The Style Is the Substance in Sofia Coppola’s Marc Jacobs Documentary
In the show notes handed to audience members at Marc Jacobs’s Fall/Winter 2026 presentation, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in early February, the designer included a section titled Credits and Receipts. The list included entries like “Yves Saint Laurent Couture 1965,” “Prada Spring/Summer 1996,” and “Stüssy.” It also named a number of Jacobs’s own past collections, like the 2003 offering from his now defunct diffusion line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, and “Perry Ellis Spring/Summer 1993,” the final collection Jacobs designed for that house before he left it and launched his own line.
As Mark Twain once wrote (in a letter to no less than a young Helen Keller), “substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” This certainly holds true in the world of fashion: it’s the rare designer, I’d venture, who eschews a mood board when making a collection. It’s rather more singular for a designer to point out, to his audience, the exact cluster of sources that have informed his work; and yet it makes a lot of sense that Jacobs is precisely that kind of a designer. Since launching his career, in the mid-nineteen-eighties—first at Perry Ellis and then under his namesake label (which, between 1997 and 2013, he juggled alongside his role as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, in Paris)—Jacobs has been a genius of the cultural collage, picking and choosing from a world of both high and low references to make new objects of desire for mass consumption.
It’s this devotion to culling and remixing to fit the moment that the new documentary “Marc by Sofia” takes as its implicit subject. Sofia is the film director Sofia Coppola, who’s been one of Jacobs’s close friends since the two met, in the early nineties, toward the end of his time at Perry Ellis. In the years since, both have become prominent in their respective fields, Jacobs as one of the most important American designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and Coppola as a director of several influential films, among them “Lost in Translation” (2003), “Marie Antoinette” (2006), and “The Bling Ring” (2013).
Like Jacobs, Coppola is highly invested in fashion, an interest that is manifest in her work. Whether it’s the montage of candy-colored Manolo Blahnik heels in “Marie Antoniette,” or the pastel Juicy Couture sweatsuits worn by the young and shallow Los Angeles criminals of “The Bling Ring,” Coppola’s focus on pretty surfaces is both pointed and omnipresent. Still, while these surfaces are clearly meant to reflect deeper emotional and cultural truths, Coppola’s mining of them is done glancingly, airily. Probed but never dismantled, they are at least as important to her as what lies beneath them, if not more so. She seems, in this sense, like the perfect person to lead us into Jacobs’s world.
Much like the great fashion documentary “Unzipped” (1995), which follows the designer Isaac Mizrahi during the preparations for, and staging of, his Fall/Winter 1994 show, “Marc by Sofia” begins twelve weeks before the Marc Jacobs Fall/Winter 2024 show, at the Armory, and ends the morning after that presentation. But, while “Unzipped” is a tight and funny movie that sticks close to the prep-and-staging time line, “Marc by Sofia” uses this time line as a pretext to offer a retrospective portrait of Jacobs himself. The word “portrait,” though, might be misleading for viewers expecting a film that penetrates Jacobs’s persona and his history. The designer, who is now sixty-two, has experienced a fair amount of tumult during his life and career. (He reportedly became estranged from most of his nuclear family at a young age, and he has struggled in the past with substance abuse and with well-publicized business challenges.) The film addresses none of this. Instead, and perhaps fittingly, Coppola takes a page from Jacobs’s own book, and strings together a gauzy assortment of references and influences—presented through clips, photographs, and interviews—that have made up Jacobs’s artistic blueprint over the years.
There’s, of course, grunge, whose seditious spirit the designer famously used as inspiration for his final Perry Ellis collection, sending models down the runway in high-end versions of slip dresses, stocking caps, and plaid shirts; there’s Bob Fosse, whose larger-than-life vision of on-the-brink feminine glamour in movies like “Cabaret” and “Sweet Charity” has served as a longstanding model for Jacobs’s womenswear; then there’s Liz Taylor and her white diamonds, and Cindy Sherman and her “Untitled Film Stills” photo series, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the clashing, hysterical palette of “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1972), and the Supremes and their slinky, spangly gowns, and the “teen-age hippie vibes” of Jacobs’s young babysitter and her friends in early-seventies N.Y.C., and his grandmother and the proper-lady outfits that she wore on shopping trips to Bendel and Bergdorf and Bonwit Teller, and Vivienne Westwood’s punk spirit, and Yves Saint Laurent’s Scandal collection, with its decadent take on trim nineteen-forties dressing, thirty years on.
All of this is a bit haphazard, and none of it is very deep or revealing. But, for a Gen X-er like myself who grew up looking to Jacobs and his designs to “always hit it on the head,” as Vogue’s Grace Coddington tells Coppola (I distinctly recall leafing through Vogue as a young teen and marvelling at grunge—wow, my culture!—making it to Fashion Week), the documentary nonetheless feels quite meaningful. There’s also something a little elegiac about it. Jacobs is a cultural titan who found his voice in the late twentieth century, and his influences are mostly culled from that era, too. Beginning his career as a young man during the tail end of the American century, he was a master of the on-the-pulse cultural quote. But now he, like so many of us, is older, and we’re well into the new century, which, for better or worse, is no longer America’s. In Coppola’s footage of Jacobs’s 2024 show, models dressed in stiff, oversized separates, blown-up bouffant hairdos, and exaggerated mod makeup, like cutouts or caricatures of ladies who lunch, teeter through the cavernous Armory to the melancholy sounds of a Philip Glass piano piece. It’s all very beautiful, but it also feels a bit like a funeral.
And yet there’s still something passionate, still very much alive, about Jacobs. It’s thrilling to observe his intense aesthetic precision as the person responsible for controlling every aspect of his brand’s output and presentation, down to the most minute details. (“It needs to be, like, dead Barbie,” he instructs the nail artist Jin Soon Choi about the “too bright” pink varnish she’s devised for the show, before telling the makeup artist Diane Kendal that the models’ lower lashes “are still not so clumpy, they’re very, like, straight-liney.”) At one point in the documentary, Jacobs talks about the “Big Spender” number in Fosse’s “Sweet Charity,” in which a row of bespangled, heavily made-up hostesses—“broken dolls,” in the designer’s words—beckon a prospective bar customer in an angular, highly stylized dance of seduction. “I’ve looked at this so many times,” he tells Coppola. “But I didn’t realize, when you broke it down, how smart every little gesture was. The precision of every little gesture created a feeling of discomfort or titillation. . . . He was a really incredible man. Really a genius.” It takes one to know one. ♦