LE BOOK sits with Marcus

Some people are drawn to the spotlight. Others are more interested in everything that happens around it: the details, the encounters, the fleeting moments that make an experience unforgettable. Marcus seems to belong to both worlds. A fashion enthusiast with an instinct for images and an unmistakable sense of presence, he has built a career across fashion, television, dance and conversation, never quite fitting into a single definition. Today, as he begins to bring his many projects together, Marcus is learning to look beyond the next destination. Because sometimes, the most meaningful part of the story is everything that happens along the way.

A FASCINATION FOR FASHION, FRAME BY FRAME

Marcus discovered fashion through television. As a child, he watched a report on Chanel during Claire Chazal’s 8pm news and remembers being fascinated by the world he was seeing. Years later, that fascination has not faded. If anything, it has become more precise.

Ask him about a fashion show and he immediately goes back to the details: the silence before it begins, the people backstage, the make-up, the styling, the models, the audience settling into their seats. His first show was a small one, but the feeling stayed with him. “Everyone respects each other. For five minutes, everyone respects the creator and what is about to happen.” Later came Tommy Hilfiger at The Plaza in New York, another experience he remembers almost frame by frame.

“Fashion is in the detail,” he says.

It is perhaps why the digital version of fashion has never quite replaced the real thing for him. He understands the speed of images, the algorithms, the endless scroll. But a show is something else. Thousands of people come together in one room to create something that only exists in that exact moment. “There will always be this magic.”

THE MAKING OF A SIGNATURE

Marcus knows what it means to build an image. He also knows what it means to have one built around you. Influence was never something he set out to become. At first, he did not feel legitimate enough to call himself one. That feeling has not completely disappeared, but his answer to it has changed. He works. He takes a creative brief and pushes it as far as he can, until it feels like his. Somewhere along the way, the work acquires what he calls his “Marcus look”  a particular way of seeing, dressing, moving through an image. People began recognising it.

Television brought another kind of exposure. On Dancing with the Stars France, there was nowhere to hide. Ten hours of training, choreography to learn, a live prime-time show, week after week. He had to stop asking himself whether he was capable of doing it and simply do it.

His first dance was “Single Ladies” with Marie. Months later, he performed it again for Lena’s Bercy show. He remembers learning the choreography almost immediately because he loved it so much.

“Dance is in me,” he says. “It will stay in me until the end of my life.”

What the experience taught him was not so much how to perform, but how much he could actually do when he stopped second-guessing himself. “When they give me the choice, I don’t do it. But when they don’t give me the choice, that’s when I do things.”

BEYOND THE CHARACTER

There is a difference between performing and being watched. Marcus has had to learn it in public. For a long time, people expected the same version of him everywhere: the jokes, the energy, the dancing, the smile. Even outside work. “People only saw me through the prism of Marcus,” he says. Eventually, keeping that energy switched on became exhausting.

“It was more exhausting to perform than to live.”

Today, he is less interested in maintaining the image than in understanding the person behind it. He describes himself as melancholic and hypersensitive, someone who feels things intensely and picks up on the atmosphere of a room almost immediately. He can be loud and playful, but he can also be quiet. This summer, people noticed that side of him more.

He did not try to correct it.

“I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”

That instinct is also what makes Le Trajet work. The concept is simple: Marcus gets into a car with someone and they talk. He is quick to reject the title of journalist. “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to say that I’m a journalist. We just have a good time in the car.”

And perhaps that is exactly why people talk.

WHEN THE MASKS COME OFF

Away from a studio and the usual interview setting, something changes. Nabilla cried. Youssoufa opened up about music and the way he writes Youssoufa, in particular, made him look at rap differently. Marcus says that, before meeting him, he had never really understood the poetry behind the genre. Listening to the way Youssoufa writes and speaks about his music opened up something new for him. There was tenderness, simplicity and a strong sense of humanity in his words. They kept talking after the interview, and the connection eventually became a friendship. Marcus is interested in that moment when the public image gives way to the person underneath it. “There are no masks, no double personalities,” he says.

It is an idea he seems to apply to himself, too.

The most natural version of him appears when he is learning something. Fashion, dance, a new project, a new person give him something he does not know yet and his energy changes. He becomes quieter, more concentrated. “When I learn, I become the wise child again.”

THE CONFIDENCE TO FOLLOW WHAT YOU LOVE

It takes him back to school, which he describes as one of the most important journeys of his life. School was difficult until he began studying something he genuinely loved: fashion. Then everything shifted. He became a top student, graduated and discovered what passion could actually do.

“If you do things with passion, you will be a winner.”

It is a lesson he has carried into everything since. If there is no passion behind a project, he loses interest quickly. If there is, he wants to take it further. Now, after years of working at full speed, he is entering a different phase. With his team at Days, he is looking at what comes next, trying to build something more solid around all the things he has already started. For once, he wants to stop for a moment, put everything on the same page and see the bigger picture. Not just one project after another, but a connection between them.

A red thread.

He has always been good at reading people. He talks about aura, about sensing something before it is said. His mother, he says, has the same instinct. Friends sometimes tell him he is too quick to judge a situation, only to come back later and admit he was right. His sensitivity, the same quality that can make him absorb a room completely, has also become one of his sharpest tools.

Maybe that is what links everything: the fashion shows, the television years, the clothes, the dancing, the interviews, the instinct for people. Marcus is constantly looking. At images, at details, at gestures, at what people say and what they leave unsaid. And then there is the journey itself.

He likes knowing where he is going, but he is just as interested in what happens along the way. That is the idea behind Le Trajet, and it seems to describe something larger in his life too. You can choose a destination, but you cannot script everything that happens between here and there.

The next chapter is still taking shape. There are projects to secure, ideas to develop, things he wants to build for himself. But there is no sense that he needs to invent another version of Marcus to get there.

The fashion lover is still there. The dancer is still there. The boy who fell in love with choreography, the student who found his confidence through fashion, the person who can walk into a room and immediately feel its energy  all of them are part of the same story. The destination may still be taking shape. But for Marcus, the journey has never been just a way of getting there. It is where everything happens.