“It feels like a dream,” says Lauren Tsai. Two years out of high school, the 20-year-old has hit the big time as a runway model, Instagram influencer (half a million followers and counting), and star of the hit Japanese reality show Terrace House: Aloha State. Along the way, she’s worked for Marvel Comics and become a front row regular. “Sometimes I don’t know what I am,” jokes Tsai, who designed a line of bags and some ready-to-wear pieces—all featuring what she calls her “pop Surrealist” drawings—for Marc Jacobs Japan that will launch in Asia on October 12.

With her success in modeling and TV came a lot of self-questioning. “When I had all of this success that I thought I wanted, I wasn’t happy,” says Tsai. “I was going home not feeling like me and that’s when I really told myself, ‘I need to do art. I need to make this my job if I can.’” And so she has.

Here, Tsai talks Tokyo street style, working with a great U.S. brand, and using fear as her compass.





1 / 19 Chevron Chevron Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Tsai x Marc Jacobs Lauren Tsai x Marc Jacobs

On her Marc Jacobs collaboration

The CEO for Marc Jacobs in Japan was into in my work because he actually saw me on the TV show. This whole process started about a year ago; I brought all my sketchbooks with me and over breakfast I showed him everything. Drawing has been a way of really understanding my life and the things that happen around me. My notebooks are my space to discover, but also to look back and to understand emotions. I think my heart is in there, and I think maybe [the team] could feel that. They decided it would be cool if we did the Snapshot bag together—that’s one of their best selling items right now and kind of an iconic line for them.

I knew if I was there in person, it could become something bigger, so I went back to New York to visit my dad—but actually it was because I really wanted to have a meeting with them in person. So I went in and we talked about and it turned into being the whole line of bags, and then after that, the ready-to-wear team wanted to make something, too [a couple of T-shirts and a hoodie].