Since Duffy’s exit, the brand has had two C.E.O.s: Sebastian Suhl, who came from Givenchy, and Eric Marechalle, who came from Kenzo and was appointed in 2017. Marechalle’s first big hire in February 2018 was John Targon, the co-founder and former co-designer of the American ready-to-wear sportswear brand Baja East, who was brought on to help Jacobs and his team design Marc Jacobs runway looks. Three months later, he was gone. Perhaps the only “name” designer at Marc Jacobs can be the man himself.

What’s certain is that the age of excess that witnessed the rise of Marc Jacobs — the person and the company — has now passed. In this new sober time, Jacobs’s career, with all its emphasis on joyful self-aggrandizement, feels a little like a cautionary tale of exuberance shading into shrinking profits, shop closures and a melancholy, if amicable, divorce from Duffy. Today the company maintains only five stores: three in New York, one in Los Angeles and another in Paris. Yet there have been moves to correct course, including the recent one-off Redux Grunge Collection 1993/2018, an almost verbatim 26-piece reissue of Jacobs’s show for Perry Ellis, released for the 25-year anniversary of the seminal collection. A resurrection of Marc by Marc Jacobs in the form of The Marc Jacobs — a mix of revived basics and new collaborations (the filmmaker Sofia Coppola, for example, helped Jacobs pick some of the pieces to bring back) — launched in May 2019. His past three runway collections have been hugely acclaimed, and critics speak of Jacobs once again as the face of New York fashion. They are reminders of how Jacobs’s shows have long been one of the main reasons European editors fly to New York for fashion week, where they once were kept waiting for hours for them to start. (These days, the shows mostly start on time.) As other brands — including Proenza Schouler, Altuzarra and Tom Ford — have experimented with presenting their clothes in Europe or in California, Jacobs has remained true to his city. His is always the last big show on the New York fashion week calendar, and his runway, though more austere now, resonates with the power of an older master — “venerable,” as he likes to say — one still able to arouse passion, still able to read the mood of the time.

And yet, one returns to Jacobs not out of nostalgia but from a curiosity to see how this man of prodigious talent, now shorn of the infrastructure of self-enlargement, is faring in a time out-of-joint. “When I think of American designers, there is a certain spirit that is inherent in American design. There’s tenacity, there’s a sort of can-do attitude, and Marc represents the best of that,” said co-chairperson Julie Mannion of the fashion public relations firm KCD and a longtime collaborator of Jacobs. “There’s that fearlessness of not being too pigeonholed by tradition.” Jacobs the artist is remarkable in his sensitivity, in his ability to pivot and meet the needs of a new era. For more than 10 years, he presented his collections at the Beaux-Arts brick fortress of the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, but in 2014, Jacobs moved west to the Park Avenue Armory, a Gilded Age building on the Upper East Side once known as the home of the “silk stocking” regiment for the high number of Roosevelts and Vanderbilts who served in the local militia. He has remained loyal to this venue, with few exceptions, ever since. His shows are now as spartan as they once were baroque: just the models, the clothes, the viewers and the building’s uneven matchstick wooden floors. For the spring 2018 season, Jacobs showed his intensely beautiful ’60s-style tunics, pinned turbans and one-shoulder gowns cut from batik-like fabrics and pastel florals in complete silence. The 460 onlookers, seated in uncomfortable metal folding chairs around the perimeter of the 55,000-square-foot room, heard only the beat of tinseled and jeweled sandals strutting and the swish of clothes heavy with sequins and beading. The effect was powerful in its simplicity, and in its suggestion of an older artist freeing himself from the noise and clutter of a younger self.

IT WAS A bright December afternoon, a week or so before Christmas, when Jacobs and I met for the last time. I waited in the reception area of his atelier next to a sculpture of Neville, Jacobs’s bull terrier, whom I had recently begun following on Instagram (he has over 200,000 followers). I thought I could finally understand why Jacobs commands such devotion from those around him. He exudes a precariousness that is deeply affecting to anyone even dimly aware of the mysterious connection between creativity and tragedy. If he attracts protectors, it is because one cannot speak at any length to him without feeling that, as Oscar Wilde wrote about his titular character in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “a note of doom runs like a purple thread” through “the gold cloth” of his talent. “He’s a beautiful, beautiful man,” Jacobs’s friend, the filmmaker Lana Wachowski said. She told me that during one of Jacobs’s “post-art-done depressions,” she gave him a copy of Albert Camus’s 1942 philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which led the designer and the filmmaker to get matching tattoos.

Earlier, Jacobs had shown me a slide of himself with his grandma Helen in Capri in 1980; it was encased in the red plastic of a vintage photo viewer. The slide was a stark contrast to the hard, distancing glamour of his appearance now; together, the two images of Jacobs were like the two panels of a diptych denoting innocence and experience. Peering down the viewer’s small convex lens, I saw Jacobs — gangly, laughing, 17 — standing next to his white-haired grandmother, herself the picture of bourgeois Upper West Side elegance. She was wearing a Claude Montana knit dress, with broad stripes of silver across a white background, which Jacobs had made her buy. He, in turn, had saved his earnings as a stock boy at the now-defunct Upper West Side clothing store Charivari to buy the men’s sweater version of the dress, which he wore with white trousers. To see the teenager with his chosen protector, the pairing of sweater and dress a proof of their bond, was to be reminded of the matching tattoos of Sisyphus that Jacobs would get decades later with Wachowski. The myth of the man condemned for eternity by the gods to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again has long attracted those who know the solitude and futility of creative life. In the version of the myth inscribed on Jacobs’s and Wachowski’s forearms, five tattooed words of hope allow for human communion as a refuge in the enveloping loneliness. They simply read: “I will if you will.”

Models: Janaye Furman at the Lions and Elibeidy Dani at IMG. Hair by Akki at Art Partner. Makeup by Susie Sobol at Julian Watson Agency. Set design by Andy Harman at Lalaland. Casting by Midland. Manicure: Dawn Sterling at Statement Artists. Production: Hen’s Tooth. Lighting design: Jordan Strong. Photo assistants: Ariel Sadok, Kaitlin Tucker and Shen Williams. Digital tech: Jonathan Nesteruk. Stylist’s assistants: Raymond Gee and Erica Boisaubin. Tailoring: Thao Huynh. Hair assistant: Rei Kawauchi. Makeup assistant: Sasha Borax. Set design assistant: Lee Freeman.