“It was such a fun experience for me to get to follow Marc around his studio,” Sofia Coppola said in her opening remarks for last night’s screening of Marc x Sofia by the Friends of the Met’s Costume Institute. She addressed a room full of friends and industry counterparts—Grace Coddington, Andrew Bolton, Alastair McKimm, and more—nestled into the stylish Metrograph Theater on the Lower East Side. She continued: “To look through the archives and remember so many collections that I loved and wore over the years.” The film itself—the first documentary by Coppola and second solely about Jacobs—feels like that: a friend tagging along for a stylized journey through the highlights of a decades-long, transcendent career in fashion. But for most of it, Coppola is behind the camera; Jacobs is the focus here.
At the film’s beginning, Jacobs notes his reverence for designers who can pick an idea and stick to it, who can plan a schedule and follow it, but orderly, he is not. Jacobs alludes to one of his icons, Yves Saint Laurent, and how he would sketch a collection we now consider legendary in a sort of fever dream. Now that he can relate to. So sets the precedent for the film: a heady collage of reference material like Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (the director’s work is a much-returned-to source of inspiration), Jacobs dancing around in his studio, and runway shows from different stages of his career. This is someone whose life is about creation.
BFA.com/Quadir Moore
The documentary pieces together Jacobs’s prolific career like a puzzle, jumping forward and backward in time between these sensationalized vignettes. You see glimpses of his childhood in New York City, much of which was spent living with his grandmother (those photos got an audible “awwww” from Coddington) and clips from the Parsons runway show that earned him the Design Student of the Year award in 1984. Then, there are his first pieces that landed on the floor of New York boutique Charivari—sweaters polka-dotted with ‘70s “hippie” smiley faces—and his start designing for Perry Ellis, where he debuted the grunge collection that changed fashion. Coppola continues to interview Jacobs, diagramming the work done under his own label alongside his tenure as founding director of Louis Vuitton’s ready-to-wear division in the early 2000s.
There’s a cheekiness about the whole thing, like when Coppola asks Jacobs, “Why do all gay men love Barbra Streisand?” Every joke, wink, and quip serves as evidence that Jacobs certainly courts the designation as both fashion’s darling and its enfant terrible. He loves noting the misconception that he was fired from Perry Ellis for that infamous grunge collection and recounting the pushback he received when he wanted to cover a Louis Vuitton monogrammed bag with graffiti. (To really change something, he says, you have to degrade it, to show it no respect.) And he’s not shy about listing the people he’s dressed for courtroom appearances: Winona Ryder and Lil’ Kim. “Go to Marc, he’ll dress you for your trial,” he laughed. But the act of retrofitting that demure ladylike look for boundary-pushers is one he loves: fashion is a costume, after all, or at least it is in Jacobs’s world.
The designer’s campiness is enhanced by Coppola’s touch; they certainly make sense as friends. (In one scene, she laughs that one of the best looks he ever put her in was a little boy cop uniform for Halloween many years prior.) Her grungy-cool yet youthfully feminine montages help paint the picture of the uptown-goes-downtown pair they were pre-millennium, gallivanting around New York City. Now, in their 50s and 60s, they’ve become titans of their fields. And last night, they sat in a room surrounded by the mega-successful creatives they grew up with.
Left to Right: Grace Coddington, Marc Jacobs, Sofia Coppola BFA.com/Quadir Moore
A good portion of the film catalogs the lead-up to the Fall 2024 Marc Jacobs runway show. We’ve now come into the era where Jacobs doesn’t seem so concerned with wearability—his business strategy is definitely not the focus of this film. The narrative arc supports this idea that he’s earned the right to defy the industry. We see Jacobs along with his longtime stylist McKimm and the rest of the design team turning archetypal clothing like sweaters and shorts into their paper doll counterparts, flattening and stretching them into supersized versions of themselves. Models with wigs teased to incredible heights and crazy spider-y lashes snake through the set of a table and chairs twice the size of any human. This isn’t just fashion; it’s theater.
In one of the closing scenes, Jacobs addresses the production of it all: it’s not really about the clothes, he says. He’s spending months creating performance art that’s gone in under ten minutes, devoting his life to ideas in such a way that he spirals into a comedown he and friends call post-art-um (a play on post-partum). And then he’s consistently moved to do it again—and to attempt to make everything perfect once more. The man spends as much time on the weave of knits as he does on the buoyancy of wigs. And when a designer from his studio is pressing him to shift something to a more practical approach, he points out: “They can put a man on the moon.” So, yet again, begs the film: Why not?
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