Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs in New York, Aug. 26, 2025. Coppola’s first-ever documentary, unveiled at the Venice Film Festival, is an affectionate portrait of her decades-long bond with the designer. Photo: The New York Times
Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola feel as if it was almost too easy to make their new documentary, Marc By Sofia.
After three decades of friendship, did their closeness change things as they filmed?
“Change it? I don’t think so,” said Jacobs, 62.
“Marc just kind of let me hang around,” said Coppola, 54.
It was half an hour after the documentary’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where the two were in a room on the Lido.
Jacobs designed a long-sleeve lace print dress for Coppola to wear that night. He adjusted a black bow, clipped into his freshly permed hair, with his extra-long bejewelled nails.
The producers, RJ Cutler and Jane Cha Cutler, had approached Jacobs, who had appeared in a televised French documentary, Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton, in 2007.
He said he would consider being the subject if Coppola directed it. She agreed, and then he knew he could not back out.
The documentary is Coppola’s first nonfiction feature, which chronicles 12 weeks of Jacobs’ life as he designs his Spring 2024 collection.
Jacobs’ creative process is revealed as loose. He finds the theme and scope of the show as he’s working in his studio.
“I envision some other designer, like some great talent, who knows exactly what they want to do, and it’s about putting in all the work to execute that vision,” he said.
“Maybe there is somebody like that, but I’m not that person.”
As he spoke, Coppola nodded in recognition about her own process.
“Some people have a storyboard and a shot list,” she said, “But I have to see the actors and how it feels.”
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Their familiarity with each other at times proved challenging.
“The first interview was hard because it’s difficult to interview someone and ask a question when I already know the answer,” Coppola said.
She appears on-screen, but more often her laid-back presence comes through in her voice behind the camera, which tempers Jacobs’ boisterous sincerity.
Beyond Jacobs building his collection, Coppola explores his array of references, which create an impressionistic portrait: clips from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant and Bob Fosse’s choreography in Sweet Charity and All That Jazz.
Muses and friends like artists Cindy Sherman and Rachel Feinstein are also included, as are childhood obsessions such as the Supremes, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand.
The film glances at Jacobs’ family life. His mother, Judy, wore clothes inspired by Jane Fonda in Klute and once bought a shocking pink fur coat.
“She had the trashiest, most vulgar taste, but I look back on it, and it was pretty cool,” he said.
His father, an agent at William Morris, died when he was six years old. His mother remarried, and as an adolescent, Jacobs went to live with his paternal grandmother, Helen.
“I wish there were more photos of his childhood,” Coppola said.
From the archival research, she did find clips of his senior show at Parsons School of Design in 1984, when he won the design student of the year award for his boxy knit sweaters and skirts.
“You look so shy then,” she told him.
Jacobs was soon hired as a womenswear designer for Perry Ellis, where he created the infamous 1992 “grunge” collection, his last for the label.
That year is when he met Coppola, then 21, who visited the designer with her mother, filmmaker Eleanor Coppola.
The mid-1990s, when Jacobs started his namesake line, “was also definitely a time”, he said.
“New York was a lot smaller than it is now, and life was so different.”
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There is a clip in the film of a fashion show in 1994 featuring X-Girl, a clothing line that Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth created with stylist Daisy Von Furth.
The show was staged just outside Jacobs’ show so that the departing crowd would see it.
Coppola produced the show and can be seen telling a reporter it was the “outlaw fashion show to liven things up this week”.
Other friends from that era, like Chloe Sevigny and Ione Skye, also appear in footage. As does designer Anna Sui, with whom Jacobs and Coppola used to go to dinner, often at La Grenouille in New York before it closed.
“We were really into themes for a while,” Coppola said.
“Will it be a dress-up dinner or a jewellery dinner,” Jacobs said, laughing.
When Jacobs was named the creative director of Louis Vuitton in 1997, he moved to Paris. Coppola also moved there when she began a relationship with her musician husband, Thomas Mars.
Coppola filmed Jacobs after the 2024 runway show at his home in Rye, New York.
Dressed in a pair of Prada pajamas, he talked about what his friend, director Lana Wachowski, called Post Art Done, a play on “postpartum” referring to the comedown phase after a project is finished.
Jacobs and Coppola said they were not decompressing from the project but rather gearing up for what’s next after a summer in which Jacobs stayed at home and read Ocean Vuong and Edmund White and Coppola travelled to see family.
Jacobs was about to begin work on his next show in January.
Now that he has let viewers into his design process, they will understand that he does not yet know what that will look like.
“We don’t know what we want to do,” he said, “And it’s the same conversation all over again.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
