It’s a wonder that Marc Jacobs hasn’t yet had the glossy, big-screen fashion documentary treatment. Sure, there was 2007’s Marc Jacobs Louis Vuitton, Loïc Prigent’s eye-opening account of the prolific designer’s time at the helm of the storied French fashion house, but in the age of Dior and I, High Low – John Galliano, and Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, he’s a star who’s certainly been overdue a splashier cinematic retrospective. That now comes courtesy of his close friend and longtime collaborator, Sofia Coppola, who makes her documentary debut with Marc by Sofia, a vibrant collage of the fashion legend’s life, work, references and obsessions, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
If you’re not familiar with the designer’s triumphant graduation from Parsons, where he was named design student of the year; his stratospheric rise with his eponymous brand; his stint at Perry Ellis, where he transformed the fashion landscape with his divisive “grunge” collection; his boundary-pushing reign at Louis Vuitton; and his continued dominance today, well, this may not be the best starting point.
In one sequence, Jacobs himself explains that he doesn’t work in a linear way—he’s interested in too many different things—and the same is true of Coppola’s approach here. Under her guidance, we constantly move back and forth in time, glimpsing snapshots of eye-popping shows, glorious archival footage, the dazzling Old Hollywood movies that inspired Jacobs, and vintage photos of the New York he grew up in. Combined, it offers not a conventional, talking heads-heavy fashion history lesson, but a total immersion in his world, perfect for existing fans who are keen to dive deeper.
We begin in the run-up to Jacobs’s spring 2024 show, the one that marked his 40th anniversary, and placed a giant table and chairs inside the Park Avenue Armory, with a coterie of seemingly Lilliputian models walking through the installation with hair teased to the sky and wearing cartoonishly oversized skirt suits and peacoats. But now, that piece of truly inspired theater is still weeks away, and Jacobs, a sylph-like presence with his very precise black bob, silver nail polish and ever-present vape, is toiling over fabric choices and proportions.
Coppola isn’t an invisible documentarian—you hear her voice from behind the lens, asking questions; and in one early scene, she comes around to sit with Marc and recount their first meeting (at that iconic grunge show, naturally) and one of the earliest looks he dressed her in (a little boy’s police costume for Halloween). There are more appearances later, including one where Coppola and her future husband, Spike Jonze, are interviewed on MTV about their raucous, unauthorized X-Girl fashion show, featuring Chloë Sevigny and held on the streets of New York after Jacobs’s latest presentation, in 1994.
Still, Marc by Sofia’s focus is not their friendship—it’s simply the context we’re given before Sofia dips further into Marc’s universe. She quizzes him about his earliest inspirations—his impossibly chic grandmother, the ’70s-era babysitters he looked up to—as well as the films that informed his practice, the fingerprints of which can be seen all over his collections: the exuberance of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the exaggerated make-up of Cabaret, the showmanship of All that Jazz, the campness of Hello, Dolly!, the luminosity of the black-and-white melodramas of Elizabeth Taylor.
Instead of listing off these classics, Coppola employs extended clips and music, constructing a kind of moving mood board that takes us inside Jacobs’s brain. As a result, when we then return to his collections, we have a far richer understanding of, say, the origins of his mirrored ball gowns (The Supremes wore similar looks during a TV appearance) and the gravity-defying bouffants and thick spidery mascara that accompany them (a nod to Sweet Charity’s glitzy and eerie “Big Spender”).
Elsewhere, there’s no shortage of great stories: Jacobs insists that he wasn’t fired from Perry Ellis, though he enjoys that narrative. He also discusses the irreverent Louis Vuitton graffiti bags, now ubiquitous but then scandalous, which those in charge of the brand apparently refused to produce for customers—until the waiting lists for them grew so long, and the bootleg versions so abundant, that they were forced to. He even touches on dressing the likes of Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, and Lil’ Kim for court, using costume to craft an exaggerated image of innocent, wide-eyed femininity.
Jacobs is shown to be a tough and demanding boss who seeks perfection and ensures his shows run on time at all costs, but this film is, of course, hardly an exposé. And when it comes to his family life, the designer speaks in passing about his troubled mother and difficult stepfather, but almost always keeps the audience at arm’s length. Most illuminating, perhaps, are Jacobs’s memories of his father, who died when Marc was just six years old. He recalls accompanying him to his office at the William Morris Agency and his thrill at witnessing the glamour of the entertainment world.
Could it be that Jacobs has spent his whole life trying to recapture that specific sense of wonderment, through creating his own moments of theater (extraordinary clothes, surreal sets, dancers moving in unison)? The question is never directly asked, but seems to float somewhere in the ether above you.
When it concludes, Marc by Sofia leaves you wanting more. At a crisply paced hour and a half, in a sea of overlong epics, it’s a moreish treat that works as both a nostalgia hit (a whistle-stop tour through all your favorite Marc Jacobs shows; background cameos from Bill Cunningham and André Leon Talley) and a closer look at one of the most fascinating minds in fashion.
Some will be frustrated by its withholding nature—it doesn’t really go into Jacobs’s thought process behind the grunge collection, for instance, though it’s possible Coppola didn’t want to retread ground recently covered in shows like In Vogue: The 90s. (In truth, an entire film could be devoted to dissecting that Perry Ellis show and its impact.) It assumes a degree of knowledge from the average viewer that might be unfair. It occasionally dabbles with music that’s slightly too sentimental, has an end sequence that feels too rote for the more freewheeling film that preceded it, and, as the credits roll, seems like something that could be the first episode of a longer series rather than the complete package.
But none of this is necessarily a criticism. Marc by Sofia doesn’t claim to be comprehensive, or even the definitive portrait of Marc Jacobs. It’s just a film that’s interested in a lot of different things_and will make you more interested in all of them, too.
