D2 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020
pher on the portrait’s ad hoc crew of three,
while Julio Espada, Mr. Jacobs’s former de-
sign associate at Perry Ellis, is the stylist.
For a world-class designer, the setup is re-
markably D.I.Y. “This is a ring light I lit-
erally got on Amazon for, like, $35,” said Mr.
Newbold, whose only other equipment is a
Sony camera and a tripod.
Yet the attitude on set has the profes-
sional conviction required for a high fashion
editorial. Mr. Jacobs is not known to do
things in half measures.
“Just a typical Sunday,” he said, emerging
from his room in a bobbed wig parted to the
side, his eyes aggressively coaled Cleo-
patra-style, with a silver streak at the cor-
ners. He was wearing a bespoke shirt, tie
and shorts from his own label, a burgundy
oversize cardigan by O’Connell’s, a cuff, belt
and kitten heel sandals by Hermès, a brace-
let and brooch by David Webb, earrings by
Harry Winston, a pearl necklace by Miki-
moto and, over his custom Marc Jacobs
leather gloves, a pinkie ring by Solange
Azagury Partridge. “Can you see the ring?
Are you getting the ring?”
Mr. Newbold captured the boss posing in
the den in front of the lit fireplace, his right
leg extended balletically, foot perched on a
small pile of logs. It would be posted to Mr.
Jacobs’s 1.5 million followers the next morn-
ing with sappy lyrics from “Only Love Is
Real” by Carole King. Everything is meticu-
lously credited, including the photographer.
A Confidant and a Caretaker
Such access to Mr. Jacobs, who has long re-
lationships with renowned photographers
like David Sims, Juergen Teller and Steven
Meisel, would be a coup for any aspiring
photographer. For Mr. Newbold, who may
be Mr. Jacobs’s most frequent and intimate
collaborator, it was never part of the plan.
Neither a professional photographer nor
striving to be, Mr. Newbold is Mr. Jacobs’s
personal assistant. In the eight years since
he has been on the job, his duties have
grown. He still walks the dogs, orders food
and runs errands, but he also oversees
things like his boss’s art collection.
“I’m buying everything, but sold it all,
too, obviously with Sotheby’s,” Mr. Newbold
said, referring to last year’s clearing house
of Mr. Jacobs’s collection, including works
by Ed Ruscha and Elizabeth Peyton.
Mr. Jacobs offloaded his art collection,
and his Greenwich Village townhouse to
make way for his new life in the suburbs
with his new husband, Charly Defrancesco.
They married last year and promptly
plunked down $9.175 million on a 6,000-
square-foot Frank Lloyd Wright-designed
house, which they are restoring with the ar-
chitect’s conservancy.
In the meantime, the couple is holed up at
a rented funky estate appointed with curi-
ous 1970s design relics — the mirrored pow-
der room has a brown porcelain toilet. Mr.
Newbold wrangled the property through
Alice and Thomas Tisch, sellers of the
Wright house. “I’ve done everything from
demo old houses to get coffee,” he said.
Mr. Newbold now also sits in on packag-
ing, production, merchandising and mar-
keting meetings. “I don’t even know what
his title is,” Mr. Jacobs said. “His title is Nick
Newbold. He does a lot of stuff and he does
all of it well.” Mr. Jacobs added: “If you
asked Eric Marechalle, the C.E.O. of Marc
Jacobs International, how vital Nick is, he
would tell you he values Nick probably
above everyone. Nick is that whisperer that
can understand what corporate needs and
what creative needs and he’s able to filter
the two and make it OK for both.”
More than a conduit, Mr. Newbold is a
confidant and caretaker to Mr. Jacobs. He
joins him and Mr. Defrancesco on vacation.
On a trip to St. Barths a few years ago, Mr.
Newbold filmed Marc, Char and friends in a
Moke spoofing the orange mocha Frappuc-
cino scene from “Zoolander,” which was the
beginning of his unofficial role as Mr. Ja-
cobs’s personal photographer.
He was ordained and officiated their wed-
ding. “To say he’s like a brother to me or he’s
like a father to me would be a terrible thing
because my father’s dead and I’ve no rela-
tionship with my brother,” Mr. Jacobs said.
“He’s what I wish for in a family member.”
Who is this guy?
“If you look back at my trajectory, I’ve al-
ways sort of said, like, ‘Yeah, why not?’ ”
said Mr. Newbold, sitting in the deserted
lobby of the Mercer Hotel on a recent Tues-
day morning. Dressed in an army jacket, a
sweatshirt that read “When We All Vote” (a
collaboration between Mr. Jacobs and Do-
ver Street Market), jeans and Vans, he
brought his French bulldog Charlie, as well
as two extra coffees, just in case someone
else wanted one.
His path from civilian in New Hope, Pa.,
with no connection to or intention of a life in
fashion, to the nexus of its star power and
influence, was almost absurdly aimless. A
self-professed autodidact and jack-of-all-
trades, Mr. Newbold will “watch tutorials on
YouTube and waste two days figuring out
how to do something.”
He came to Mr. Jacobs by way of Christy
Turlington Burns and her husband, Edward
Burns, who hired him as their personal as-sistant in 2009 on the recommendation of
their former nanny, a friend of Mr. Newbold.
He ended up traveling the world with Ms.
Turlington Burns, helping with her charity,
Every Mother Counts, and accompanying
her on marathons and shoots when she
modeled. “He’s hardly a bodyguard, but he
feels like someone who has your back,” she
said in a phone interview. “Not in a gate-
keeper way, in the most gentle, respectful
way. He sort of just sets the tone.”
Before this, Mr. Newbold held a series of
odd jobs: some public relations, a babysit-
ting gig, designing a line of neckties, tiling
Dunkin’ Donuts on a construction gig. He
hated high school but said he had perfect at-
tendance. He didn’t want to go to college but
spent three years at Bates College before
transferring to George Washington Univer-
sity for a woman.
He never wanted to live in a city, but here
he is — 15 years in New York. “I’m a super-
solitary person,” he said. “I’m alone all the
time. I don’t like going out. Never have.”
He told his story in a soft-spoken ramble
of guileless disclosure, bringing to mind the
voice-over from the Dos Equis “Most Inter-
esting Man in the World” commercials. Tan-
gents abounded. There was the time his
band played CBGB in high school. The time
he took up boxing and discovered the
“sweet science” mental agility of it. The
time he became a 100-mile a week runner,
ending up a quarter mile from the finish
line, he said, when the bomb went off at the
Boston Marathon in 2013.
He fell asleep on his drive home and stillshowed up at work at 7:30 the next morn-
ing. Did he mention that he used to race
stand-up Jet Skis? Or that his drone footage
was used by Lana Wachowski in an episode
of “Sense8”?
In July, Mr. Newbold went to St. Barths.
“Guess who got dengue fever?” he said.
He enjoys “disarming,” and sees his role
at Marc Jacobs as “a fixer for everything.” It
inspired his Instagram handle,
@1.800.Newbold. Got a problem? Call Nick.
Mr. Newbold has always been attracted
to off-the-beaten-path creative people, he
said. But “I never allowed myself to be cre-ative.” A cynical mind may wonder, is his
meander actually a climb?
“Nick’s one of those people I’ve never
tried to figure out or analyze,” Mr. Jacobs
said. “I trust him. So I’ve never delved deep
into any facet because I tend to do that
when I think somebody has got an angle,
and Nick to me, from Day 1, I never felt he
was in this for something other than the
very honest and immediate reaction that he
had.”
Ms. Turlington Burns said, “He’s also not
someone who’s incredibly ambitious.” In
Mr. Newbold’s own words, “I don’t have
goals.” Rather, he rises to the occasion.Good in Disasters
When the coronavirus hit New York, Mr.
Newbold was ready. “I’m such a steady,
even-keeled person,” he said. “Marc and I
really bonded over Sandy” — the hurricane
— “because his house flooded. I was there. I
had only known him for a couple months at
that point. Literally, the water was at my
knees, and I’m still grabbing stuff. Then, I
heard the door was about to bust open. That
was crazy. In disasters, I’m good.”
Even without Hurricane Sandy, Mr. New-
bold said he and Mr. Jacobs had “been to
hell and back” together, bonding during the
end of Mr. Jacobs’s 16-year stint as creative
director at Louis Vuitton, the ouster of his
longtime business partner Robert Duffy
from the company, and a carousel of re-
structuring, reseizing and business ups and
downs. And then the pandemic.
“I was so prepared when it happened,”
Mr. Newbold said. “I was ready to bug out.
Marc could tell you. It’s like, ‘Well, Nick’s
ready to go anywhere.’ I was like: ‘I have
passports, we have cash, I have a car. I
know where to go.’ ”
The farthest they got was the Mercer Ho-
tel, where Mr. Jacobs spent 70 days as one of
three residents at the hotel. (Mr. Newbold
maintains his own apartment downtown.)
At the suggestion of Sofia Coppola, one of
Mr. Jacobs’s close friends and collaborators,
Mr. Newbold took out his Sony a7ii hand-
held camera and began chronicling the sur-
real experience of one man living in an all-
but-deserted hotel with a staff of four.
A 28-minute film titled “A New York
Story” resulted, falling somewhere be-
tween documentary and humorously bi-
zarre art house piece, beginning with Mr.
Jacobs checking in and ending with him
checking out and driving off with his hus-
band when the lockdown is lifted.
Mr. Jacobs plays every character in the
film — the concierge greeting himself at the
front desk, the bouncer at the hotel’s club
the Submercer, the maintenance person he
summons to the room to change a light bulb
in one of the film’s more subtly funny mo-
ments. The narrative is the last man in the
city at a vacant hotel, “going in with one
mind-set and coming out with another,” Mr.
Newbold said. Mr. Jacobs left his room only
to shoot the scenes for the film. There’s also
a strand of pearls that the designer wears in
every scene. Make what you will of it.
Ms. Coppola gave editing notes, and the
composer Bill Sherman did an original
score.
The film can be seen on Mr. Newbold’s
YouTube channel. It doesn’t promote the
Marc Jacobs brand, at least not directly. If
anything, it underscores Mr. Jacobs’s need
for creative outlets under any circum-
stance. “An artist needs to create,” Mr. New-
bold said. “Otherwise what else is there?”
What did Mr. Newbold get out of it? An-
other task mastered. “The funny part is, I
don’t really want to share this,” he said of
the film. “I’m happy we did and that’s
enough, but Marc and I were chatting the
other day. He loves to share. He talks about
the importance of sharing experiences and
art as part of the process. Even the little vid-
eos I do for Instagram. I don’t really post
them on my Instagram, Marc posts them.
He’s the vessel.”PHOTOGRAPHS BY FARAH AL QASIMI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTop, Nick Newbold editing
photos, one of his
responsibilities; middle left,
helping take care of Charlie,
a French bulldog; middle
right, Marc Jacobs posing in
playsuit and pearls; above, a
knack for fitting in anywhere.He’s Looking Out for Marc Jacobs
CONTINUED FROM PAGE D1
Models are generally thought of as people
who are seen and not heard, but every once
in a while one of them breaks the sound bar-
rier. Such is the case with Karen Elson, the
red-haired mannequin who dominated
fashion imagery at the turn of the millen-
nium, and who has just written a no-holds-
barred autobiography.
“The Red Flame,” which was published
on Tuesday by Rizzoli, contains more than
130 photographs of Ms. Elson, including one
as a ’50s movie star — swathed in a Donna
Karan cream wool coat, oversize shades
and stilettos, and squired by the actor John
Hawkes — as well as her memories of being
hospitalized as a child for an eating disorder
and fending off unwanted sexual advances
as a teenage model. Among other less than
glamorous stories.
Before the book’s release, Ms. Elson sat
on a cushioned bed in her Nashville home,
wearing a floaty floral dress bought at a flea
market, and talked via Zoom about why she
decided it was time to open up. The conver-
sation has been edited for clarity.
Why did you want to write a book?
Because people see you in two dimensions
on the page of a magazine, they assume that
you’re two dimensional as well, and the pic-
ture is essentially who you are. I really
wanted to get under that and show my per-
spective. It’s been a couple of years in the
making, from having the first conversation
to scouring my archives and figuring out
what images to use. And then writing it and
really trying to dig deep and be honest.
In social media culture, everything is
squished to a 15-second sound bite, and if
I’m doing something for a brand, I have to
speak about how great the product is. No
one is ever asking about my insights and
my career and job as a model. So I figured
I’d take the opportunity to unearth these
things and talk about the stuff that’s pretty
hard.
Has your attitude toward your job changed?
Now, if anyone asks me to do a nude, there
has to be a conversa-
tion before I get on set
so I have the ability to
say, “No, I’m not com-
fortable doing that.”
I’ve got to have a say in
these things, but in the
past I didn’t. I just took it
as “this is what is ex-
pected of me.”
It wasn’t until I got old-
er, maybe even when I
had kids and moved to
Nashville and got a bit of distance from the
fashion world, that I started doing some dig-
ging inside myself about what feels com-
fortable. I started to realize that a lot of the
times I’ve done nudes I have felt uncomfort-
able, but there’s this sort of subtle condition-
ing that happens to a model, or did back in
the day.
The last time I was offended on a shoot or
show was a couple of years ago. The photog-
rapher was being really offensive to every-
body. He would say things to be controver-
sial and made comments about how people
used to call me “fat.” It crossed a line, so I
called my agents, and we had a conversa-
tion with the magazine and with the photog-
rapher’s people and — I can’t say who,
what, how, why — but action was taken.People used to call you fat?
Yes, at 130 pounds I could be deemed heavy.
In the real world that is just insane, and a
really dangerous narrative, but fashion is so
insular that it has enabled very toxic mind-sets to thrive because nobody’s ever really
questioned it.
Are there any photographers you avoid
working with?
There are a number of people I avoid work-
ing with absolutely — because I didn’t enjoy
the experience. I was maybe made to feel
less than, so why bother walking into that
arena again? But I believe in redemption.
I will draw the line when there are things
that are sexual in nature. But if it’s toxic be-
havior like bullying, acting like a tyrant on
set or yelling at people, fat-shaming people
— if I can say, “You know, I want to talk
about how this behavior made me feel,”
then maybe, just maybe, I might be able to
move on from it. But I will always take the
side of the victim because I myself have
been in situations where I’ve been treated
terribly, and it has scarred me.
You just walked in Fendi’s show. Do you still
like the catwalk?
There is a lot of camaraderie, especially
with the models who have known each
other like a decade plus. It’s always a funny
thing when someone is trying to tell you
how to walk on a runway. We go, "It’s not
my first rodeo!” At one point, one of the
models — and it may even have been me —
took the microphone because this guy was
explaining it to us. And then we were like,
“Ladies, this is how you walk down the run-
way.”
Do you still watch the collections?
When it’s my friends like Anna Sui or
Proenza Schouler. But I’m not as clued in as
you’d imagine because I don’t live and
breathe fashion. I’ve got two teenage chil-
dren, and I’ve got a music career. I’ve got
other things in my life.Karen Elson on Modeling and Speaking Up for Herself
Karen Elson in 2000 in a
photo from her new book,
“The Red Flame.” The picture
first appeared in an issue of
the Dutch magazine No. 30.THOMAS SCHENKBy MELANIE ABRAMSA new autobiography includes
less than glamorous stories.
STYLES Q. AND A.