Fashion: The School of Cool

It was just a store opening, but the festivities taking place behind New York City's Lincoln Center could have rivaled the christening of the new Queen Mary. A giant tent glowed with the image of a logo-laden Louis Vuitton trunk, a beacon for the handbag obsessed. On the ceiling inside, tiny stars shaped like Vuitton's LV logo twinkled above the crowd. Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rudy Giuliani swept in to congratulate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault on his spectacular four-story Fifth Avenue emporium.

The 150-year-old Vuitton brand may have been the star of the night, but on the ground, the talk was all about Marc Jacobs, the designer who has been widely credited with boosting Vuitton's profile and bottom line ever since he was named creative director in 1997. Rumors were flying around the tents at the New York fashion shows that Jacobs was unhappy with the way LVMH was handling his signature label and that he had been approached by rival Gucci Group N.V. to design the Yves Saint Laurent line. Arnault dismissed the chatter, saying that the relationship was very good and that Jacobs had the potential to become as big as Ralph Lauren or Donna Karan.

The designer, 40, is perhaps already more influential among fashion's Young Turks than those brands are. The disheveled-1950s-housewife look that stalked runway after runway last week, for example, first appeared in Jacobs' spring 2003 show. And renditions of his brightly colored accessories have recently turned up in mass venues like the Gap (for which a onetime Jacobs accessory designer now works). "He certainly has made it really cool to look back to the past, and now other designers are following him in the way they put together a collection," says Julie Gilhart, vice president and fashion director at Barneys New York, marveling at Jacobs' growing influence. In fashion schools around the world, students reference Jacobs almost exclusively. "They revere him," says Timothy Gunn, chairman of the department of fashion design at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. "It's his design innovation and flea-market sensibility but also the fact that there's a little bit of mystery about him."

If Calvin Klein is the icon of minimalism, Ralph Lauren the elegant esquire and Donna Karan the workingwoman's tailor, Jacobs is the eclectic sampler who has ushered in an era of sophisticated charm in fashion. His uncanny ability to give street-wise looks a luxurious twist--a thermal undershirt made of cashmere, or cropped cargo pants turned into tuxedo pants--has made him one of the most carefully watched--and desired--designers in the business. The $1,000-plus Murakami bag, a collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, generated more than $300 million in sales for Vuitton last year.

"He has a vision of what people will want tomorrow," says Yves Carcelle, chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton. "With the Murakami bag, he came to me and said, 'Look, we've been through such a gray period after Sept. 11, and we need optimism, a fresh, even naive, vision of the world.' And when those bright, colorful bags came out on the runway, it was such a relief, so new, so what people wanted."