The groundwork

An American fashion house based in New York, Marc Jacobs has been owned since September 2026 by a partnership of WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group. The catalogue stretches to ready-to-wear, bags, leather goods, shoes, jewelry, eyewear and fragrance, with handbags as its core. It shows roughly once a year, in early February, outside the official New York Fashion Week calendar. Its first store opened in SoHo in 1997, and its flagship today is at 127–129 marc jacobs bags Prince Street in Manhattan. The ground this marc jacobs overview covers is the designer, the labels, the corporate structure and the range as they stood in late September 2026. If you arrived from the singular search phrase “marc jacob overview”, be aware that the correct spelling carries a plural, Jacobs.

1. Founder and Creative Director: Marc Jacobs, a New Yorker born in the city in 1963
2. Founding year: 1984, the date the brand’s own timeline gives
3. Headquarters: the company sits in New York City
4. Owners since 1 September 2026: WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group
5. Chief Executive: Eric Marechalle, running the company since 2017
6. Current labels: Marc Jacobs, The Marc Jacobs, Heaven by Marc Jacobs

The founder

New York City in 1963 was where Marc Jacobs was born, and Parsons School of Design was where he trained, graduating in 1984. As a student he became the youngest ever winner of the CFDA’s Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent. Perry Ellis took him on in 1988 and in November 1992 he showed the grunge-inflected spring 1993 collection that made his name and cost him the job. By his own timeline the “Original Grunge Collection” sits in 1993 and a redux is listed in 2018. In 1997 he took the job of first creative director at Louis Vuitton, where he created its first ready-to-wear and ran artist collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama. Nicolas Ghesquière took over after he showed his last Louis Vuitton collection in October 2013, and he remains Founder and Creative Director of his own company.

The labels under a single name

Out of the four names that matter in the history of the Marc Jacobs brand, three are still in use. The plain name sits on the main line, which holds the runway collections and the priciest products. Below the main line, for fourteen years, sat a diffusion line, Marc by Marc Jacobs. The Marc Jacobs, created to occupy that space, sits above the price floor. With its own art direction and price band, Heaven by Marc Jacobs stands separate from them. Extensions that are not fashion labels are also run by the company: Bookmarc, Marc Jacobs Beauty and the Bark Jacobs dog line.

Marc Jacobs

The main line is where the runway business sits and where every other label began. Bag categories cover The Tote Bag, The Snapshot and The Scene, plus groupings for crossbody, mini, shoulder bags and totes. The largest family is The Tote Bag, launched in 2019 and reinvented each season. The Snapshot uses a camera-bag shape that the brand says was conceived in a Parisian studio with its design team. The Sack Bag turned up first on the 2022 runway, and The Scene now has its own place in the site navigation. The line “No more Birkins, only Tote Bags,” is credited by the company to Jacobs, framing it as a rejection of exclusivity rather than a pursuit of it.

Marc by Marc Jacobs

Marc by Marc Jacobs started in 2001 as the diffusion line, aimed at a younger, cheaper end of the market. It ran fourteen years and was how plenty of shoppers first encountered the designer. The line came to an end in 2015, after the fall and winter collection, and went back into the main line. That removed a distinct price tier from the business rather than simply renaming it. The label now turns up only on resale pieces from that period, the only place it exists. Because it is routinely confused with the sub-label that replaced it, recognising the name matters.

The Marc Jacobs

The Marc Jacobs was announced in December 2018 and launched for pre-fall 2019, about four years after the diffusion line closed. It is a lower-priced sub-label descended in function from Marc by Marc Jacobs, built to reoccupy the tier the company had vacated. In practice it is the line most casual buyers run into, holding the canvas totes and much of the everyday accessory range. The online tag on those products is still “THE collection,” the quickest way to identify one. Because the definite article is deliberate and capitalized, it is written The Marc Jacobs. Most of the price confusion around the label traces back to mixing it up with the main line.

Heaven by Marc Jacobs

September 2020 brought Heaven by Marc Jacobs under art director Ava Nirui, and it was built around youth subculture and a gender-fluid, do-it-yourself sensibility. The company calls it a gateway into what it terms the omniverse of Marc Jacobs subversion, and quotes Jacobs saying that “Heaven is a world within our Marc Jacobs world”. Well under the main line on price, it had bags around $150 to $250 and tees from about $65 on the US site in September 2026. Roughly 153 products sat in the range, and standalone stores run in Los Angeles, New York and London. Artist collaborations show up in product names, including a David Rappeneau shoulder bag listed at about $175. News of Nirui’s departure came in January 2026 with no successor named, so the label’s current creative leadership is not confirmed by the brand.

The owners and the leadership

Who owns Marc Jacobs was a question with one answer for nearly thirty years, until it changed in 2026. The year Jacobs took up the Louis Vuitton role, 1997, was also when LVMH acquired a majority stake, and the exact percentage was never published. On 14 May 2026 LVMH made public a definitive agreement to sell the brand to WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group; the deal closed on 1 September 2026. The arrangement splits the business in two: a fifty-fifty joint venture owns the intellectual property with WHP Global leading licensing, while G-III operates the wholesale, retail and e-commerce business under a long-term license from that venture. Business of Fashion and WWD put the transaction at roughly $925 million, but LVMH disclosed no value, so that figure is press-reported rather than official. Marc Jacobs continues as Founder and Creative Director, with the closing announcement committing to continuity of the creative vision, collections and shows; Eric Marechalle has been chief executive since 2017.

The show cadence

Unlike most houses of its size, the company does not follow the four-season calendar they still use. It shows once a year, in early February, a few days before New York Fashion Week opens and deliberately off schedule. Seasonless and named for the year, the collections are called runway collections rather than spring or fall lines. Recent editions ran on 2 February 2024 at the Park Avenue Armory, on 3 February 2025 at the New York Public Library, and in February 2026 at the Armory again. Writing about the 2026 show, titled “Memory. Loss.”, the trade press read it as a turn toward wearability. Whether a show also took place during September 2026 fashion week is not confirmed, and on the established pattern the next outing falls in February 2027.

What is on sale today

Commercially the core is handbags, with 312 products in the full bag listing on the US site in September 2026, across canvas, jacquard, leather, denim and seasonal fabrics. Starting at about $150 for canvas totes and reaching about $598, while The Dakota Tote sits at roughly $798, the prices are all figures that vary by country and change without notice. Past the bags come ready-to-wear, shoes, wallets, jewelry, eyewear and children’s products, plus a permanent discount section called MARCDOWN. Fragrance dates to Daisy in 2007, named after Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. Marc Jacobs Beauty goes back to 2014 and now operates under Coty, which relaunched the line in 2026, while watches were discontinued after November 2019 and carry no valid warranty. Physical retail leans toward discount: the store locator listed 103 locations in September 2026, of which 46 were boutiques and 57 outlets, with Regent Street in London the only boutique in Europe.