Star artist Anna Weyant has painted designer Marc Jacobs for the cover of Vanity Fair‘s 2026 Style issue.
The magazine’s cover story, “Marc Jacobs Cannot Tell a Lie,” delves into Jacobs’ four decades in fashion and the sale of his namesake, $850 million label, Marc Jacobs International.
In Weyant’s up-close portrait, Jacobs faces the viewer, meeting their gaze, with stone-faced composure against a dark background. Were it not for the artist’s characteristic Dutch Old Master painterly style, and subtle hints at an underlying flamboyance through details like Jacobs’ fashion accessories (teal flower earrings, the ruffled collar of a Chanel tweed top, salon hair clips), the artwork’s framing and composition would recall the sobering directness of a photo ID, as if to say, ‘this is me, take me as I am.’
That is also a running theme within the article. “All I’ve ever been is a fashion victim … I don’t think of that as a bad thing,” Jacobs tells VF. Perhaps, but as model Kaia Gerber tells the magazine, echoing others interviewed, “Marc has never really tried to be anyone other than himself.”
Jacobs has worked with and dressed Weyant in the past. He commissioned her to paint Gerber wearing one of his Fall 2024 creations for a Vogue cover in December of that year. “I love Anna’s women, and I love the idea of Kaia seen by Anna,” he reportedly said at the time. For his September 2025 show at New York’s Academy Mansion, Jacobs also collaborated with Weyant on the set design, which she turned into an immersive installation called The Dollhouse. Models traipsed through the artwork in dollhouse-themed dresses by Jacobs.
Weyant has long explored an eerie dollhouse motif in her work. Her figures, who are often young women, tend to be quietly embroiled in dreamlike, “low-stakes trauma,” as the artist has described it. Yet despite this unease, they are also shown with occasional silliness and wit, as well as an unexpected strength to their paradoxically porcelainlike bodies. Weyant is represented by Gagosian; her painting Falling Woman (2020) sold for $1.6 million at Sotheby’s in 2020, a record for the artist.
The VF feature also includes some fashion industry hot takes, with unusually blunt criticism from Jacobs of the LVMH conglomerate, which decided to sell Jacobs’s label, plus his doubts about the more commercial priorities of the brand’s new owners, the G-III Apparel Group, in partnership with WHP Global. G-III has “a less elegant connotation in the industry,” operating licenses, reports VF. Meanwhile, Jacobs admitted that “LVMH has kept us and done the least possible they can in terms of growing our business,” he said, while adding this was not their fault.
“I get a good feeling about being honest,” Jacobs said, in the context of his personal life, which he notes also includes patronizing art galleries. “It excites me to be open, and it excites me to reveal things that somebody else would keep secret,” Jacobs told VF. “I get a good feeling about being honest,” he added.
