Sofia Coppola Explores Artistry Of Marc Jacobs

I’ve long been baffled why fashion documentaries don’t get more respect.

Films like Unzipped, Valentino: The Last Emperor, Dior and I, The September Issue, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and McQueen, rank among the finest nonfiction films of their time, yet none of them earned an Oscar nomination. Documentaries about visual artists often receive serious attention – the Oscar-nominated Exit Through the Gift Shop being a case in point – but focus on a designer or a fashion magazine editor and good luck to you.

Paying no mind to that, Sofia Coppola makes her documentary directorial debut with Marc by Sofia, a film about her close friend, the American designer Marc Jacobs. It made its world premiere today at the Venice Film Festival (her papa, Francis Ford Coppola, was in Venice just a few days ago presenting the festival’s honorary Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Werner Herzog).

Jacobs, occasionally described at earlier stages of his career as an enfant terrible, here comes across as somewhat mellowed by age (he’s 62 now) yet as engaged with his art as ever. As with many docs about designers, this film is loosely framed around the creation of a collection – in this case, Jacobs’ 2024 spring ready-to-wear collection. Despite the inherent pressure of fashioning a collection that will receive intense scrutiny, Jacobs seems far less angst-ridden than Isaac Mizrahi in Unzipped, who nearly came to pieces on screen during the making of his fall 1994 collection. Jacobs tells Coppola with understated confidence, “I have faith that it will become something.”

There’s good reason for his confidence. It’s been more than 30 years since he climbed into the top ranks of designers when he joined Perry Ellis as head of womenswear. He became creative director of Louis Vuitton in 1997, reinventing the luxury label, and launched his own brands, Marc Jacobs Collection and Marc by Marc Jacobs. Press notes for the film describe him as a genius.

The documentary starts off rather slowly but gets moving when it dials back to the early 1990s (the timeframe when Marc and Sofia met in New York). He raised hackles in the fashion world by designing a grunge collection, nodding to street fashion (a bit taboo at that time as it seemed to ignore the class-conscious haute of haute couture). Many reports have said that collection got him fired from Perry Ellis. Coppola asks him whether that’s true, and he replies it isn’t, but he likes the story anyway.

Coppola stays off camera for the early part of the film. Fortunately, she gets into the shot later on; we need to understand their relationship for the documentary to go beyond the cosmetic. They’re clearly sympatico and, presumably, one of the chief areas where they bond is over cinema. We discover that Jacobs is deeply inspired by film, particularly The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the 1972 Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, the “Hey Big Spender” number from Sweet Charity, the louche Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, and the work of Bob Fosse. Coppola weaves in appropriate clips of Cabaret, All That Jazz, and Petra von Kant, as well as Elizabeth Taylor on screen with Montgomery Clift, and Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly. Coppola asks him why all gay men love Barbra Streisand; he answers that he’s fascinated by women who are caricatures of themselves.

Coppola became the face of Jacobs’s Daisy fragrance and she and her dad Francis also appeared together in a Louis Vuitton ad for Jacobs. Given that close relationship, it would be folly to expect a distanced and more cooly analytical documentary about the designer. Jacobs is seen sucking frequently on a vaping device, but there is no discussion of his previous cocaine and alcohol problem (The New Yorker reported in a 2008 profile that he went to rehab twice, in 1999 and 2007).

That’s not to say the documentary isn’t revealing. We learn about a childhood of considerable pain; Jacobs’ father, an agent at William Morris in New York, died when Marc was just six. His mother suffered from mental illness. Part of his formative years were spent living with his grandparents, and it was his grandmother who taught him how to knit and do needlepoint. He had a bit of a weight problem as a kid and though long since slimmed down, describes himself as “pretty uncomfortable socially.” It’s through the clothes, through the art, that he expresses himself.

What I found most fascinating is to see Jacobs at work, training his attention on details a lesser eye would miss. He asks for micro adjustments to looping sleeves of a dress, for instance, that might seem undetectable and yet once executed, one sees the difference. Carefully examining the shade of nail polish on a model for the spring 2024 show, he declares it needs to be more “dead Barbie.” For that collection, which was inspired by paper dolls, he even instructed his models on how to hold their arms to mimic the opposable limbs of a child’s plaything.

Jacobs’ inspiration for the set of that runway show featured an enormous table and chairs (possibly inspired by the Robert Therrien sculpture at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles). The models walk under and around the furniture – it’s a stunning visual.

It struck me while watching Marc by Sofia that great fashion designers could be considered the most brilliant artists of all. Painters and sculptors, most of them spend their careers imitating themselves, in a sense. One Giacometti sculpture bears a notable resemblance to another, as incredible as they are, which is not meant as criticism; it’s how we recognize the distinctive character of an artist. But a fashion designer must reinvent themselves with every collection. They must keep pace with and even lead the evolution of culture. A Marc Jacobs collection from the early ’90 vs now bears little in common visually, except perhaps for an affection for knits. It’s astonishing to witness the expanse of his creative output.

Marc by Sofia can seem a bit clubby at times, a touch too cool for school. But perhaps that’s just a familiar gripe of one, like myself, who stands on the other side of the velvet rope from the likes of Jacobs and Coppola. The press notes do refer to the Marc Jacobs woman “as cutting-edge, culturally savvy, insouciant, and effortlessly cool… in essence, Sofia.” Okay! An inevitable degree of self-regard is built into the film, but that can be forgiven as we marvel at what, over a period of decades, Marc Jacobs has made.

Title: Marc by Sofia
Festival: Venice

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Sofia Coppola
Distributor: A24
Running time: 1 hr 37 min.