He may have his own bookshop, but if anything, that’s only encouraged Marc Jacobs to carry on expanding. Monday will be the day that an incredible book goes on sale – The Men + Women of Marc Jacobs, the launch of which will entail a grand party and lots of hype. It’s a coffee table book, made up of images of Marc’s many employees, (as stylish as you would imagine) and snapped and complied by photographer Brian Bowen Smith.

Smith himself explained how the project took shape while he was travelling with the Jacobs crew to store openings and business trips; at each stop, he would take photographs of the staff for fun. “We never really planned anything,” he explains. “[An employee] would run out with me for 15 minutes and do one of those shots. It was very spontaneous.”

When Smith and Duffy eventually decided to produce the book, the formula stayed the same. “No assistants, just the kids and me and my little Leica. We’d go and bang the shots out,” says Smith, adding, however, that “after people knew what I was doing, the word spread. They were ready for me if I came into town.”

And the story behind that amazing elephant shot? Staff member Jonathan Penn dragged the photographer into South Carolina to Papa Joe’s Fireworks on Highway 17. “The place had two giant elephant statues there,” Smith recalls of that adventurous day. “I hoisted him up [atop one of the heads], and the owner came out with a shotgun and chased us off.” They managed to get the shot they needed though! How very very cool indeed.

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- Naomi Attwood