On the day that we speak, I’ve just returned from a stint of shows that appeared bigger and more boisterous than ever: resort collections staged across the globe with a gruelling frequency, the calendars of menswear and couture weeks ramped up to a newly frenetic pace, audiences dripping with sweat through one of the hottest European summers on record. What happened, I wonder, to that brief but seemingly potent burst of enthusiasm for building a more environmentally and mentally sustainable future? Marc pauses and, across Zoom, raises an eyebrow: “What happened is what always happens with fashion people. They have a five-second memory.”

He’s right. To pretend otherwise is to be wilfully blinkered to the forces that underpin fashion. But to discuss commerce within the framework of creativity is too often seen as somewhat seedy, as if acknowledging the shadowy infrastructure of this industry strips away its ineffable allure. But those mechanisms are vital to understanding Marc Jacobs’ post-pandemic liberation; to how he has found freedom amid fashion’s frenzied return. “I have to be honest,” he explains. “Doing what I’m doing now – it’s partly a choice, and partly a necessity.”

When he returned to the runway, it was with a far smaller team but a newly liberated mindset – one which shone through his first collection, shown in New York in July 2021, and which mesmerised the industry. Silhouettes of epic proportions which hybridised reality and fantasy – cocooning Carhartt jackets and protective puffers slowly shed to reveal fluid gowns draped with a 20s elegance but modern ease – were declared the great return of a master showman, and appeared emancipated from the constraints of mass merchandising. As Marc put it to me: “Sometimes at the shows, I hear people say, ‘Is this what people want to wear?’ But I don’t really think like that. I think, ‘Is this what fashion people want to see?’” After two years in tracksuits, this was exactly what we were hungry for: the refreshing splendour of fashion for fashion’s sake, without an entry-point must-have or a new handbag in sight.

Instead of being conventionally retailed on shop floors, the pieces Marc presented were available only through a made-to-order service at Bergdorf Goodman. Rather than depending on runway pieces flying off the rails, the profits of the business could instead be sought through the likes of his Tote and Snapshot handbags, while the 2020 launch (and resounding success) of his 90s-meets-Euphoria line Heaven – helmed by Ava Nirui and fronted by the likes of Mena Suvari and Nicki Minaj – allowed a new demographic to buy into the Marc Jacobs universe. The debut of a Monogram line and a doubling-down on perfume allowed the business to expand even further.

Then, without much of a specific plan as to how things might evolve, six months later, “me and Joseph (Carter, from his design team) and Alastair (McKimm, Marc’s collaborator) decided that we were going to make some more clothes.” He explains that he never feels inspired until he picks up his tools but, once he did, ten looks evolved: developments on the same visual themes as those which defined the first, often re-appropriating the garments themselves. The paillettes which once formed dresses were slashed and wrapped around the body to become bandage tops; a skirt assembled out of five pairs of cargo pants; a denim jacket transformed into a sculpted stole.

So, in July of this year, and for his second runway collection in this new spirit, Marc chose to continue the approach: pure imagination made manifest at the New York Public Library before a tiny audience. He started once more with the ten looks he’d created previously, re-fitting the skirts and treating the denim, before deciding that what was still most interesting to him was silhouette. He began to draw upon the everyday items that surrounded him – the sickly shades of protective gloves worn by his manicurist, the tank tops and jeans that abound on the streets of New York – and piled them upon his fit model, twisting, shaping and re-draping them into new forms.

That same philosophy inspired the looks that appeared like hospital scrubs: paper-thin sheets of waxed leather, bonded with organza, that paid tribute to the most vital and familiar uniform of the past few years. It was purely a coincidence, Marc says, that his show occurred just days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and that the fetishistic, shining leather dress which opened the show was built so that, in profile, the stomach appeared almost pregnant. He’d been looking at Comme des Garçons’ famous “lumps and bumps” collection, and then a Vivienne Westwood documentary he watched made him think about how she had used corsetry as a radical device of liberation. He thought about how “one of the conversations that seems very valid today is how women choose to create their ideal shape” and so had worked with boning and horsehair padding to play with proportions of the body, with his model ending up taking on a slightly unintentional swell. “I wish I could say that it was a Roe v. Wade statement, but it really wasn’t; it was more about shape,” he says. “Nothing we did had anything to do with those current events but, while we were apart from it in our own little world, we felt the world. We are part of the world. And things do take on a meaning; you can’t deny time, or the time we’re in.” He named his collection Choice because “it seemed like the right word – I wasn’t trying to create a political conversation, but I couldn’t not reflect what felt imminent and important in that moment.”

“It really doesn’t matter who they are, or how they identify. What matters is finding someone who brings strength to the vision,” he says. “I still get this chill when I see evidence of change in a positive direction. And, although we have a lot of fear right now – with Roe v. Wade, with what that might mean for gay marriage, for so many things, I marvel at the freedom and the openness of so many young people I meet. When I read, and when I see the expanding and non-binary definitions in evidence, I just get really excited.”

It’s an exciting new path he’s treading, one paved by what appears to be his seemingly limitless imagination – albeit one which remains rooted in reality. As he says: “I’m not an inventor: I don’t need to invent anything. I just want to reimagine it.”