Photo: Courtesy of Marc Jacobs
Marc Jacobs’s namesake label is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024, and the designer has embarked on a year-long collaboration series. Last month, he dropped a collaboration with Pat McGrath on a classic red lipstick housed in McGrath’s sleek lipstick tube, emblazoned with Jacobs’s familiar logo, that took us back to the good old days of Marc Jacobs Beauty (IYKYK). Now, Jacobs has called upon another longtime friend, Anna Sui, for a special capsule collection that includes his signature Snapshot Bag decorated with “Miss and Mister Marc” illustrations in Sui’s signature colors purple and black, along with a varsity jacket emblazoned with their initials and the year 1984 when the brand was founded.
This isn’t the first time the two have collaborated; they first put their designer minds together in 2018 for a small capsule titled “Marc & Anna” that featured a line of t-shirts, sneakers, and keychains where the “Miss and Mister Marc” illustrations by Will Broome first debuted. (Miss and Mister Marc are, in fact, cartoon versions of the designers themselves). Last year, Sui also reissued the fairy wings from her spring 1997 collection as part of Jacobs’s Heaven line.
Although the two had crossed paths during the 1980s, when Marc Jacobs was still a teenager working as a stock boy at the famous Charivari store on the Upper West Side and Anna Sui was a customer, their friendship officially began in the 1990s. “The first time Marc and I got to know each other and hung out was when I did my first show, and WWD interviewed us together,” Sui is quoted as recalling in the release notes. “There were two other designers there, but somehow Marc and I really bonded.” The two have remained close ever since (they even released corresponding “grunge” collections in the early ’90s), meeting up for dinner at Manhattan’s famed Il Cantinori restaurant, and attending each other’s fashion shows. At Sui’s most recent show held at The Strand’s Rare Book Room, Jacobs was spotted front row, looking adoringly at the clothes as they made their way down the makeshift runway. Sui, of course, was at Jacobs’s Park Avenue Armory show too. A friendship made in fashion heaven—and New York.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
