integrity even at a price. When we did that plastic quilted stuff? It’s not because I wanted to make a cheap plastic bag. It’s because I was approached by a celebrity who doesn’t wear leather and asked, “Will you make me this in Perspex?” That’s how that started. Reusable bags. And then it grew into a business. And then the charity tees grew into a business. I mean, I don’t want to pay $500 for a pair of flip-flops. I’m going to pay $10. If it costs me $7 to make it or whatever it costs, I’m not going to charge $800 for it just because I can. That’s so false.

Does Marc like “the stuff?”
He doesn’t get involved in it. One day he told me, “Oh my God, I was at Lee Radziwill’s house the other night and I saw this thing. And she said ‘I bought it in your store on Bleecker Street.’” He’ll see stuff and say, “I didn’t know that was ours.”

Do you have stuff stores in other places?
We have it in the Marc by Marc stores in other places. It’s fun for me to do. It’s like, we use the Berluti factory to make our men’s collection shoes; they make the best shoes in the world. But if I want a flip-flop it’s a $600 flip-flop. It’s just not my thing.

It’s quite Vuitton.
But that’s that customer. My customer is not that jet-set business guy. My customer, the Marc Jacobs customer, may wear a cashmere pant and a cashmere sweater but he’s wearing a $10 flip-flop. He wears beautiful clothing but not $600 flip-flops.

At what point did you step away from Vuitton?
Well, for the first four years I had to be there, because they’d never had women’s ready-to-wear, they’d never had shoes. I had to hire designers, sample makers, sewers; rent a studio and buy drawing paper. We arrived there and I literally don’t know if they knew we were coming.

Then at what point did you say, “Enough, I’m going to build Marc Jacobs?”
The first four years Marc was at his worst with the drug thing. I couldn’t really leave. I had to be there because I had to make sure we had collections. We had a contract. Once he was sober, I could begin to build this business.

Are there things that you miss about Vuitton?
I learned a lot. It was interesting to watch Mr. Arnault work. I was just fascinated by that. And it was nice not to have to negotiate for everything, to have every model for the fashion show, so nice to be able to say, “I need a model,” and somebody just did it. Or, “Can we develop this hardware?” And somebody just did it. You have everything. For the Marc Jacobs collection I was used to saying, “You can develop one button this season.” At Vuitton if we want to do a crocodile bag we could buy 50 kinds of skins. To this day we can’t do that for Marc Jacobs.

What do you think of the state of play for the luxury houses in Europe right now, where designers are hired and fired so quickly by the major brands? Would you and Marc have lasted through your Vuitton debut – the all-white, logo-on-the-bottom collection?
We did our first collection [in 1998]. We knew it was wrong, but Marc said he wanted to start with a clean slate and it was just that. We had that discussion: what they want to see is Naomi walking down the runway with a clear plastic bikini, a high heel with a big LV in the back and an LV tote. Fashion 101. Is that what they want to see? Yes, but that’s not what we’re doing. We would have had three seasons if we continued down that road. There were so many people who were coming and going at LVMH. People who lasted a week. We had to prove ourselves. I knew they were not paying us just to do whatever we wanted. We can do what we want here.

Do you think Marc wants to do couture?
I think he’d want to do Chanel, but again … you see what Karl does and he does it so well. If he wanted to go anywhere that’s where he’d love to go – because he loves what Karl has established there. Basically Marc just loves that company.

No.

You would part?
No, because I have this. Who knows if he would want me? I would like to work one job for once in my life. I have other things in my life I want to do, that I’m doing. We’re in the process of editing a movie I just produced.

So you’re finally producing movies after the boyfriend of 25 years ago?
Yes. And there are things I am starting to do that I’m not at liberty to say. And there are other designers I want to help. There are people I’m helping and advising.

Do you think Marc could go on to a next thing without you?
He knows how to work with people now. He’s older. He’s making choices now – not in his personal life but in business. Otherwise I’d be sitting in Paris. If he says at Vuitton, “I need a patternmaker,” or, “I need a sewer,” and they say no, then he can sit down and say, “If you don’t want these people then I won’t be able to get you this thing by the end of the week.” He was never able to do that before.

Where is most of Marc’s energy?
He spends most of his time in Paris. In New York he works on the women’s collection, women’s collection shoe line, women’s collection bag line. He still sketches every piece of the women’s collection, every pant, every shirt.

Do you ever say no to the things he sketches in the line?
Yes. But more often he comes to me and says, “Do you think you can sell this?”

And when he picks someone like Victoria Beckham to be in the campaign, is that a collaborative choice or his alone? How does it work?
It’s so weird. I know more celebrities than he knows, but I don’t choose to hang out with those people. I meet people and ask them to get involved in charities and then Marc likes some of them, doesn’t like some of them – and he was particularly interested in Victoria. You get it, I’m sure. She has kids and is a wife and is very kind. When you ask her to pose naked for skin cancer she does it. She’s very charitable and gave to the charities we were involved with. So there’s that part of her that he admires. And then there’s that whole tabloid.

But I think of most of the women who have been identified with Marc Jacobs – Sofia Coppola, Zoe Cassavetes – and they were so interested in diminishing their celebrity, in being anti-celebrity celebrities.
You think they’re not interested in being celebrities?

Well, their story is always, “We just wear our clothes.” The celebrity they are constructing is of a remarkably different type than Victoria Beckham.
But they’re still celebrities, with followings. I’ve watched all of that over the years. I’ve watched people manipulate their careers and their images.

How do you think your role will be remembered? As a Pierre Bergé?
I think it was Anna [Wintour] who said to me, “You’re getting famous,” and comparing it to someone in a negative way. Sort of, this person shouldn’t be famous, do you really want to go there? And I said, “No, I don’t want to be famous.” But someone has to speak for the company and Marc’s on drugs; he’s been gone for a month. He’s in Belgium; I don’t know where he is. Somebody still has to answer questions and somebody still has to answer the phone. I just did a world tour. I just did 80 interviews. I don’t want to do it, but he’s not going to do it. I don’t want to be remembered as anything except by people I work with as being generous and kind. I’m never going to be an Andre Balazs or any of those people who want to be groomed and photographed. I’ve had very famous boyfriends in the past but I never wanted to be in the picture with them. That’s not how I want to be remembered. But if I’m remembered as the guy that helped build this company? Yes, that’s how I want to be remembered.