AS ONE OF America’s arbiters of cool, fashion designer Marc Jacobs has been the face of many trends. But this July, when the perennial enfant terrible, now 58, revealed in a gleeful Instagram post that he’d had a face-lift, just one day into his postoperative recovery, his newly taut mug became the story.
“Marc telling the world he had surgery, not magical ‘work’ that makes you look like you just got back from Tahiti, changes the game,” said Dr. Andrew Jacono, the haute-society New York plastic surgeon behind Mr. Jacobs’s operation. The designer’s social-media revelation “was a shock to me, but I think it’s upfront and great,” added Dr. Jacono, whose much-ballyhooed, decade-old “extended deep-plane” technique involves hoisting the face from beneath the muscle layers instead of pulling it back at a more superficial level. After all, Dr. Jacono pointed out, celebrities are not usually in a rush to reveal they have gone under the knife—Simon Cowell and Gene Simmons being rare exceptions. “Are men now going to start dishing about their procedures in the boardroom or at the golf club? Probably not,” he said. “But the taboos are lifting.”