Fashion Iconography
The 25-year business partnership between fashion designer Marc Jacobs and Butler-born Robert Duffy has been the making of a cultural phenomenon.
By Ellen T. White
(Above) Front Row Center: Robert Duffy and actress Selma Blair (at table with champagne) during Marc Jacobs' runway show. (Inset) Dynamic Duo: The symbiosis of the business acumen of Robert Duffy (left) and the creative genius of Marc Jacobs has forged a force to be reckoned with in the fashion industry. Photos courtesy of Marc Jacobs International
Watching the documentary Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton - which premiered on the Sundance Channel this year - you could get the impression that the business of fashion is all about creative inspiration, runway walks, international travel and celebrity. When he isn't kissing Demi Moore's cheek or zipping, say, to Tokyo or back home to Paris, designer Marc Jacobs is burning the proverbial candle at both ends, conceiving collections of dizzying depth and variety. The clothes? They seem to appear in stores through some mystical transference. Production and merchandizing are a puzzlement. To be sure, in scene after scene, you'll see Butler-born Robert Duffy, the vice chairman/ president who runs the show. But he's cast more as an incidental player of their enterprise than the linchpin he really is.
Early last summer, Duffy touched down briefly at the offices of Marc Jacobs International - part of Louis Vuitton since 1997 - on Spring Street in New York's SoHo. What with his schedule of international store openings and business deals, one wonders if a papal audience would have been easier to arrange. I think long and hard about what to wear into fashion's inner sanctum, a case of nerves spurred by actual experience.
Some years back, I did a brief stint as a reporter for the trade newspaper Women's Wear Daily, where the wrong shoes or belt can (and did) earn the wearer the palpable scorn of fashion insiders. I needn't have worried. Marc Jacobs staffers greet me like a long-lost friend - one who's running perilously short of bottled water. While waiting for Duffy, we rifle through racks of exquisitely wrought clothing, "cruise collection" samples and accessories.
Duffy breezes in - casual in a gray T-shirt and rumpled pants. Unlike Jacobs, he's one of those guys whose looks are never accurately caught by cameras; he swore off TV appearances after his Oprah turn. I am unprepared for his dreaminess. Duffy is unusually tall, lanky and tan, and the only giveaway of his 54 years is his gray hair, which is fashionably unruly.
Duffy shares an airy, light, loft-size office with Jacobs. Indeed, they work facing each other across adjoining desks - that is, until Jacobs' clutter drives Duffy to take refuge at a nearby conference table. "I've got about an hour, hour and a quarter," says Duffy, sitting down, "and then I've got to get to a plane out of here."
Fortune magazine calls Duffy "the man behind fashion's $5 billion man...a merchandiser, a corporate infighter - and the person standing between a famous designer and his demons." Without him, Jacobs himself has trouble imagining where he'd be. As studio director and creative director, respectively, of Louis Vuitton, Duffy and Jacobs revived a brand that was so sluggish its knock-offs got no respect. In the decade after Duffy and Jacobs arrived, they quadrupled LV sales from $1.2 billion to $4.8 billion, it was reported last year by Fortune, maintaining profit margins above 40 percent.
In addition to Louis Vuitton's ready-to-wear lines, the duo produce a high-end Marc Jacobs label and the lower-priced Marc by Marc Jacobs, which includes the wildly popular, "reasonably" priced accessory line. Then there's the menswear and children's clothes, not to mention that heavenly gardenia perfume and more. Duffy has turned Marc Jacobs into an international brand and, with LV's backing, dotted the globe with Marc Jacobs stores.
All this has made Robert Duffy a very rich man. The beautifully appointed houses in New York City's West Village, Savannah, Ga., and Provincetown, Mass., attest to this. (He put the house in Paris on the market.) But the money isn't what drives him. "I was crazed about clothes when I was a kid," says Duffy, who collected department-store shopping bags from places he visited. "I had to have sterling-silver buttons for my navy-blue blazer, and I loved cashmere sweaters - but I liked them with holes."
In fashion he's found a home. "I've asked him if he would ever consider giving all this up, because at this point he could, of course," reports his kid brother, James Duffy, an editor in Wisconsin. "He says he's got too many people with families now depending on him," says Jim, referring to Duffy's loyal employees. Reflecting on his sibling's success, Jim recalls, "Robert always had this quality of owning the room."
Duffy and Marc Jacobs have a 25-year bond that - while never romantic - is deeply emotional. "There's not a person in my life who means as much or who I've had as meaningful a relationship with as Robert," says Jacobs, who has brought his drug addiction to heel with Duffy's help. To their vast fashion enterprise, Duffy is the emotional glue.
You could say Robert Duffy's talent for merchandizing runs in his blood; in fact, one relative established a department store in Butler in 1823. The Duffy family is true Western Pennsylvania royalty, among Butler County's original settling families.
(Left) Remembrance of Things Past: Robert Duffy's talent for business and merchandising might be traced back to his ancestral roots in his hometown of Butler, Pa., where a relative established a fashionable emporium, pictured above at its Main Street site in a Butler Centennial Souvenir of 1900. An advertisement for the store appeared in a School Annual of Butler County, Pennsylvania, 1924-25.
As family genealogist, Jim Duffy recalls how their great-great-great-grandfather Charles Duffy, from Donegal, Ireland, staked his claim in the county in 1796, and the family went on to own significant tracks of land there and erect elegant homes. It was one of Charles' sons, John, a judge, who started Duffy's Store, an early emporium in the county-seat town of Butler. The Duffys also became involved in the oil business. Robert's great-great-grandfather Peter returned from the California gold rush penniless, only to find he was sitting on oil. That vast fortune was partly spent by his son James Edward, a monsignor, erecting Catholic churches in upstate New York, and finally dissipated in the 1929 stock-market crash. A generation later, Robert Duffy Sr. went to college on the GI Bill and raised his three sons - Dennis, Robert and Jim - on his salary as an Armco Steel public-relations manager. Robert Duffy Sr. encouraged his boys to follow their bliss, long before the notion became popular.
It's difficult to imagine a mid-20th-century father tolerating an obsession with fashion in a son, let alone making room for it. Yet, if Robert Sr. took Dennis and Jim to a Pirates game on a Saturday, he'd set aside Sunday for a trip with Robert Jr. to the Carnegie Museum of Art. "My father always thought the most important thing was not to live a lie," remembers Robert Duffy. "He felt everything would be all right if you go where your heart is."