It’s not just a fashion movie—it’s a movie about movies.
From Funny Girl to All That Jazz, the film is steeped in classic musicals, alongside The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Hello, Dolly!—the first movie Jacobs ever saw in a theater. Elizabeth Taylor looms especially large; at one point, Jacobs tells Coppola, “All roads lead to Liz.” For his fall 2024 show, that translates to towering, inky bouffants built from “wigs on top of wigs.”
Jacobs didn’t get fired from Perry Ellis for his grunge collection…
Fashion lore says that after Marc Jacobs did his then-polarizing, now-legendary grunge collection for Perry Ellis in 1993, the prim execs booted him. But “it’s a misconception that I got fired for it,” Jacobs says in the movie. “It’s the story I like to go with. But it’s not the truth.” Really, Jacobs was already plotting his next moves as a fashion force—but much like Yves Saint Laurent and his 1971 “Scandal Collection,” Jacobs realized the marketing value of a little mess.
…But he was scared around grunge rockers afterwards.
Courtney Love famously burned the pieces of the grunge collection that Jacobs sent her as a gift. (Love later told me she wished she’d kept them.) The gesture made Jacobs hesitant when Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth reached out about a possible music video collaboration. “Doing that grunge collection was looked down on by Courtney and Kurt [Cobain],” Jacobs tells Coppola in the film. “So when I met Kim, I froze. I’m very intimidated by people I look up to… So I told her, ‘I would love to do this [music video], but I don’t want to be the butt of your joke.’” Spoiler alert: He wasn’t; the music video (“Sugar Kane”) is still a classic. Gordon and Jacobs are still good friends!
We meet a new Marc muse.
Delilah Koch, Jacobs’s fit model and a face of his Perfect fragrance, quietly anchors the film. She’s often first into the clothes—testing silhouettes, tights, even nail polish—and joins a lineage of Marc muses that includes Dakota Fanning and Rachel Feinstein. Off the runway, the Montana native is also an outspoken mental health advocate, speaking up for suicide awareness and body image support.
His mom was his original beauty template.
In the film, Jacobs describes how, as a child, he would watch his mother prepare for a date. “She would scrape black velvet with a knife and add the velvet to her mascara to pile on her lashes,” he explains, adding that he was enthralled: “Creating this person that you want to be at any given time is part of human nature.” You can still see an obsession with otherworldly lashes on the Marc Jacobs runway, as well as his on-and-off beauty line, which featured a now-discontinued mascara so good, there’s still a thriving black market on eBay.
His grandmother made his first samples.
Jacobs revered his grandmother, Helen, who taught him the unspoken rules of style. “I saw beautiful clothes with her,” he tells Coppola. “She would plan her whole day around where she shopped—a Saks day, a Bergdorf day.” When Jacobs launched his first sweater line in the early ’80s, Grandma Helen knit the first samples.
Fake bags led to real results.
A disciple of Marcel Duchamp’s artful subversion and punk rock’s stylish defiance, Jacobs realized while working at Louis Vuitton that “in order to change something and in order to make it cool, you have to deface it.” Enter his decades-long partnership with graffiti legend Stephen Sprouse, who scrawled over Louis Vuitton’s hallowed monogram bags in 2001. Some executives were so aghast they refused to produce them for retail—until, as Jacobs tells it, demand became so intense that counterfeiters began making their own imaginary Vuitton x Sprouse bags, convincing the luxury label that interest in Jacobs’s design was sky-high. “Now people say, ‘It was so brilliant,’” Jacobs tells Coppola. “It took a minute for everyone to get it, though.”
Even Marc Jacobs gets freaked out…
“I get really nervous before shows,” Jacobs admits to Coppola just before his fall 2024 collection hits the runway. “It’s such a physical thing. I work to show the work, but then I feel very frightened!” What keeps him going? “The joy you get for a few minutes of seeing that work. Then you want to do it again.”
…But he keeps his team really calm.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the film is watching Jacobs interact with runway veterans like makeup artist Diane Kendal and hairstylist Duffy, alongside PR guru Michael Ariano and stylist Alastair McKimm. In one of the documentary’s quietest moments, Jacobs stops McKimm from making one last adjustment before the models hit the catwalk. “Let it go,” he says softly. Then the show begins.
Marc and Sofia want you to get out of here.
Like all the best art, Jacobs says his clothes can’t exist in a vacuum, and neither can the creative process. “You can’t just find inspiration,” Jacobs says as he walks Coppola through his latest work. “You have to be doing something.” Coppola underscores his point with a video clip of young women frolicking in a field. They wear Marc Jacobs; they look incredible. It is clear that they’re having too much fun just hanging out to care.
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