This year’s Beat Film Festival opened with Sofia Coppola’s documentary debut – the film “Marc Through the Eyes of Sofia”, which is dedicated to the director’s friendship with one of the main modern fashion designers – Marc Jacobs. Weekend shares what we learned about the designer and his approach.
“Never trust fashion designers, especially if they are men. Trust your own feelings! I still can’t wear the clothes I create, for me it’s pure creativity,” American fashion designer Marc Jacobs addresses women in a conversation with Oscar-winner Sofia Coppola, who decided to take an unexpected turn in the career of a successful feature film director by filming her first feature-length documentary. The world premiere of the film took place at the Venice Film Festival last year.
If the theme of Coppola’s feature films (“The Virgin Suicides”, “Lost in Translation”, “Priscilla: Elvis and Me”) is mainly devoted to women who are in a conditional golden cage and trying to get out of it, then in documentaries Coppola makes an exception for his old friend, accompanying him during the preparation of the spring-summer 2024 collection. Coppola and Jacobs have been friends and have been working on various projects for more than 30 years; it was the Marc Jacobs dress that Sofia wore to the Oscar ceremony, where she received the coveted statuette for Best Original Screenplay for the film Lost in Translation in 2004.
Sophia had never even thought about making a documentary until she was approached by RJ Cutler—writer of Billie Eilish: A Slightly Blurry World, The September Issue, and producer of Listen to Me, Marlon—with a proposal to make a film about her longtime friend. “I had never thought about documentary before, but it seemed to me that this was a kind of fun challenge for me and it would be very interesting for me to watch Mark throughout the process of preparing his new collection and talk about his creative path and the best works over all his years in the profession. And yes, we have been friends since the early 1990s, and, of course, it was very interesting for me to return to the many memories of our youth and to the best works created by Mark,” told director at the Venice Film Festival, where she presented the film together with Jacobs.
For 12 weeks in 2024, Sofia, along with her brother Roman Coppola and a small film crew, watched the birth of Jacobs’ new collection – from the choice of fabrics, their texture, shades, thickness to the final show, which the fashion designer invariably turns into a spectacular, theatrical show. Jacobs immediately admits that the desire for performance is due to the fact that he enjoys the profession of theater director. There is a lot in common between the theater and the preparation of a fashion collection show: choosing actors (models), creating costumes and scenery, developing a story concept. Essentially, Jacobs, who dreams of trying his hand at theater, spends his entire career creating a small, seven-minute show that takes months of intense preparation.
Coppola shows Jacobs as vulnerable: he talks with pain about his experiences in his family, often admits that he is very worried before each new show, still suffers from impostor syndrome and cannot believe that all this is happening to him. The designer also has a great sense of humor and self-irony: mentioning how Winona Ryder turned to him to design a formal suit for participation in a trial in order to look serious and presentable, the designer unexpectedly exclaims: “Marc Jacobs will dress you for any trial!”
However, the director does not limit himself solely to the film-portrait of Jacobs today: using numerous archival materials, Coppola talks about how the fashion designer’s career developed and highlights the features of his personal life. Born into a wealthy family, Jacobs encountered tragedy early on: his father died when he was seven years old. The mother married several times and suffered from psychological problems after the death of her husband, and the boy faced cruel treatment from his stepfathers. At the age of 14, he moved to live with his paternal grandmother, forever cutting off all ties with the family and subsequently not even appearing at his mother’s funeral.
It was the grandmother who instilled in the future fashion designer a taste for fashion and art and supported him in his desire to become a fashion designer, and even came to her grandson’s first shows wearing his clothes. Jacobs attends Parsons, one of the most prestigious schools of art and design in the world, based in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York. Having presented his graduation collection of sweaters with smiley faces, which, of course, his grandmother helped him knit, the young fashion designer received an award for the best student design of the year upon graduation. Subsequently, the collection of sweaters is sold by the chain of New York boutiques Charivari, where Mark worked as a salesman before joining, and an article about the sweaters appears on the pages of the prestigious The New York Times. Upon graduation from Parsons, Mark also received the Golden Thimble Award from fashion designers Perry Ellis and Chester Weinberg. It was at Perry Ellis, already as creative director, that Jacobs created the legendary spring-summer 1993 collection in the grunge style, which made him famous in the fashion world.
Grunge is a musical movement and subsequently a rebellious clothing style that emerged in the 1980s in Seattle as a protest against gloss and commercialization. Jacobs decided to bring the aesthetic of the Seattle music scene, with its floral dresses, oversized Martens, and oversized flannel shirts, into the fashion world. Thus, the fashion designer undermined the industry, built on gloss, from the inside. The consequences were not long in coming: a big scandal broke out, the patriarchs of the industry were horrified, the same The New York Times wrote that the collection was created with their eyes closed in a very dark room, and Jacobs lost his place. “With this collection, I tried to reach a level where I do what I like and don’t care what others think. I usually care about the opinions of people around me, but what Perry Ellis thought in this context was not important to me… In general, I liked the reputation of the bad guy, it was quite fun to be in the center of such a large-scale dialogue, and my goal was to either be loved or hated, the middle was not interesting to me,” recognized Jacobs.
In the film, the fashion designer says that he was not fired because of this scandalous collection, as is commonly said, but he really likes this version of events. One way or another, the scandal and loss of work did not prevent Jacobs from becoming one of the most influential fashion designers in the world, creative director of Louis Vuitton, and subsequently opening a fashion house under his own brand. By the way, Sofia Coppola actively supported Mark on his path: she took part in advertising campaigns for perfumes and clothes of his brand and even designed a handbag for Louis Vuitton, which has since bear her name. “When I lived in Paris after filming the film Marie Antoinette, Mark worked there, and we spent a lot of time together, we have a whole “Paris chapter” of our relationship,” remembers Coppola.
Jacobs was able to bring notes of hooliganism and his beloved underground culture to Louis Vuitton, and also invited Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, Sylvie Fleury, Zaha Hadid, Richard Prince, Daniel Buren, Yayoi Kusama and other cult artists of our time to collaborate.
“I was thinking about Marcel Duchamp and how he painted the Mona Lisa with a mustache,” recognized fashion designer. — And it was this cool punk idea in art, which was that you deface a piece of art to show that you have no reverence for it. And I thought: I have the Louis Vuitton monogram, which is characteristic of the brand, it’s like the American flag, like Mickey Mouse. And I invited Stephen Sprouse to “destroy” this monogram on the bags with his Duchampian graffiti. And this was the beginning of a creative search for my path in the brand.”
The spring-summer 2024 show, directed by Sofia Coppola in the film for the Marc Jacobs fashion house, founded in 1984, is also inspired by the work of the American artist and sculptor Robert Therrien. The show takes place in Manhattan’s sprawling Park Avenue Armory, where the designer is installing Therrien’s gigantic installation, Untitled (Folding Table and Chairs, Beige), consisting of enormous pieces of furniture that make models with bouffant wigs and bouffant dresses and dresses that look like they were sewn for them by a child, like miniature dolls. In this way, Jacobs not only plays with the show’s location and reinterprets the works of art, but from the very beginning of the collection’s development integrates its idea into the physical space inseparable from it. In general, the creator of his own brand, known throughout the world, a 63-year-old designer, caressed from a young age by professional awards, awards, posts in the best fashion houses and the love and hatred of the public and critics, no longer needs to prove anything to anyone. He himself admits that fashion for him has long become pure art – it may not be possible to wear it, but it is beautiful. Sofia Coppola makes her film about this, with her characteristic tenderness for the hero of the film.
The film will be released in Russia on June 25.
