Marc Jacobs and Porn Star?

Marc Jacobs kicked off Fashion Week with a documentary on the behind-the-scenes life of a designer - although many viewers would have likely been more interested in the secret tryst he’s been having with a porn star.

Jacobs has been quietly seeing adult film actor Erik Rhodes and whisking him away to secret locations, sources told Page Six. The new fling is likely the reason things have cooled again between Jacobs and former male escort Jason Preston, whom he’s dated on and off since 2005.

Sources said Jacobs’ affair with Rhodes - who describes himself as “Addictive. Wild. Open” on his ManNet.com profile - began last year when the designer invited Rhodes to join him and Preston for a three-way. Jacobs allegedly continued the fling with Rhodes one on one after that.

“Jason thought he and Marc were exclusive again,” said our insider. “But Marc is sleeping with this porn star behind his back, and sneaking him to Paris for hot sex.”

Rhodes seems an unlikely partner for the flamboyant fashionista, who counts Winona Ryder and Ashley Olsen as close friends. The guy-on-guy actor proudly wrote on his profile that he is “full-blown gay” and starred in adult movies such as “Flesh,” “Flex,” and “Beefcake.”

When we saw Preston Thursday night at the Cinema Society bash sponsored by W magazine for the documentary “Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton,” he was keeping his distance from the designer.

The two were on opposite ends of the room, and a fellow party guest noted the duo seemed to be avoiding each other.

Jacobs has done a couple of stints in rehab for drug abuse, and Preston made waves when he had Jacobs’ full name tattooed on his forearm. The boytoy told HX magazine last year they were “engaged.”

Despite the hot designer’s extracurricular activities, we hear Preston still plans to attend tomorrow’s Jacobs show with Aly Hilfiger as his date.

Asked about Rhodes, Jacobs told Page Six through a spokesperson, “He’s a really nice guy and we are just friends.”

Source: NY Post: PageSix

Jacobs Receives Designer of the Year Award

New York - The man whose own latest accessory is dyed blue hair, Marc Jacobs, took home the "Designer of the Year" award at the 11th Annual ACE Awards in New York on Nov. 5, one of many people honored by the Accessories Council this year for their achievements in the world of accessories.

Jacobs, whose shoes and handbags for both his signature collection and his younger Marc by Marc Jacobs brand are highly sought after items, also designs accessories for one of the most recognizable luxury brands in the world, Louis Vuitton, which he reinvents season after season. His latest collection, shown on the runways in Paris in October, featured a collaboration with artist Richard Prince.

Actress Mandy Moore was honored as "Fashion Innovator," while supermodel and "Project Runway" producer Heidi Klum, who designed a jewelry line of her own that she will wear in upcoming episodes, received the "Fashion Influencer" award. Moore opted to wear a form-fitting black satin shirt dress, while Klum wore a black and gold brocade gown. Jessica Simpson, a presenter, wore a black and gold sheath.

Black dresses - perhaps better for highlighting one's accessories - turned out to be the prevailing statement of the evening, as fellow honoree Tory Burch, whose new line garnered the "Accessory Brand Launch" award, wore an elegant black halter gown. Presenter Helena Christensen and Lucy Liu, who accepted Valentino's lifetime achievement award on his behalf, also looked stunning in tiered dresses - Liu's, from the Valentino couture collection, featured dramatic, full ruffles and Christensen's was Grecian column-meets-flapper.

The other award winners included Macy's, Inc. (Retailer of the Year), Harper's Bazaar (Magazine of the Year), Scoop (Specialty Retailer of the Year), Bridget Foley (Marylou Luther Award for Fashion Journalism) and Nancy Gonzalez (Brand of the Year).

The City’s Top Inkers

By Jenny Eliscu

(Photo: Naga Sakai/Hair by Yo-Hey Nakatsuka; Makeup by Tussy Yoshida; Special Thanks to Fast Ashley's Studio)

He’s so busy with commercial ventures (like designing ads for Camel cigarettes, for example) that he only lays ink on the weekends, but it’s still worth the three-month wait for Scott Campbell. His knowledge of what he calls “antique ornamentation and specialized typography”—as well as old-school classics like swallows, anchors, sailing ships—is exhaustive, which is why his Williamsburg studio, Saved Tattoo, pulls in clients like Marc Jacobs, Josh Hartnett, Heath Ledger, and Helena Christensen. The price is steep ($1,000 for the first hour, $200 each hour thereafter), but it’s worth the investment to brandish one of Campbell’s works on your skin forever (3 Hope St., nr. Roebling St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn; 718-486-0850).

And introducing four other needle geniuses:

(Photo: Tina Tyrell)

STEPHANIE TAMEZ
New York Adorned, 47 Second Ave., nr. 3rd St.; 212-473-0007
Specialty: Typography.
Tamez spent several years doing graphic-design work before realizing that her skills could translate to skin. “Because I didn’t have a traditional tattoo background, I’d say to clients, ‘Let’s play with some fonts,’ ” says the 44-year-old, who has worked at New York Adorned since she moved to the city in 2001. Lettering allows clients to achieve a more spartan, elegant design. “Right now, I really like mixing and matching typeface styles,” she says. “It’s fun to figure out how many fonts to explore in one piece.” Tamez prefers clients with realistic goals, though. “When people want the whole Our Father prayer on their shoulder blade, I’m like, ‘I can do it, but it’s not going to look good over time. You’re not going to be able to read it.’ ” She’s not yet a marquee name—hence the relatively short wait for an appointment—but that’s just a matter of time.
Wait list: Four months.
Price range: $200 to $400 per hour.

(Photo: Courtesy of Anil Gupta)

ANIL GUPTA
Inkline Studios, 513 E. 5th St., nr. Ave. A; 212-614-0094
Specialty: Realistic, portraiture.
Gupta is the Zen-calm master of precise reproduction. His East Village shop is stocked with art and photo books that he uses to create his tattoos: Xerox-perfect portraits, elaborate Celtic knotwork, biomechanical nightmares, tribal-inspired abstract pieces, replicas of Dalí and Da Vinci. Since he moved here from India in 1991, he has tattooed celebrities including Christian Slater, John McEnroe, and Rosie O’Donnell. The 44-year-old’s big breakthrough came fourteen years ago, when he inked a perfect postage-stamp-size copy of the cover of the Grateful Dead’s 1974 Skeletons From the Closet. Gupta suggests that clients think abstractly rather than literally about their designs. “If you lost your dog, you don’t need to get a portrait of your dog,” he says. “Maybe your dog reminds you of a cloud because he was fluffy. Then you can ask for a running, fluffy cloud on your arm.”
Wait list: Six months.
Price range: Starts at $450.

(Photo: Courtesy of Paul Booth)

PAUL BOOTH
Last Rites Tattoo Theatre, 511 W. 33rd St., nr. Tenth Ave., third fl.; 212-529-0666
Specialty: Horror, gothic, realistic, grayscale.
Booth is the go-to artist for rock and roll, and his goth work can be seen on members of Sepultura, Slayer, Pantera, and Slipknot, among other bands. Metalheads both professional and amateur go to his Chelsea shop for his detail-laden, demonic pieces, rendered freehand in a black-ink wash known as grayscale. The 40-year-old New Jersey native got his first tattoo (the name of his daughter, Tabitha) when he was 19, and started apprenticing at a Jersey parlor shortly thereafter. Don’t ask Booth to tattoo your face—“I don’t want to be the guy that gets a phone call in a year of some guy crying, going, ‘Why did you let me do this?’”—and take good care of his handiwork. “No matter how good the artist is, if you don’t do your best to heal it, it’s crap. It’s all about Lubriderm, washing it gently every day, and keeping it out of the sun.”
Wait list: Two years.
Price range: Starts at $300 per hour.

(Photo: Courtesy of Mike Rubendall)

MIKE RUBENDALL
King’s Avenue Tattoo, 844 Broadway, nr. N. Nassau Ave., N. Massapequa, N.Y.; 516-799-5464
Specialty: Japanese, horror, neo-traditional.
It’s worth the schlep to Nassau County to get inked by Rubendall, who used to work at Adorned but now has his own shop (which will be featured in the season premiere of Tattoo Wars, a reality show on the Learning Channel this fall). Some of his best pieces combine traditional Japanese motifs—koi fish, cherry blossoms—with the kinds of ghouls, demons, and gore you’ll find in Booth’s portfolio. But Rubendall favors the Eastern aesthetic, he says, because “it’s open and bold and colorful, and you can see it from across the street. It’ll look good forever.” He researches the images and aesthetic principles intensely. “If you’re doing a sleeve, you wouldn’t mix cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums. If you’re going to do it, you should do it correctly, and with respect for the culture.”
Wait list: One year.
Price range: $125 to $200 per hour. Expect a full back to take at least 30 hours.

Attack of the Fashion Gremlins

The Row: sophisticated, sexual, Olsen-designed. (Photo: Courtesy of the Row)

‘I grew up horseback riding,” Mary-Kate says, lighting the first of what will be many Marlboro reds. “I never even picked up a fashion magazine when I was a kid.” But she did like fashion, and marvels with gaspy teenage incredulity over the dress code at her high school (khaki pants, collared shirts, closed-toed shoes), which, so she figures, was what first inspired her to look less like everyone else.

Mary-Kate’s first show was Marc Jacobs. Then there was a trip to Paris: Balenciaga, Christian Dior, French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. “When I really started looking at fashion, I was amazed,” she says. She claims to have arrived at her vampiric European look through a series of accidents. There was the giant-sweater boho era of her (short-lived) NYU career—“I was just trying to stay warm!” She also insists she was trying to be somewhat inconspicuous on her way to class, but the heaped-on layers, the giant sunglasses, the hunormous lattes had quite the opposite effect. Every other starlet was showing oodles of flesh, and here was this little gremlin buried in a massive hat. How not to be intrigued?

Mary-Kate left NYU (she’s still enrolled and has just a year and a half to go) because she didn’t feel safe, she says. She was freaked out by the kids in her class who were selling anecdotes to tabloids, in some cases even getting school credit for it. “They’d have internships at the weeklies,” she says, adding, “Learning is not fun if you’re not safe.”

Mary-Kate’s style has evolved since then. Fashion followed her into big coats and glasses, so now she is going small, dressed today in a tiny knit black dress and well-fitted coat.

The Row, she says, “was my sister’s baby, and of course I wanted to do whatever I could to help her.” She suggested additions to the line, like oversize man-tailored pants.

Both Olsens insist that they don’t shop much. They like simple, somewhat anonymous pieces and loads of accessories. “I love how you can totally change your look by changing your shoes,” Mary-Kate says, and pauses. “Or maybe you don’t look different, and no one else thinks you look different, but I feel different, anyway.” She laughs the crinkly-nosed, squinty-eyed chipmunk laugh that made her a tween queen, and then announces that she’s off to an audition. “I’m so sorry,” she says a few times, and then she’s gone.

Ashley arrives next, tottering across the garden on her own crazy, crazy shoes: They are sandals, platforms, stilettos all at once. Ashley is still tiny but somehow more robust than her sister. She was born first, is maybe two inches taller, and her bearing is far more alpha than Mary-Kate’s. Her look is somehow sleeker—giant Christian Dior shades, tight, narrow rubber pants, a tiny leather jacket with little ruched sleeves. Where Mary-Kate takes her soy latte decaf, Ashley asks for a double shot.

Within seconds of sitting (and lighting her Parliament Light), she’s talking business. “This is hands-on,” she says. “It’s production, it’s planning, it’s taking the right steps. It’s everything you need to do to start a business.” She looks like something from a cartoon, but she talks like she’s just stepped out of a Joan Collins boardroom scene.

The Olsens have been businesswomen for years, vetting their merchandising deals at Wal-Mart and elsewhere. But their work —in both fashion and “film”—has never been exactly a reflection of who they were or the adult lives they’d been leading. “When we were growing up, it was always about being appropriate,” Ashley says of the years spent in matching floral party dresses and silly sailor hats. And that’s what their Wal-Mart line reflects. But they’ve grown up to be something other than mainstream and appropriate. College taught Ashley what she wanted to do, but, as is so often the case, inadvertently. “I was studying architecture and psychology and I loved it, but I kept thinking about T-shirts and how to make the perfect one. It was my dad who said, ‘You should do it.’ ”

So she called a childhood friend, a designer named Danielle Sherman, and got to work. “That’s what I’m good at,” she says. “Seeing voids.” Ashley says she left NYU because she was ready to do the Row. “Wal-Mart was about the customer,” she says. “It taught us how to be commercial. This is about me and my sister, and what we like to wear.”

The Olsens are aware that their fame, so useful at Dualstar, is liable to be a hindrance with their new line—fashionistas won’t fall over each other to buy $150 T-shirts from a young-adult brand. So the Olsen name appears nowhere on the product, and they won’t be photographed in its promotion.

Whether the Row will attract the customers who buy Alaïa and Ghesquière is an open question. But the clothes do, in fact, stand on their own. They are sophisticated, elegant, versatile, understated. In a way, it’s a different tween act—idols to both goofy little girls and snotty fashion ladies. And for all their riches, it’s what they wanted. “I think,” says Mary-Kate, “my sister would be happy selling it out of the back of her car.”

The Hi-Lo Country

Few members of today's art world embody the tensions between glamour and artistic integrity as surely as British-born, New York-based critic and curator Neville Wakefield. Which is why Wakefield was a natural choice to curate the fifth Frieze Projects (which, along with the rest of the Frieze, gets underway tomorrow), and why his goal is to remind us that art fairs aren't only about sales and high-profile buyers; the art is also worth paying attention to. He practices a souped-up form of scholarship, combining mass and high culture, uptown and downtown style, art and fashion. He has been a contributing editor to such varied publications as Another Magazine and the academic journal Open City, and is the author of scholarly books on fashion photography and postmodern theory and a contributing photo editor at Visionaire.

Why do you think the relationship between fashion and art is consistently so interesting to critics and curators?
The art/fashion duet is always fascinating, and I think critics and curators are attentive to it in part to see who's taking the lead. The art calendar has come to resemble the fashion calendar, with major destination events taking place almost according to seasons. Now you are just as likely to see Stefano Pilati or Marc Jacobs at a fair or biennial as you are to see Elizabeth Peyton or Rachel Feinstein at a fashion show. But essentially it's not about either fashion or art. It's simply that the lamp of wealth and commerce attracts moths of all colors and what's interesting is the nature of the dance.

Do you believe in a high/ low hierarchy between art and fashion?
I don't know whether I believe in a hierarchy, but I do know that generally I'm not interested in art that is worn as fashion or fashion that is fetishized as art. To me they are different entities with very different roles. Even couture, which is perhaps closest to art in its intent, is ultimately about design and not, as I believe art to be, about transcendence.

How did you select the works you'll show in Frieze Projects?
I was interested in commissioning work that in one way or another engaged with the conditions of the fair itself and what it means to show work in such intense hothouse conditions. The responses ranged from the spectacular—Richard Prince's take on the fair as a yard sale for rich people—to the beautifully elusive work of Mario Garcia Torres, who is this year's recipient of the Cartier Award.

How is curating for Frieze different than selecting work for a more conventional exhibition space?
It's an entirely different process from putting on something in a white cube. Not only does the work have to be able to survive and be seen in an environment that is continually vying for your attention, it also has to meet the health and safety requirements of an event that attracts over 60,000 people. For instance, one proposal that we took seriously was a cattle grid installed across the entranceway. It was meant to be a riff on the stampede to collect, its underlying herd mentality, and the demarcation of the English countryside but in the end just couldn't be done.

How is Frieze different from other fairs?
What distinguishes Frieze from other art fairs is that it was founded on a critical rather than commercial culture. This feeds into nearly every aspect of the Fair, from the pavilion designed by architect Jamie Fobert in Regent's Park to the fiercely independent curatorial program. The FAF is greater than the sum of its commercial parts—it's both bellwether and overview of what's going on in the international art world.

—Ana Finel Honigman
Photo: David Velasco/Artforum.com
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 03:02 PM