When Sofia Met Marc

The fashion documentary is famously sumptuous: slow-motion shots of ruched, billowing fabric, with fleeting glimpses of the intricacy and detail that atelier hands spend weeks, sometimes months, poring over. We gawk at this gorgeousness, the end result of a mad genius’s obsession. Same old formula, same damn feeling. Marc by Sofia, the new movie—and first documentary—from Sofia Coppola about her friend Marc Jacobs, feels like it’s attempting to do something different. If its peers feel elegant, Marc by Sofia is tuned to its own frequency, more invested in a legacy of friendship than straight fashion. 

Coppola and Jacobs have known each other for over 30 years, first meeting in 1993. At that time, Jacobs had caused such a stir with a Perry Ellis collection that leaned into grunge and counterculture, he was ultimately dismissed for it. Coppola, slightly younger, was finding her way as an artist in her own right, experimenting in fashion and photography. Their creative insights have aligned: they’re both known for their acute understanding of femininity, manifesting in different forms. 

It was Jacobs’s team that came to Coppola with the idea of making a documentary about his life. For Coppola, it’s a one-and-done project—she has no interest in making nonfiction features again anytime soon, she’s said—perhaps because the softness of her framing as a narrative auteur feels diametrically opposed to the kind of confrontation one might expect from a documentary like this. But her name is there in the title. It feels like a polyamorous, multi-pronged love story between two friends and the mediums of fashion, cinema, and art. She speaks from behind the camera and, every so often, steps into it too.Though it runs the gamut of Jacobs’s life and work, it does so in a slightly amorphous structure, bouncing between decades instead of proceeding chronologically. Coppola arrived, however, during the preparation for the Marc Jacobs Spring 2024 show—the collection of oddly-proportioned, Polly Pocket-ish garments on models made up like dolls. They walked under an oversized table and folding chair, the work of the late artist Robert Therrien. We return to it partly to act as a real-time insight into his process, from concept to fitting to the final show.

For Jacobs novices, there is enough here for you to learn about why he’s important and how he’s successfully landed at legendary houses and played with their DNA. His time at Louis Vuitton is a core subject in the film, and Jacobs discusses how designing for the house—then just a leather and luggage brand—felt like an “impossible” task at first. “You have to deface it [and] show it no respect,” he says of the monogram, famously graffitiing over the top of it—a move Vuitton were hesitant about but that, in the end, became an iconic bestseller. 

There’s so much material here that’s come from Coppola combing through archives—both Jacobs and her own—that it makes fashion history feel fresh. There’s unseen images of Coppola’s Halloween costumes, fun footage from the X-Girl days (so fun, in fact, that I came home and ordered a hoodie on eBay), and clips from Jacobs’s Parsons graduate show.

But every time you think it’s turning into a run-of-the-mill fashion story, we’re pulled in the other direction, toward something that feels like a revelation only Coppola could conjure from her friend. That Jacobs can love this wholeheartedly makes it feel all the more special. Personal, punk, and touching, it’s like being read a series of exchanged letters between two tight-knit friends who’ve made the rare decision to let you in. Now they share a cinematic language, we can wonder what a future collaboration might look like. Marc Jacobs designing costumes for the next Sofia Coppola film? We’d love to see it.