While vintage Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, and Galliano-era Dior pieces remain an archival fashion collector’s dream, designs from Marc Jacobs’s tenure at Louis Vuitton are emerging as the new must-haves. Recent celebrity pulls, a reedition Takashi Murakami collaboration, and an upcoming Sofia Coppola documentary have thrust the designer’s 16-year reign at the house back into the spotlight. In fact, Marc Jacobs–era Louis Vuitton handbags have seen an increase of 44% year-over-year on The RealReal, with the Speedy being the number one searched style, says Rachel Glicksberg, the reseller’s women’s fashion and new-initiatives lead. “Demand for the LV SC bag, which Jacobs and Coppola first collaborated on in 2009, has more than quadrupled this year.”
Lauren Pyes, however, was hunting down rare pieces from the period well before the hype. Pyes, who’s based in Boston and works in alumni affairs at Harvard University, has cultivated a deep admiration for the designer, amounting to a carefully curated archive of nearly 60 pieces of his most iconic work for Louis Vuitton.
“There is a certain irreverence to everything Marc Jacobs makes,” she tells Vogue of her connection to his vision. “I love how his items allow me to go out into the world, inhabit the fairly conservative work environment I have a career in, and still feel like there is something different and elevated about how I am dressed. His designs have a wink of silliness, without being costumey.”
Pyes first fell in love with Jacobs’s work during a trip to Paris at 16. A highlight, she reflects, was visiting the Louis Vuitton flagship on the Champs-Élysées, where the spring 2007 collection had just arrived. “The sight of a pair of sandals with cutout architectural wedges that looked to have gold foil wrapped over their heels set my heart aflutter,” she says. Though they remained in-store (“despite pleading and impassioned reasoning, it was a rational decision by my parents,” she adds), her curiosity was sparked. “The beautiful soft romanticism of that season led me to explore what had come before,” she says, like the grunginess of fall 2006 and collaborations with Murakami and [Stephen] Sprouse.
Her pursuit of rarified goods is both meticulous and delightfully unpredictable. She scours resale platforms, proxy services, and social media accounts and occasionally enlists a professional sourcer to track down hard-to-get finds. Of the extreme lengths she’ll go to for an item, she admits: “I should probably be vague, but let’s just say there is something in my closet that I recently chased down from a country with whom the US currently has trade sanctions.” That dedication is evident in the breadth of her collection, which includes the nurse dresses and coordinating face masks from spring 2008 and a full yellow-and-white Damier look from spring 2013. Every piece—from the theatrical to the understated, from statement makers to little touches—is seen as a portal into Jacobs’s world.
Among her most prized possessions is the actual green wool and taffeta fall 2004 dress worn by Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada. There is also the spring 2012 carousel dress, a garment whose twin was featured in the 2013 “Manus x Machina” Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pyes’s priciest acquisition—the fall 2005 Cherry Sac Fermoir bag, adorned with Murakami cherries, lizard trim, and a dramatic kiss lock—required “a bit of cognitive dissonance when buying it,” she laughs, but confirms it was worth the $4,500 price tag.
Pyes has a particular interest in finishing pieces: the gloves from the spring 2005 collection, a fall 2006 hat she was told was “impossible to find,” and a spring 2007 necklace she ended up selling to a pop star. She describes these accessories as “putting a proverbial exclamation point on the subtle irreverence of his clothes.”
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Her collecting philosophy is simple: She buys for herself, not with a legacy in mind. “The most significant factor behind my decision to part with something is mostly where I am stylistically,” she says, noting the evolution of her wardrobe. Years ago her uniform consisted of blazers and jodhpur pants from Balenciaga’s fall 2007 collection. Today her wardrobe is mostly LV—mixed with some Marc Jacobs main-line pieces (including her thriftiest find, a red velvet leopard-print wrap from fall 2006, worn on the runway by Freja Beha, that she bought for just $33)—and mostly dresses and skirts.
Despite being a deeply sentimental person, as her collection has grown, “those feelings have actually dissipated,” she says. “I don’t have anything so precious that I don’t feel comfortable wearing it. If my style changes, I’ll let things go to make room for whatever the new vibe is.” It’s because Pyes finds joy less in what her archive might mean, or be worth, decades from now and more in the personal thrill of the chase—and also in the quiet rebellion that comes from wearing archival designer collectibles in a city she describes as full of puffer coats and duck boots.
Yet her devotion mirrors a larger cultural shift. As Coppola’s documentary is set to introduce Jacobs’s Vuitton years to a new generation and as demand on resale platforms continues to surge, collectors like Pyes are helping preserve the magic of a bygone era. “I think Marc is underappreciated today,” she says. “While his contributions to Louis Vuitton are underrecognized, his imprint is everywhere. Clothes, shoes, accessories, jewelry, men’s—it all started with him. And people are finally starting to see that again.”
