What the film also captures brilliantly, however, is Jacobs’s distinctive genius as a designer. One thrilling section charts the run-up to his spring 2024 show, which memorably featured an oversized folding chair and table by the artist Robert Therrien, under which models processed with Diana Ross-on-acid wigs and deliberately clumpy fake eyelashes. After absorbing Jacobs’s melting pot of references throughout the film, we can finally appreciate how he distils them into clothes that read a little strange at first—the proportions of the paper doll coats, the blown-up handbags, the oversize pailletes and trompe l’oeil embellishments—and then, just as quickly, become strangely desirable.
But perhaps the most affecting moment in the film comes the day after the show, when Coppola travels to Jacobs’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in upstate New York, and he greets her in a silk dressing gown, visibly and audibly drained after the previous day’s extravaganza. There’s a great turn of phrase that Jacobs uses to describe a feeling of exhaustion that is not quite postpartum, but “post art done,” a term passed on to him by the director Lana Wachowski.
Did he feel nervous about showing that side of the process, too? Not just the frenzy and the fabulousness of the fashion show, but the emotional comedown afterwards? “Sofia didn’t overstate any of it. I think neither of us had a real plan—it all just kind of happened. And because of the ease of our friendship, that ended up in the film. Also, that wasn’t even the worst ‘post art done’ I’ve ever suffered. He knows, he’s been through them all with me,” he says, gesturing to Defrancesco. “I said it to Sofia a couple of weeks ago. I was like, ‘Thank God it was that show you came to.’ Because even though there were some hiccups, none of them were so dramatic that I was like, ‘This is the end of my life. I’ll never work again.’ I happen to really love that show.”
Photographed by Francesc Planes
