Marc Jacobs thinks it is "problematic" when the fame of models overshadows the designs they are showcasing.
Marc Jacobs worries about models' fame
The 61-year-old designer thinks there are "two ways" for people in his position to work amid the current trend for models-as-stars, to either step apart from them or "embrace" the iconic faces.
In a profile of Kendall Jenner for Vogue magazine, he said: "“When you put Kendall or Kaia or Gigi or Bella in a show, you can expect that most of what you will read online the following day is about those four people being in the show.
“You will know very little about the collection. I think that’s problematic. But this idea of a personality as a great model is just where we’re at.
"What might have been the story in the 1970s, with a Lauren Hutton, who started off as a model and became super well-known as a model—now things are different.
"I think Kendall’s beautiful. She wears clothes with confidence. I think she’s also super nice and charming. She photographs well. She has all the things, but then also this thing that makes her very of this moment, this reality-celebrity thing.
"There are two ways you can deal with that. You can say, I don’t want anything to do with this, or say, This is real and I can embrace it. I think that’s the way you go with Kendall.”
Kendall credits her big break in fashion to walking in Marc's fall 2014 show, and the designer admitted he cast her on the suggestion of his collaborator Katie Grand because he enjoyed the "irony" of taking someone from a globally-famous reality TV show and putting them into an anonymous "army" of models.
He said: "Katie knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t excited by the Kardashian fame.
“I just wasn’t, to be very honest. I was aware of who they were. There was no judgment.
"But I have a job to do, a fashion show, and that means finding models who can show the clothes the way I think they should be shown. That show was very much about the uniformity of the cast.
"Some are more about individuality and maybe exaggerating different models’ features and personalities.
"But in this one there was this almost narcotic-like pull to the thing. It was this army of the same person. Kendall couldn’t be Kendall Jenner at all. It was really about anonymity—which is kind of ironic, and that irony appeals to me.”
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