Marc Jacobs was born in New York City on 9 April 1963. His father, an agent at the William Morris Agency, died when he was a boy, and as a teenager he went to live with his grandmother in the Majestic on Central Park West. At fifteen he worked as a stockboy at Charivari, the avant-garde boutique on the Upper West Side. He studied at the High School of Art and Design and then at Parsons School of Design, where in 1984 he won the Perry Ellis Gold Thimble and was named Design Student of the Year. His hand-knit sweaters from that period sold under the Sketchbook label.

At Parsons he met Robert Duffy, who became his business partner for three decades. In 1986, with the backing of Onward Kashiyama, Jacobs showed the first collection under his own name. The next year, at 24, he became the youngest designer to receive the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent. In 1988 he and Duffy took over the women's division at Perry Ellis. His spring 1993 collection there, which brought the thrift-shop look of Seattle grunge onto the runway, became one of the most famous of its era. Critics admired it, but buyers did not take to it, and he was let go. The CFDA named him Women's Designer of the Year in 1992.

He and Duffy relaunched Marc Jacobs in 1993, adding menswear the following year. In 1997 LVMH took a stake in the business and appointed Jacobs the first creative director of Louis Vuitton, where he introduced ready-to-wear. Over sixteen years he turned the trunk-maker into a fashion house, partly through collaborations with artists that changed the relationship between luxury and art: Stephen Sprouse's graffiti, Takashi Murakami's multicoloured monogram, and work with Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama. His last Louis Vuitton show, for spring 2014, was an elegiac black installation that revisited his earlier sets. He left to concentrate on his own label.

His own house grew in parallel. The diffusion line Marc by Marc Jacobs, launched in 2001, at its peak had hundreds of shops around the world before it was folded into the main brand in 2015. The fragrance Daisy, launched in 2007, became one of the most successful scents of its generation. In 2020 he introduced Heaven, a younger, gender-fluid line. He was included in Time's list of the hundred most influential people in 2010 and has won numerous CFDA awards, including the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

Jacobs is known for runway shows of great theatricality, and in recent seasons for small, concentrated presentations at the Park Avenue Armory and the New York Public Library. He married his partner, Charly Defrancesco, in 2019.

In 2026 LVMH sold the Marc Jacobs brand to the brand-management firm WHP Global and the apparel group G-III, which completed the acquisition on 1 September 2026 through a joint venture. Jacobs remains founder and creative director, responsible for the brand's creative vision, runway collections and shows, while G-III leads operations and WHP leads licensing.