Fashion began, for me, as a bribe: When stay-at-home dad had errands to run, he would entice me to come along with the promise of a magazine from the grocery store. At first, I was fixated on the teeny-boppers of the publishing world—the J-14s and Tiger Beats—but in time, inspired by my steady culture diet of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, I became a religious Teen Vogue subscriber.
Every month, like clockwork, I would tear through my issue until I came across Juergen Teller’s Marc Jacobs advertisements. In one portrait, a model with frizzy red locks pinned back by an enormous floral hairpiece hid her eyes behind a pair of equally large glasses. Another stood atop a crate of oranges, holding her striped dress out wide. I especially loved the ads for Jacobs’s fragrance, Daisy, and their pastoral scenes: the grinning model reclining in a field of tall grass, dressed in a white lace bralette and panties, or the grungy blonde posing on horseback, cradling a bottle of Daisy Eau So Fresh.
Each of Teller’s artfully overexposed photographs told the story of another time or locale—outfitted to perfection by Jacobs, of course. I was particularly taken with his spring 2011 collection, a 1970s-inspired romp through Cannes in shades of ochre, raspberry, and orchid. While I hated to desecrate my magazines with scissors, the thought of those beloved ads landing in the recycling bin (or, more accurately, living under my bed), never to see the light of day again, was just as upsetting—so I painstakingly extracted the pages from the spine, taping them to my closet wall so that I could look at them every day. They stayed there until they were sunbleached.
Jacobs’s Teller images introduced a generation of young people to fashion. When I joined Tumblr in my adolescence, I was delighted to find a treasure trove of other photographs that predated my Teen Vogue subscription: a precocious Dakota Fanning gazing knowingly at the camera; Jamie Bochert balancing a handbag on the sole of her platform sandal; Victoria Beckham’s legs emerging from an oversized shopping bag.
These were the arresting scenes that first piqued my interest in fashion. Sure, I was an avid ANTM watcher, but the undiluted fashion in Jacobs’s ads stirred something in me that a campy reality show never could. Beyond wearing his clothing, I wanted to live in the world he created. I would peruse the Bookmarc on Melrose until I was eventually able to buy a small pair of enamel daisy earrings, which I still have somewhere—my first taste of luxury.
I’m surely not the only person in my generation who was entranced by Teller’s ads. Call it effective marketing, but I can only imagine how many young people got their start—or at least owe their interest—in fashion to Marc Jacobs.
