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.
