Marc by Marc Jacobs Announces Two Major Hires

For the first time in the 13-year of Marc by Marc Jacobs, the company has publicly announced two new key creative hires - creative director and design director - that are people other than Marc Jacobs himself.

"He's still the boss," said Robert Duffy, president and vice chairman of Marc Jacobs International, when WWD asked what the appointments of Katie Hillier to the role of creative director, and Luella Bartley to design director of women's ready-to-wear, meant for Jacobs and the secondary line. "He's as involved as he wants to be. It depends on the season."

Marc by Marc has always been more Duffy's responsibility than Jacobs', especially with the expansion of the Marc Jacobs designer label and the Louis Vuitton. Jacobs remains the boss at large of Marc by Marc, Hillier will oversee everything involving the women's collection. The current men's team remains the same and will continue to report to Karl Aberg, global design director of men's collections.

"She [Hillier] has a million ideas. She likes to work with the same type of person I like to work with," said Duffy.

"I am very excited to have Katie here in her new role," said Jacobs. "Her creativity and energy inspires me and everybody she works with. She is a great leader. She is a team player and a great friend to Robert and me."

Duffy added that "Katie is allowed to staff the team any way she wants." That included hiring Bartley, a fellow English designer, for whom Hillier designed accessories in the early days of Bartley's own rtw collection, Luella, which she ran from 1999 to 2009.

Naming Hillier and Bartley to their respective titles is a big change for Marc by Marc, which, by Duffy's own admission, was "getting a little stale." The look has always been youthful and slightly retro. When Duffy and Jacobs launched Marc by Marc Jacobs in 2000, they were really the first. They discovered a new market in fashion that had previously been dead. But now with Phillip Lim, Alexander Wang and Alice + Olivia things are changing. They needed to make a change.

"The competition has become too great," said Duffy of the contemporary market. "We have an issue with the ready-to-wear. I knew it because I pay very close attention to company-owned retail stores and I knew what was happening. We started out really strong in denim, and then we just let it go. We rested on our laurels and it hurt us."

It's no coincidence that Hillier and Bartley are coming a little more than a year after the company experienced a corporate shuffle, replacing founding president Carolyn Risoli with Liz Fraser. Fraser came in and "started kicking ass - you can quote me on that," said Duffy. "She just sat down in front of me and said, 'I. Need. To. Change. Everything.'"