Sofia Coppola grew up in the spotlight. Much of her brilliance has centered on what she wears.
There's the envious gossip you'd expect to coalesce around such a famous daughter, like when Courtney Love admitted to stealing a Chanel lipstick from a 16-year-old Coppola's “Sistine Chapel bedroom” because she thought that he had too much. already (he fixed his karma years later by leaving the director a Chanel lip gloss at The Mercer reception). Then there's the fashion press, like when Suzy Menkes, somewhat condescendingly, noted the 23-year-old's attendance with father Francis Ford Coppola at Anna Sui's Fall/Winter 1994 show, “Pink cardigan from sugar with thin buttons, eyes bright with excitement.” Or, more lovingly, there are the anecdotes of a concerned and proud mother, as found in Eleanor Coppola's diaries. When Eleanor, who has shot behind-the-scenes documentaries on all of her daughter's films, described Coppola's “jeans, Vans, cotton shirt, chunky sweater” and “bad cough” on the first morning of filming. Marie Antoinette (2006), noted that she looked “too small and unattractive to be the director of a $40 million movie”.
In the chaos of growing up in the sprawling Coppola universe, there's fashion and there's clothing. The first is pure pleasure, the second is a coping mechanism. “Some sort of uniform helps,” said Coppola, in his succinct way. The uniform, as it is, consists of skinny jeans, sneakers, V-neck sweaters and, most recently, overalls, like a denim button-up made by Sonia Rykiel's creative director Julie de Libran for the production of Nova Orleans. The Deceived (2017). But the hotline is Coppola's button-down cotton shirts from Parisian brand Charvet, the traditional men's shirt he tailors to his frame for every project.
You'll see Coppola in these pale blue or white slim-fit shirts, which stand out among the era-specific outfits of her characters, those women and girls who always seem to be waiting in the wings of other people's stories, because they tend to be those who have wished too much. Turned on The Deceived, is surrounded by her actresses wearing Civil War dresses and petticoats in washed-out pastels; a few years earlier, on the set of The Bling Ring (2013), the director returns with her actresses to Paris Hilton's real house, the only one in the room without badly made extensions. And even on set The Suicide Virgins (1999), when Coppola was still a kitten heel in the '90s It-girl splits, we see the director for the first time holding a light meter to her four Lisbon sisters on the front lawn: them in four shapeless sacks, her in a pale blue short-sleeved T-shirt not unlike the one Satyajit Ray wore at his own summer shoots
Coppola's reputation for quietness is at odds with an uncompromising nature; its reputation for a specific aesthetic in cinema belies the years of experimentation that formed it. “I could do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but I never had the patience to study something and become an expert at it,” she admitted in her twenties in 2000. “I was confused. about what I was supposed to do and I was afraid of waking up one day having done nothing with my life. Now I realize it's useful to be a generalist if you want to make movies.” With her own appearance closely reproduced and analyzed from birth, it's no wonder she took an “intense” (as her mother notes) interest in fashion—a world she felt so at home in, it's almost as if she had simply walked into a larger version of her father's wardrobe departments that she used to browse. Marc Jacobs was a certainty, which helped. “I didn't know what I was doing with my life,” she said of being drawn to her longtime friend's designs, “but I knew I wanted to be in those clothes.”
It is this understanding of images, and being an image, that has so profoundly shaped Coppola's cinematic point of view, in which he creates worlds of boundless aesthetic pleasures and performs a serious reading of their surfaces. As the critic Anna Backman Rogers has written, what Coppola reveals with the satisfying morsels of girls she presents us with is “the process by which an image comes to make sense culturally,” that is, “how images function as clichés that , in turn, report. our understanding of power relations”.
Wondering in her diaries why her daughter, as a foreigner, had turned to the enormously challenging subject of a young French queen, Eleanor Coppola correctly identifies the parallels between her daughter and her three main protagonists up to that point : Lux in The Suicide VirginsCharlotte a Lost in translationi Marie Antoinette. “Sofia is part of all these women,” she writes. “Growing up she was, in a way, a princess of the kingdom of Francis. On their sets she was treated as the adored daughter of the boss, son of a celebrity. She was not seen as a thinking and feeling person with her own identity and keen perceptions. Sofia worked hard to survive and develop…[she] weave reflections of [that] experience in his films.”
A uniform becomes more necessary as cinema becomes a life. It's while filming Marie Antoinette at Versailles that Coppola first publicly cited Charvet's shirts. It's almost as if the more traditionally—and elaborately—feminine her on-screen characters are, the more strongly she wants to stick to her own playbook, one that favors the plain tee over frills and bows. “I like to have a bunch when I'm shooting, so I don't have to think about what I'm wearing,” he told Charvet's Self-Service magazine that year.
It fascinates me that just as Sofia Coppola was literally and figuratively introducing Converse shoes into French history, she was also doing her part to keep the more traditional French workshops in business. This serves as a parallel with the doomed queen herself, on whose purchases and influence the textile industry in France depended. (Marie's switch from French silk to American cotton was one of the reasons the public turned against her, sparking a rage that would lead to her execution.) Charvet himself dates from 1838, only 45 years after the queen's death, and its tailor-made fabrics and artisan attention. in detail they are similar to those of dressmakers of another era.
In Eleanor Coppola's documentary about the making of Marie Antoinette, the younger Coppola wears a blue shirt with skinny jeans as she directs a scene with '60s icon Marianne Faithful (she looks nervous; Coppola's soothing voice tells her she's doing a good job). Elsewhere, Coppola wears a striped shirt, which looks a bit more like pajamas, with a black cashmere scarf. At one point, she's also wearing a skeleton hoodie, like Donnie Darko, and a Hysteric Glamor t-shirt, like a Depop girl; this, like Coppola as a director, is a wardrobe still in transition. “When you direct,” he said, “it's the only time you get to have the world exactly the way you want it.” As carefully commissioned as they are, the shirts seem like a natural graduation from the fashion play of his youth—those years when he “didn't know what he was doing”—to the serious business of management. Which brings us back to his father, Francis, and his uniform; and Fellini, and his.
In one of my favorite shots of the director on set, Sofia Coppola walks through the middle of Marie Antoinette's masquerade ball scene, surrounded by a cast of hundreds of silk draperies (and a couple of technicians in cut-off denim down). It's just one of many photos by on-set photographer Leigh Johnson, but it's quite beautiful, lit like Barry Lyndon. Even though she's busy directing and must have as many conflicting thoughts in her head as there are extras on set, Coppola, in a wrinkled white shirt, exhausted, stares into the camera, beaming.
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