The essentials

Marc Jacobs, an American fashion house based in New York, has been owned since September 2026 by a partnership of WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group. Ready-to-wear, bags, leather goods, shoes, jewelry, eyewear and fragrance form the catalogue, with handbags as its core. It stages a show 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 Prince Street in Manhattan. This marc jacobs overview designer bags covers the designer, the labels, the corporate structure and the range as they stood in late September 2026. If you came in on the singular search phrase „marc jacob overview“, keep in mind that the correct spelling carries a plural, Jacobs.

1. Founder and Creative Director: Marc Jacobs, a native of New York City born in 1963
2. Founding year: 1984, per the brand’s own timeline
3. Head office: New York City
4. Owners since 1 September 2026: the pairing of WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group
5. Chief Executive: Eric Marechalle, at the helm since 2017
6. Labels still running: Marc Jacobs, The Marc Jacobs, Heaven by Marc Jacobs

The designer in brief

Born in New York City in 1963 and trained at Parsons School of Design, Marc Jacobs graduated in 1984. The youngest ever winner of the CFDA’s Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent, he won it while still a student. He was at Perry Ellis from 1988 and in November 1992 he showed the grunge-inflected spring 1993 collection that made his name and cost him the job. The „Original Grunge Collection“ is logged on his own timeline to 1993 and a redux is listed in 2018. In 1997 he was made the first creative director of Louis Vuitton, where he created its first ready-to-wear and ran artist collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama. The final Louis Vuitton collection he showed came in October 2013, Nicolas Ghesquière succeeded him, and he remains Founder and Creative Director of his own company.

The lines under one name

Four names count in the history of the Marc Jacobs brand, and three are still in use. The runway collections and the dearest products sit with the main line, which carries the plain name. For fourteen years a diffusion line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, sat below it. That space above the price floor is held by The Marc Jacobs, created to occupy it. Heaven by Marc Jacobs sits apart, with its own art direction and price band. The company also runs extensions that are not fashion labels: Bookmarc, Marc Jacobs Beauty and the Bark Jacobs dog line.

Marc Jacobs

The main line is both the runway business and the root of every other label. Bag categories cover The Tote Bag, The Snapshot and The Scene, plus groupings for crossbody, mini, shoulder bags and totes. The Tote Bag forms the largest family, launched in 2019 and reinvented each season. The shape of The Snapshot is a camera bag, and the brand says it was conceived in a Parisian studio with its design team. The Sack Bag first appeared 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 company discontinued the line in 2015, after the fall and winter collection, and folded it back into the main line. What that did was remove a distinct price tier from the business rather than simply rename it. The label now turns up only on resale pieces from that period, the only place it exists. Recognising the name matters, because it is routinely confused with the sub-label that replaced it.

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. That vacated tier is what this lower-priced sub-label, descended in function from Marc by Marc Jacobs, was built to reoccupy. In practice it is the line most casual buyers run into, holding the canvas totes and much of the everyday accessory range. Online, those products are still tagged as part of „THE collection,“ the quickest way to identify one. Deliberate and capitalized, the definite article means it is written The Marc Jacobs. The price confusion around the label is largely the result of mixing it up with the main line.

Heaven by Marc Jacobs

Started in September 2020 under art director Ava Nirui, Heaven by Marc Jacobs was built around youth subculture and a gender-fluid, do-it-yourself sensibility. In the company’s own framing it is a gateway into what it terms the omniverse of Marc Jacobs subversion, and Jacobs is quoted saying that „Heaven is a world within our Marc Jacobs world“. On price it sits well under the main line, with bags around $150 to $250 and tees from about $65 on the US site in September 2026. The range ran to roughly 153 products, and it runs standalone stores in Los Angeles, New York and London. You see artist collaborations in the product names, among them a David Rappeneau shoulder bag listed at about $175. Nirui’s exit was reported in January 2026 with no successor named, so the label’s current creative leadership is not confirmed by the brand.

Ownership and leadership

The question of who owns Marc Jacobs had one answer for nearly thirty years before it changed in 2026. The LVMH majority stake dates to 1997, the year Jacobs took up the Louis Vuitton role, 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 business is split in two by the structure: 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. Roughly $925 million is the figure Business of Fashion and WWD put on the transaction, but LVMH disclosed no value, so it is press-reported rather than official. Marc Jacobs remains Founder and Creative Director, and the closing announcement committed to continuity of the creative vision, collections and shows; Eric Marechalle has been chief executive since 2017.

The show schedule

The four-season calendar that most houses of its size still use is one the company does not follow. There is one show a year, in early February, a few days before New York Fashion Week opens and deliberately off schedule. The collections are seasonless and named for the year, which is why they 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. Trade coverage of the 2026 show, titled „Memory. Loss.“, read it as a turn toward wearability. Whether it also showed during September 2026 fashion week is not confirmed, and on the established pattern the next outing falls in February 2027.

What the brand sells 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. Ready-to-wear, shoes, wallets, jewelry, eyewear and children’s products sit beyond bags, plus a permanent discount section called MARCDOWN. Daisy started the fragrance business 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. Discount weighs heavily in physical retail: 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.