Science & Tech Quote by Marc Jacobs

Marc Jacobs isn’t confessing incompetence so much as performing a kind of luxury innocence: the idea that a “real” designer life happens in studios, fittings, and feelings, not in browser tabs and resale listings. Dropping eBay by name is the tell. It’s not “the internet” in general; it’s the messy, democratized marketplace where taste gets priced, authenticated, flipped, and argued over by strangers. Saying he can’t find it “if my life depended on it” is hyperbole with a purpose: it frames online commerce as not just unfamiliar, but beneath the emotional stakes of his world.

The subtext is a controlled distance from the churn of consumer behavior that eBay represents. Designers depend on desire, but they also benefit from selective opacity: mystery helps keep the brand floating above the bargain hunt. Jacobs positions himself as the artist who makes the objects, not the guy refreshing auctions to see what last season’s bag is going for. That posture protects creative authority, even as it dodges the less romantic reality that fashion is an ecosystem of resale, knockoffs, and secondary markets.

Context matters, too. Jacobs came up in an era when “authentic” creativity was still coded as analog, and being too online could read as desperate or managerial. The line lands because it’s both relatable and strategic: a celebrity shrug that signals, “I’m busy being me,” while quietly reinforcing the old hierarchy where the designer creates value and the marketplace merely chases it.