The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity 9781350176621, 9781350178076, 9781350176652, 9781350176638

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Self-Fashioning
2 Fashioning Worlds
3 Film Style
4 The Fashion–Fame–Film Industrial Complex
Conclusion
Sofia Coppola: A Fashion and Film Timeline
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola Fashion, Culture, Celebrity

Suzanne Ferriss

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Suzanne Ferriss, 2021 Suzanne Ferriss has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xv–xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning in Somewhere (2010) directed by Sophia Coppola (© Focus Features / Photofest NYC) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7662-1 PB: 978-1-3501-7807-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7663-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-7664-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Steven

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Contents List of Illustrations  viii Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction  1 1 Self-Fashioning  14 2 Fashioning Worlds  55 3 Film Style  99 4 The Fashion–Fame–Film Industrial Complex  154

Conclusion  194

Sofia Coppola: A Fashion and Film Timeline  206 Notes  210 Select Bibliography  257 Index  271

Illustrations The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book.

1.1 Marie Antoinette at the handover. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  24 1.2 Marie Antoinette blends into the wallpaper. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  26 1.3 “Let them eat cake.” Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  28 1.4 McBurney working in the garden. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  32 1.5 Edwina’s defiant dress. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  33 1.6 “Keep your stitches in a straight line like I showed you.” The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  34 1.7 A Facebook post of Rebecca modeling Lindsay Lohan’s yellow Chanel bag. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  36 1.8 Marc on his bed in Paris Hilton’s pink stilettos. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  39

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1.9 Johnny watching pole-dancing twins. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  42 1.10 Johnny, in white, strides toward the camera. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  43 1.11 Bob Harris with his tuxedo clipped at the back. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  44 1.12 Charlotte framed by Kelly and John. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  45 1.13 Charlotte and Bob in matching sleepwear. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  47 1.14 The Lisbon sisters in identical homecoming dresses as captured by their father’s instant camera. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  49 1.15 Trip Fontaine’s catwalk entrance. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  49 1.16 Lux filtered dreamily through the boys’ fantasies. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  51 1.17 “I want those girls in the nighties.” The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  51 1.18 Johnny Marco literally behind a mask. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  54 2.1 The boys and girls, in split screen, communicate using rotary phones and record players. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  63

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2.2 Trip’s Western-style shirt ties him to 1970s’ style and his past self. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  65 2.3 The beguiling nature of lace. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  68 2.4 Nicole Kidman’s Martha resembles Nastassja Kinski’s Tess. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola; Tess, directed by Roman Polanski  70 2.5 Jo Ann Callis, Woman with Blue Bow, 1977, chromogenic print, 14 5/16 x 17 15/16 in. (36.4 x 45.6 cm)  71 2.6 “The party’s over.” Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  72 2.7 Marie Antoinette’s black gown and “mask” scarcely conceal her desire. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  74 2.8 Count Fersen channels Adam Ant  77 2.9 The triangular silhouette of Marie Antoinette’s dark gown merges with that of the manicured trees. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  80 2.10 The teenagers’ clothing reflects their personalities. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  83 2.11 A Suntory whiskey ad with Bob Harris (Bill Murray). Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  87 2.12 Charlotte decorates her hotel room with pink paper cherry blossoms. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  89 2.13 The Japanese talk-show host’s clothes match his colorful set. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  91

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2.14 The twin pole dancers perform to “My Hero” in underwear and stilettos. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  94 2.15 Cleo skating to “Cool.” Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  95 2.16 Johnny’s boots, like his car, symbolize his itinerant existence. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  96 3.1 Bill Owens’s picture of an eighth-grade graduation dance with tinfoil stars, 1973  106 3.2 Coppola’s recreation in The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  106 3.3 William Eggleston’s photo of Marcia Hare, c. 1975  107 3.4 Lux on the football field. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  108 3.5 Marie Antoinette after consummating her marriage. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  108 3.6 Marie Antoinette with her daughter. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  109 3.7 William Eggleston’s print of two girls talking intently and intimately on a couch, 1973  110 3.8 Amy, Alicia, and Emily on a couch. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  111 3.9 Martha bathing an unconscious McBurney. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  111 3.10 A Calabasas kitchen in The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  112

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3.11 Tina Barney, Beverly, Jill and Polly, 1982, chromogenic color print, 48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm)  113 3.12 John Kacere, Maude, 1977  114 3.13 The opening shot of Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  115 3.14 Charlotte, folded up on the window sill, gazing out over Tokyo. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola  116 3.15 Advertisement for Charles Jourdan by Guy Bourdin, 1977  118 3.16 The opening image from Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  118 3.17 Bruce Weber’s portrait of Matt Dillon  121 3.18 A portrait-style close-up of Chloe in Lick the Star  123 3.19 Models stalking the hallway in Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola  124 3.20 The Bling Ring walking, Entourage-style, along Rodeo Drive. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  124 3.21 “The Twelve Most Photographed Models,” 1947. Irving Penn, Vogue  125 3.22 Nine models wearing Charles James gowns, 1948. Cecil Beaton  126 3.23 A tableau of ladies posed around the piano in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  126 3.24 A tableau of the ladies confronting the chandelier shattered by McBurney’s pistol. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola  127

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3.25 The Lisbon sisters in their bedroom following Cecilia’s suicide. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  129 3.26 Neighborhood boys watching the Lisbon home. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  129 3.27 The queen lounges with her friends. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  131 3.28 Marie Antoinette reading to friends on the lawn at Le Petit Trianon. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  131 3.29 An evidence bag and list amid the bling. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  134 3.30 Teens taking photographs of each other for posting on Facebook. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  137 3.31 Trip’s memory of Lux replicates 1970s’ photographic style. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  138 3.32 Gauzy fantasies of the Lisbon sisters employ 1970s’ advertising style. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  138 3.33 One of the boys’ invented candid “travel” snapshots. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola  139 3.34 Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801  140 3.35 Marie Antoinette’s fantasy of Count Fersen. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola  141 3.36 Berthe Morisot, L’Ombrelle Verte, 1873  143 3.37 Kate Moss performs to the White Stripes cover of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” directed by Sofia Coppola  148

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3.38 Lauren Hutton in American Gigolo, directed by Paul Schrader  150 3.39 Courtney Eaton in Coppola’s ad for Cartier’s reissue of its 1980s’ Panthère watch, 2017  150 3.40 Courtney Eaton driving a vintage Mercedes convertible down a palm-lined Los Angeles street  151 3.41 Arthur Elgort, “Lisa Taylor, George Washington Bridge, New York,” 1976, inkjet print, 12 1/16 x 17 15/16 in. (30.6 x 45.6 cm)  151 4.1 The director calls out her “Rich Bitch” image. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola  165 4.2 Sofia on the cover of Vogue Paris, December 2004/January 2005  172 4.3 The cast of Marie Antoinette, Vogue, September 2006  181 4.4 Elle Fanning on the cover of Vogue, June 2017  183 4.5 Elle Fanning in Alexander McQueen, Vogue, June 2017  184 Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Acknowledgments

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n researching and writing this book I have had the luxury of a wide support network. My own version of the Coppola “mob” reaches across the

globe: friends in the US, UK, Europe, and New Zealand have nurtured and encouraged this project. Thanks to Caryn Simonson for generously sharing her fashion expertise, and Kathryn Galán and Dan Cohen for theirs in film. Mark McGuire and Rochelle Simmons offered their insights into photography, design, and fine arts. I have benefited from endless opportunities to talk through my ideas with the Corsos (John, Debi, Amie, Anthony, and Emma Frederick), often on the move on hikes or bike rides, and with other willing (and unwilling) conversational companions: Susie Higgins, Sharon Theroux, Christopher Fichera, Kate Waites, and Lynn Wolf. I am particularly indebted to my unofficial “research assistant,” Anne Bellissimo, who routinely supplied me with Coppola-related news (including a hot tip about a perfume called The Virgins) and avidly read the entire manuscript during the writing process. Gerd Hurm supported this project from the start, inspiring it by his own work on photographer Edward Steichen and by inviting me to present some of my ideas at an international symposium sponsored by the Trier Center for American Studies in June 2018. A generous grant from Alfred Hornung, director of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, enabled me to begin work in earnest on the project. Martha Lucy and her assistant Alia Palumbo offered me an invaluable opportunity to test arguments about Coppola’s engagement with both the fine arts and fashion at a symposium on fashion and feminism inspired by Berthe Morisot, held at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in October 2018. Martha’s invitation came from reading an article I published with Mallory Young on Marie Antoinette in 2010, portions of which appear in Chapter 1.

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My editor at Bloomsbury, Camilla Erskine, enthusiastically embraced the project and worked with astonishing speed and enviable patience to get the manuscript into publication in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Her assistant Veidehi Hans provided invaluable support, even while forced to work from home, fielding questions and researching licensing agreements and permissions. They accommodated repeated revisions to account for the rapidly evolving circumstances impacting the film industry, as did copy editor Cherry Ekins, who worked with meticulous care, astonishing speed, and sparky humor to insert last-minute changes. The anonymous reviewers of the proposal and manuscript offered helpful guidance and direction for enhancing the book. My thanks, in particular, to the peer reviewers of the final manuscript for graciously supportive assessments. A book so focused on visual culture—film, fashion, fine arts—needs images to advance its argument. I am grateful to the artists and their representatives who generously provided images as a courtesy: Bill Owens, Winston Eggleston (on behalf of William Eggleston), Lou Meisel (for John Kacere), and Emma Bowen at Kasmin (for Tina Barney). As New York City was being ravaged by the pandemic, Anthony Tran at Trunk Archives corresponded with me almost daily to secure the rights to include photographs by Annie Leibovitz and Bruce Weber. In their efficiency, Reina Nakagawa at Art + Commerce and Stefanie Breslin at Art Partners made it appear that all was well as they seamlessly communicated on my behalf with the Guy Bourdin Estate and Mario Testino’s studio. Condé Nast was ably represented in New York by Jamie Lee and in Paris by Caroline Bérton. Final thanks go to my ever-supportive family—to John, Judy, and Mathew, and to Julia and Renata (especially for traveling to Philadelphia to be with me at the Barnes). This book would not have been possible without Steven, who encouraged the idea I sprung on him over drinks after seeing The Beguiled, indulged me as I spoke ceaselessly about it over the months it took to complete it, endured my retreats into “Sofia world,” and not only read but commented on every page of the manuscript. For these reasons and so many more this book is dedicated to him.

Introduction

“Movies incorporated all the things I liked: clothes, music, photography.” SOFIA COPPOLA1 Sofia Coppola, “the most celebrated American filmmaker under 50,”2 is credited with an impressive collection of films, all released in under two decades: The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), The Bling Ring (2013), and The Beguiled (2017), with On the Rocks set to appear, as of this writing, in 2020. Their settings span the globe, from Japan to France, and cross the United States from California to Louisiana to Michigan. They encompass four centuries, from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first. Coppola’s screenplays—three original, three adaptations—inventively play with film genres: Lost in Translation has been described as a romantic comedy where the couple does not get together at the end; The Virgin Suicides is “a horror film from which all signs are erased”; Marie Antoinette is hardly a conventional historical biopic or costume drama; The Bling Ring is a crime story where the perpetrators are revealed at the start; and The Beguiled transforms the Southern gothic into “a fairy tale … a horror movie, a quasi-western, and a revenge melodrama.”3 None is exclusively comedic or melancholic. Regardless of their diversity of setting, genre, and tone, the films are united by Coppola’s distinctive cinematic aesthetic. Her directorial achievement rests on an original visual style, instantly recognizable as hers for its muted color palette, languid pacing, and quasi-still images. Trained in the fine arts, Coppola

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

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infuses her films with complex allusions to photography and painting, as well as European and Hollywood cinema. Sound and music fuse with visual images in a complex audiovisual fabric to craft narratives about identity, appearance, and surveillance that center on clothing and other fashionable goods. Rather than disguising the constructed nature of visual performance, Coppola’s films call attention to it and submerge viewers in the experience of it, causing us to reflect on our participation in a culture that grants unparalleled power to image construction, particularly through the display of amassed consumer goods. Early reviews of her work tended to devalue her cinematic achievements by foregrounding her relationship to her father or dismissing her films as confined to privileged, cossetted worlds that reflect her own upbringing.4 A growing body of scholarship has, however, begun to redress the balance, eschewing biographical readings in favor of serious consideration of Coppola’s work—cinematic and commercial. Naturally, given that she is a female director operating in male-dominated Hollywood, critics have made gender a central focus. Coppola is routinely identified as the first American woman nominated for an Oscar for directing, one of only five female directors nominated for an Academy Award in the organization’s ninety-two-year history, and only the second woman to win best director at Cannes.5 Scholars seeking to shape her emerging canon identified a trilogy composed of the first three films to argue that she created narratives centered on young women that mirrored her own existence.6 Subsequent scholars uncoupled the films from Coppola’s personal life to read them in relation to feminist politics. They reflect the range of positions and controversies within contemporary feminism. Lucy Bolton and Anna Backman Rogers have carefully studied individual films in relation to key feminist philosophies, while Fiona Handyside, Todd Kennedy, and Amy Woodworth have classed her films as postfeminist, stressing their embrace of femininity and consumerism.7 Caitlin Yunuen Lewis neatly summarized the theoretical divide: The clearly contrasting views of Coppola’s film practice—one that she is an innovative feminist filmmaker articulating important issues of contemporary womanhood, the other that she is a shallow, spoiled daughter of privilege who spends excessive amounts of her father’s money on

Introduction

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frivolous girlishness—highlight a contrast that reflects the contemporary dilemmas of femininity that are at work in all aspects of her stardom. Rather than being feminist, anti-feminist, or even quasi-feminist, Sofia Coppola is strongly located in the current climate of postfeminism.8 Recurring themes and motifs of her films, including fame and fashion, are in Handyside’s view “central questions of the postfeminist age.”9 But questions of fashion and celebrity are not exclusively postfeminist, nor are they considerations limited to women—in Coppola’s films or in contemporary culture. Her films do not exclusively feature female protagonists: boys narrate the story of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides; Lost in Translation focuses equally on Bob and Charlotte;10 Marc is central to The Bling Ring, as is Corporal McBurney in The Beguiled; Somewhere’s protagonist is a male film star. Likewise, it is limiting to equate fashion and femininity, particularly in an era when male consumers avidly trade athletic footwear as though trading stock, celebrity musicians such as Pharrell and Kanye West now partner with athletic and luxury brands to market their own styles, and NBA players’ entrances at basketball arenas are covered by photojournalists with the same eagerness as red-carpet appearances. Unquestionably, as Heidi Brevik-Zender has argued, “all of Coppola’s films reflect her preoccupation with dress and sartorial expression.”11 But in this book I argue that fashion is not restricted to the feminine and nor is it restricted to clothing. Understood in its broadest sense, fashion includes aesthetic practices in interior design, architecture, art, transport, and music, as well as dress and accessories. It is also fundamentally linked to self-fashioning, to shaping personal identity and evaluating others. In these expansive senses, fashion is central to Coppola’s oeuvre, visible on every cinematic dimension—film narrative; costume, production, sound, and music design; cinematography—and in branding and marketing. This book expands on previous scholarship to offer a comprehensive analysis of Coppola’s cinema, commercial output, and celebrity in relation to contemporary artistic, social, and cultural currents. By drawing on film and fashion theory, and also integrating theoretical approaches from a variety of disciplines—from material culture to sociology, photography, and economics—I hope to capture the complexities of Coppola’s engagement with fashion across her work and life.

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Fashion Films Despite its primacy in Coppola’s cinema, it would be misleading to call hers “fashion films.” For instance, the term “fashion film” now has a specific meaning associated with commercial work for fashion houses. As Nick ReesRoberts has noted, a “fashion film is primarily understood by those within the fashion industry to refer to the production of digital video content and branded entertainment commissioned by designer labels and fashion houses as a promotional tool. It is seen as an integral component of today’s networked culture as a type of ‘spreadable’ media content.” He identifies a range—from the low-budget productions of emerging filmmakers screened at niche festivals to promote up-and-coming designers to “big-budget commercials or campaign films made by famous film directors or prestigious photographers for the leading fashion houses that are rolled out as part of larger advertising campaigns in stores and across the internet, television, and cinema.”12 Coppola’s films for perfume (the Miss Dior and Daisy lines), clothing (Calvin Klein underwear, H&M’s Marni collection, and the Gap), jewelry (Cartier’s Panthère watch), and the house of Chanel fall squarely in the second category. Yet none of Coppola’s feature films could be classed as fashion films in the larger sense of the term as it is applied to cinema. The term has been employed to describe a variety of films with fashion as their narrative subject. ●●

Films about the fashion world—that is, films that make the industry its subject. These include those that represent the behind-the-scene activities of designing, such as Prêt-a-Porter (Robert Altman, 1994), or, more popularly, the fashion press, as in Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957) and The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006), or parodies, such as Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966) and the Zoolander series (Ben Stiller, 2001, 2016).

●●

Biographical films, fictional dramatizations of lives of fashion figures, from designers (Coco Avant Chanel, Anne Fontaine, 2009 and Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) to photographers (Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966).

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Nonfiction/documentary films about individual designers, such as Valentino: The Last Emperor (Matt Tyrnauer, 2008), Yves St. Laurent

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(Jalil Lespert, 2014), Dior and I (Frédéric Tcheng, 2015), and McQueen (Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui, 2014), or fashion editors, including Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington (The September Issue, R. J. Cutler, 2009), Diana Vreeland (Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Frédéric Tcheng, and Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, 2012), and Carine Roitfeld (Mademoiselle C, Fabien Constant, 2013). Coppola’s film narratives do not revolve around the fashion industry or feature protagonists associated with it. Instead, fashion is central to an overriding thematic concern with identity. As Chapter 1 explores, her films focus on characters at key moments of self-definition or redefinition: adolescence, mid-life crisis, marriage, divorce, and even travel. They further dramatize that the self is not fashioned (or refashioned) in isolation but is defined in relation to others, and that we evaluate others by their appearance, especially public figures—from historical personages like Marie Antoinette to contemporary celebrities. In Coppola’s films, fashion mediates between the body and the world, between crafted, public self-presentation and intimate, personal identity. From The Virgin Suicides to The Beguiled, clothing operates as a visual language in narratives that question the limits of self-knowledge and unmediated access to others.

Fashion in Film Given the thematic weight granted to fashion in Coppola’s films, costume, production, and sound design deserve scrutiny, not only in the films showcasing visual display (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled, and The Bling Ring) but also in those where clothing and material goods may not stand out ostentatiously but are nonetheless essential in establishing characters’ identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Somewhere). Studies of fashion in film have tended to limit the definition of “fashion” to clothing—meaning, as many theorists have defined it, “dress that embodies the latest aesthetic”13— and, to the extent that clothing functions as a visual language in Coppola’s films, they provide avenues for illuminating elements of her work.

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

Some studies have focused on couturiers designing for film, such as Stella Bruzzi’s Undressing Cinema or Christopher Laverty’s Fashion in Film, which document film work by Hubert de Givenchy, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves St. Laurent, and others, or storied costume designers, such as Adrian, Edith Head, and Colleen Atwood, as in Jay Jorgensen and Donald L. Scoggins’s Creating the Illusion.14 It is worth noting that Manolo Blahnik created the shoes for Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring makes designer goods its focus visually as well as in narrative terms. Oscar-winning costume designer Milena Canonero worked on Marie Antoinette. Coppola had collaborated previously with Nancy Steiner on The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, inspired by her designs for Todd Haynes’s Safe. Described as “the most influential costume designer you hadn’t heard of,” Steiner’s understated creations contrast markedly with Canonero’s, as do Stacey Battat’s for Somewhere.15 Battat has received greater recognition for work on The Beguiled, raising interesting questions about defining the “costume film” and whether the term applies to Coppola’s cinema. “Fashion shows and films came into being almost simultaneously,” Caroline Evans argues. She details the similarities between the two during the early “cinema of attractions” (from 1895 to 1906 or 1908), including a fascination with clothed bodies in motion rather than character or narrative.16 Charlotte Herzog has identified a distinct category of later films, “the fashion show-infilm,” that stage shows or depict models displaying the latest designs for private clients in designer studios, as in Fashions of 1934 (William Dieterle, 1934) and The Women (1939).17 Other films simply resemble fashion shows in borrowing visual strategies from fashion photography to draw viewer attention away from the film’s plot to clothing on display, from Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954) to Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2008). Bruzzi describes this as intentionally making clothing into “spectacle.”18 While no formal fashion shows appear in Coppola’s films, individual scenes employ cinematic techniques to capture informal “fashion shows,” from Chloe’s appearance at the opening of her short Lick the Star to the Bling Ring’s impromptu modeling of purloined goods. Such moments, though, are not disconnected from the narrative but connected to it, tied to thematic concerns with external judgment and self-display. Others have noted less staged means of drawing attention to clothing. For instance, in Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film, Jonathan

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Faiers demonstrates how individual garments and accessories—trenchcoats, furs, gloves, jewels, hats, shoes—transcend their practical associations or roles in defining character to acquire additional significance.19 He isolates moments of fashion’s dysfunction, when clothing causes discomfort, embarrassment, or harm, arousing emotional identifications in viewers as well as memories of similar fictional representations. These contents of a “negative cinematic wardrobe” are, in his examples, uncoupled from the film narrative. In Coppola’s films individual garments are invested with meaning in the ways Faiers describes, often on the basis of their film history: Johnny Marco, in T-shirt and jeans, inevitably recalls James Dean and Marlon Brando. Bob Harris’s tuxedo aligns him with a cinematic history of fashionable masculinity, from Fred Astaire to James Bond, and the clips cinching the jacket to fit signal his comedic unease with the role. As this example suggests, Coppola’s is not necessarily a dysfunctional or “negative cinematic wardrobe,” for individual pieces stand out visually but remain part of the narrative fabric. Garments also command viewer attention in film not only as individual items, as Bruzzi and Faiers describe, but owing to their materials. Marketa Uhlirova and Esther Leslie have studied how costumes become “cinematic spectacle” on the basis of their material composition and physical presence. “Film’s ability to reflect the world is exhorted gloriously in the glossiness of silk, satin and gauze, the twinkle of sequins, beads and tinsels,” Leslie writes. “The fuzzy textures of feathers, fur and lacy filigree are tickled by lighting and tease the shadows. Light is reflected and bent back in sparkle and scattered glare.”20 Motion—in cinematic time and space, enhanced by dance and other deliberate movement—transforms film into a “sartorial theatre of ever-changing shapes, volumes, designs and textures; of materials mingling and layering; of light shimmering over reflective surfaces that provides cinema with bewitching moments of perceptual richness and sensuality,” as Uhlirova describes it.21 Uhlirova and Leslie restrict themselves to silent movies of the 1920s where such “visual enchantments” form the substance of the film. We do find moments in Coppola’s films when costumes in motion—on the ice rink, on stripper poles, on the dance floor—attain a temporary prominence as “cinematic spectacle,” but again in the service of narratives about self-fashioning and display.

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

Film scholars have also emphasized more generally the material dimensions of cinema, arguing, like Vivian Sobchack, that it is an embodied experience. Film is “more than a merely visible object,” for it involves seeing, hearing, and moving.22 In Carnal Thoughts, Sobchack pronounces, “We are, in fact, all synaesthetes—and thus seeing a movie can also be an experience of touching, tasting, and smelling it.”23 Pointed attention to textured fabrics in Marie Antoinette exemplifies such a “cinesthetic” experience of the directly material dimensions of clothing. However, Coppola’s films attend equally to objects—lipstick tubes and perfume bottles in The Virgin Suicides, chandeliers in Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled, cars in Somewhere, taxis and trains in Lost in Translation—and even food and drink—cakes and champagne in Marie Antoinette, mushrooms in The Beguiled, whiskey in Lost in Translation. Isolated cinematically and wedded to music, tangible goods, including but not limited to clothing, convey the sensory pleasures (and dangers) of consumption. Just as film transcends the boundaries of visual experience, fashion—in Coppola’s films as in contemporary culture—is equally unbounded. In an expanded sense the term “fashion” embraces aesthetic practices beyond personal adornment. Writing for The New York Times, Vanessa Friedman noted that fashion is no longer equated with clothing, accessories, cosmetics, and other tangible goods. In fact, fashion is “not necessarily about any product at all. It is about an idea of what a product stands for; about a creative form that connects to music and film and written words and action and layers it all together into community.”24 Friedman dubs it “Fashion-capital-F” to distinguish it from narrower definitions. But fashion is not singular either. While, as many have observed, there is no uncontested definition of the term in fashion studies,25 most would agree that change is an essential component. Elizabeth Wilson argued long ago that “fashion, in a sense is change.”26 And this applies not only to changing aesthetics of dress, but music, décor, architecture, and more. Thus Coppola’s films represent fashions plural, from the 1780s in Marie Antoinette and the 1860s in The Beguiled through the 1970s in The Virgin Suicides to the first two decades of the new millennium in Lost in Translation, Somewhere, and The Bling Ring. Representations of fashion—in photography, video, film, and other media forms—are equally subject to changing aesthetic and technological

Introduction

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trends, and Coppola’s films register these representational fashions as well, often with great complexity. For instance, eighteenth-century décor and dress are set to a punk-rock soundtrack in Marie Antoinette to underscore the teenqueen’s rebellion. Street scenes and karaoke bars in Lost in Translation anchor it in 2000s’ Tokyo, yet anonymous hotel rooms and understated dress mirror the characters’ temporal dislocation, making it appear, in a sense, also timeless. Johnny Marco may be a contemporary action star, but his Chateau Marmont digs align him with icons of past Hollywood masculinity. Shots of him in bed and models prowling the hotel’s hallways duplicate celebrity portraits and fashion photos that date from decades earlier. Much has been made of the current rage for collaboration, with the ubiquitous “x” marking the synergies between musicians and luxury houses (Balmain x Beyoncé) or athletic brands (Adidas x Kanye West), between athletic brands and fashion designers (Nike x Riccardo Tisci) or designers and musicians (Stella McCartney x Taylor Swift), between fashion houses and discount retailers (Missoni for Target) or designers and home décor (Jason Wu for Canvas, Marc Jacobs for Waterford, Marimekko for Crate & Barrel). However, as Coppola’s films remind us, the “x” phenomenon formalizes preexisting cultural fusions. Fashions in music and trends in décor are wedded to trends in clothing, accessories, hair, and make-up. The difference may be that contemporary collaborators are making commercially calculated, future-forward bets on athleisure or minimalism or sustainability as not only marketable but definitive of current fashion, rather than waiting for history to reveal retroactively the defining style of the moment. Fictional representations, like those in Coppola’s films or the novels on which some are based, are collaborations as well. Chapter 2 explores how fashionable worlds are crafted through cinematic collaboration: costume x music x production. Employing materials—tactile and aural as well as visual—design teams fabricate illusory, imaginative worlds that tangibly manifest existing worlds from the past or present, or both at once. They grant stories unfolding on screen authenticity and connect them meaningfully to cultural history. As I argue, in Coppola’s films they not only reproduce and culturally reify past fashions, but place them into creative transhistorical interchanges.

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

Cinematic Surfaces Coppola’s films have their own visual style, described as “Coppolism.” It is so identifiable that the British Film Institute (BFI) and others have produced video primers on how to make “a Sofia Coppola film,”27 with instructions on color (muted pastels), lighting (natural), characters (sympathetic), theme (isolation, alienation), etc. They also mention that her films are notoriously short on dialogue, conveying information and emotion more through images than words. To gauge information about the characters’ interior changes, we rely on visual clues, from facial expressions to gesture and clothing. She thinks “in terms of images,” says her sound designer Richard Beggs, and these images derive from her well-documented training in the fine arts, first in painting and then in photography. Her initial forays into cinema came on the heels of stints as a fashion photographer and coincided with the discipline’s turn toward cinematic techniques, when clothing was put in motion and integrated into fashion stories. Chapter 3 shows that Coppola’s film style derives from fashion’s representation in visual media (painting as well as photography). Her films not only allude to specific artworks and artists, but create moving equivalents employing conventions typical of still representations of fashionable clothing and stylish lives. Coppola’s films have been dismissed as overly preoccupied with surface. “Sensibility is everything in Coppola,” writes Nathan Lee in Film Comment. “To accuse her of lacking ideas presumes she has any interest in them … [She is] baffled by her creations and incapable of penetrating their inner lives.”28 The fashion roots of the stylish visual surface of her films implicate them in longstanding derision of fashion as feminine and frivolous. The increasing cultural prominence of fashion has been accompanied by serious research, so much so that Joanne Entwistle has noted the “unfixing of fashion and femininity” and proclaimed that fashion is no longer seen as “a frivolous bit of ‘fluff ’.”29 Still, there remains an undercurrent of suspicion in film studies. Rosalind Galt claims that film theory has “consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical.”30 Happily, a growing chorus has countered this equation of concern for style with lack of substance. Kennedy argues that “the implication that a unique visual

Introduction

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style lacks meaning because it is, essentially, pretty speaks toward the manner in which the critics seem unprepared to evaluate Coppola’s films on their own terms.”31 Woodworth contends that “while Coppola’s concern for style can make her seem superficial, this is belied by her film form, which shows an intense care in representing her subjects and recognition of the ideological weight of aesthetic choices.”32 Pam Cook states simply, “In Coppola’s film, style is substance.”33 Style becomes substance in her films by wedding cinematography influenced by fashion representation in art to meticulous material recreations in costume, production, and sound design to serve narratives that dramatize the essential link between fashion and self-fashioning, between internal processes of identity formation and external practices of surveillance and judgment. It also comes from Coppola’s sophistication regarding visual representation of style. Her invocations of photographic history and convention allude to the changing nature of representation itself, to the “fashions” evident in still and moving forms. As Chapter 3 demonstrates, this thorough grasp of visual representation extends to her commercial projects for the fashion industry—the “fashion films” noted above. So substantive is her visual style that it shapes fashion. Her visual aesthetic derived from fashion media is conscripted to promote fashion.

Art and Commerce This already complex entanglement of fashion and film is complicated further by the fact that both are industries fusing art and commerce. And, in addition to creating commercial films, Coppola has actively participated in the fashion industry. She created a clothing line, MilkFed, and interned at Chanel, worked as a fashion photographer, and directed “fashion” films (i.e., commercials) for a host of famous brands. Coppola is also implicated in what once was termed the “celebrity–industrial complex,” referring to the role of Hollywood stars in promoting dresses, cosmetics and other consumer products. It is now more accurately described as “the fashion–fame industrial complex” to capture simultaneously the centrality of fashion goods and the transformation of celebrity to encompass popular figures in athletics, music, politics, and social media, not simply film and

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

television stars. As the daughter of a prominent filmmaker, a clothing designer, and a style icon, Coppola has mastered the contemporary media landscape encircling fashion to market her films, establish a cinematic brand, and promote consumer goods created by luxury houses and mass-market retailers. Her fame is, in fact, inseparable from her film work: she has become a celebrity director. Film scholars such as Tim Corrigan and Dana Polan have charted the rise of the auteur as a “marketable commodity,” of the “directoras-star,”34 and Coppola scholars Cook and Lewis have mounted compelling cases for applying the designation to her.35 The “commerce of auteurism,” as Corrigan terms it, hinges on equating cinematic style with personal style, establishing an equivalence between the director and her films. Chapter 4 endeavors to untangle the complex web of fame, film, and fashion surrounding Coppola and her work. In addition to considering representations of fame in Coppola’s six narrative films, it analyzes her commercial presence— not the “fashion films” discussed in Chapter 3, but her own image as a style icon and a director-star. It further considers the complex, synergistic strategies employed to promote her films as well as how her films and auteur-star reputation are leveraged to market fashionable goods. I extract three separate strands of Coppola’s fame: a personal image initially defined apart from her films and her family through fashion; an image as an auteur crafted at the nexus of film and fashion, understood in a broader sense (Fashion-capital-F); and a film brand (Coppolism) identifiable with Coppola as a celebrity and a celebrity director.

Loose Threads Throughout this book, I hope to demonstrate how thoroughly, consistently, and pervasively Coppola’s cinema engages with fashion, culture, and celebrity. Of necessity, I have organized discussion of such an expansive subject into discrete components of film: narrative, costume/production/music/sound design, cinematography, and promotion. As in cinematic practice, they overlap with each other as well as with disciplines and cultural practices beyond film. Invariably, this means that, as an interdisciplinary work, it will fall short of expectations for studies devoted specifically to one discipline. I have endeavored, however, to

Introduction

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invoke the key ideas and proponents of each in the service of a comprehensive analysis that mirrors the subject. To borrow a fashion metaphor, the individual threads—of film and fashion studies, social and economic science, visual and material culture—are woven together into one dense fabric. To anchor Coppola’s multivalent participation in the worlds of fashion and cinema, I have appended a timeline, tracing the most significant moments. It includes relevant personal experiences in fashion, music video, and film production, as well as prominent appearances in fashion media. An analysis of a filmmaker so wedded to images, as both the inspiration of her style and the substance of her cinema, depends on illustrations. Ideally, every reference to a garment, an accessory, a photograph, or a visual trope would be included. In reality, I have had to select images judiciously. Given the nature of its engagement with visual representation, Chapter 3 incorporates the most. Where possible, I have cross-referenced images included there in the other chapters. But I am also relying on readers to conjure up images from their own memories of Coppola’s films or to return to view them anew through the lenses supplied by this analysis, where they have the advantage of seeing them in their original form as moving, rather than still, images. In the case of Coppola’s commercial work, I have supplied links to readily available copies posted on YouTube (usually by the advertisers themselves).

1 Self-Fashioning

“My movies are not about being, but becoming.” SOFIA COPPOLA1 Central to Coppola’s film narratives are issues of self-definition and a reciprocal, yet independent, concern: how we are defined by others. All her films focus on problems of identity, emphasizing a late-modern2 definition of selfhood as essentially unstable and ceaselessly open to change. This preoccupation takes narrative shape in plots centered on characters at key moments of self-definition or redefinition. The narratives consider liminal moments, such as adolescence, mid-life crisis, marriage, divorce, and travel. Coppola deems this her niche: “character-driven films mapping the moves of people lost in transition.”3 Scholars writing about the first three films in Coppola’s oeuvre have classed them as a trilogy focused on the transition of young women from girlhood to adulthood, taking her claim that they are about “a lonely girl in a big hotel or palace or whatever, kind of wandering around, trying to grow up” as their guide.4 But, as I noted in the Introduction, this overstates the case, particularly when considering the existing six-film corpus. The Virgin Suicides focuses on the teenaged Lisbon sisters, but charts their passage from the perspective of the teenage boys who are obsessed with understanding the girls retrospectively from their position as adults. Lost in Translation features a woman, Charlotte, unsure of her professional and marital future, but the film focuses equally on Bob, a man in precisely the same precarious state. Marie Antoinette is the sole film in this initial group that centers almost exclusively

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on a young woman navigating multiple life transitions, from childhood in Austria to adulthood in France, from adolescence to marriage and maternity, from early life to the cusp of her death. Taken as a whole, Coppola’s films feature men as well as women negotiating questions of identity and purpose. Somewhere presents a man whose life is figuratively stalled, his repetitive existence leading nowhere. While female characters outnumber men in The Bling Ring and The Beguiled, the male characters are essential figures: Marc in The Bling Ring seeks belonging and experiments with gender definition; and Corporal McBurney, passing through enemy territory in The Beguiled, spins multiple narratives of his past to find favor, safety, and sexual satisfaction. Taken together, the films foreground the dynamics of identity: they dramatize that the self is not fashioned (or refashioned) in isolation, but defined in relation to others—for or against, in concert or competition with others. As sociologists from Erving Goffman to Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman have demonstrated, individuals establish a sense of self through interaction with others. In fact, the very notion of a self implies its distinction and difference from other selves.5 From her first short film, Lick the Star, Coppola has stressed group dynamics. The cliqueish nature of high school in that film carries over into The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled. What are Versailles and Hollywood if not grown-up and more stifling versions?6 In such tight, exclusionary social worlds, identity is established through emulation and reinforced by conformity, whereas individualism is asserted by rebellion and defiance. Coppola’s films dramatize the dynamics at play: individuals define themselves in relation to others while others define them through social interaction and observation. Individuals present a self to others, who scrutinize their self-performance for clues to their identity. Who was Marie Antoinette? Who is Johnny Marco? Which version of Corporal McBurney is the true one? Were there signs of the Lisbon sisters’ imminent demise? This preoccupation with identity links Coppola to a long tradition of narrative cinema. As Pam Cook argues, her films “wrestle with the extent to which identity is of our own making or imposed by others. This existential problem has preoccupied filmmakers from Hitchcock to Scorsese.”7 However, as this chapter demonstrates, Coppola’s approach is distinctive in two respects: first, her plots are famously spare, marked by an uncommon paucity of dialogue that shifts the

16

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

burden of storytelling to the visual register; and second, the visual dimension foregrounds fashion. For her films’ characters—male as well as female—clothing is central to shaping identity and, more crucially, for communicating with other characters through self-display. Her films are preoccupied with our tendency to judge others by their appearance and our fixation on publicly created images of individuals, from historical figures such as Marie Antoinette to contemporary celebrities such as the fictional actors in Lost in Translation and Somewhere. Coppola’s films highlight how displays of fashionable clothing—and other socially visible consumer goods—can broadcast identity but are equally subject to manipulation and misreading. A constructed public identity can conceal as much as reveal. Fashion is the hinge between the crafted public self and intimate personal identity. Questions about the possibilities of self-knowledge or genuine insight into the lives of others pervade her films, from The Virgin Suicides to The Beguiled, and are pursued cinematically through the visual language of clothing.

Looking “I’m not really dialogue-driven.” Sofia Coppola8 Coppola’s films are notoriously short on dialogue. The screenplay for Lost in Translation was 70 pages and the script for Somewhere only 43, when the average for a Hollywood film is 120.9 She even toyed with the idea of making Marie Antoinette a silent film.10 Dialogue for key scenes has also been “delivered against serious auditory challenges,”11 as Hannah McGill and Isabel Stevens note: the final words Bob (Bill Murray) speaks to Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) at the end of Lost in Translation are inaudible. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) shouts his parting words to his daughter Chloe (Elle Fanning) over the relentless whirr of helicopter blades. McGill and Stevens detect in Coppola’s films an aversion to “overt emotion and excessive verbosity.”12 Amy Woodworth notes that the vapid speech of others—the chattering of the female star in Lost in Translation and the court gossips in Marie Antoinette—is often contrasted with the protagonists’ silences, which are a mark of intelligence. Above all, Woodworth argues, spare dialogue suggests the “inadequacy of words to convey feeling.”13

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The burden for conveying emotion shifts instead to image. To gauge information about the characters’ interior changes, we rely on visual clues, from facial expressions to gesture and clothing.14 Rather than offering details of what Charlotte is thinking while isolated in her hotel room or walking the streets of Tokyo, Coppola’s script for Lost in Translation includes little more than vague descriptions of action: “she wanders around” or “she sits in her underwear and looks out the window.”15 To critics of her films, this barely constitutes action and grants them a troubling “hermetic quality.”16 Defenders counter that, as in life, significant moments occur in mundane, everyday circumstances, particularly in moments of transition—driving, waiting, sharing a drink, floating in a pool. “This is the magical territory that defines Coppola’s work,” according to Anna Backman Rogers, for these ephemeral moments externalize the “turbulence of inner life.”17 Since identity—an interior, subjective experience—is the films’ central narrative concern, external action is by definition superfluous or at least secondary. The “vagueness” repeatedly noted in her films mirrors the transitional, uncertain condition of their subjects.18 In short, “her very sense of action is inseparable from subjectivity.”19 In the absence of overt action and explanatory dialogue, access to the characters’ subjective states is conveyed visually. As film critic Richard Brody argued of her first feature film, “Coppola [is] a master at rendering inner depths startlingly, straightforwardly visual.”20 In his review of her most recent film, The Beguiled, he noted that “perceptions, appearances and impressions are crucial facts.”21 Scholars concur that the visual surface “is deeply meaningful in Coppola’s diegetic worlds.”22 This emphasis on image or aesthetics over dramatic action and dialogue is the hallmark of a “classic Sofia Coppola work,”23 or, more simply, “Coppolism.”24

Fashion and Identity “Style synthesizes different pieces of affective knowledge into an expressive statement of the self, linking processes of identity construction and aesthetic creation.” Samiha Matin25

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

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“Life itself is a dramatically enacted thing.” Erving Goffman26 In filmic worlds of such aesthetic exactitude, clothing bears extraordinary significance, especially given the foregrounding of identity as a thematic preoccupation. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have advanced models of selfhood with parallels to cinema that fuse narrative and performance. In the 1950s Goffmann offered a dramaturgical model to describe social life, arguing that identity was a performance conveyed through voice, posture, facial expressions, and material objects, including clothing. Others have noted that the self is essentially a character, performing for others but also acting as the protagonist in an “ongoing ‘story’ about the self ” that it narrates to itself as well as to others.27 We perform a self to ourselves, to an imagined audience, as well as to a real audience of other selves. As Bauman explains: It is in interaction with others … those “out there”, as well as those already incorporated as “significant others” and set inside the self in a perpetual court session … that the awareness of “having a self ” or indeed of “being a self ” dawns upon us and the life-long labour of building and rebuilding identities is conducted.28 The narratives of self unfold in language (through both internal and external dialogue) but are also, in Bauman’s words, “printed on the body, in a sartorial lingo or the patois of demeanour and countenance.”29 In our interactions with others we employ clothing, “sartorial lingo,” with varying degrees of intention, as part of a performance of identity. “The self, of course, is embodied,” as Giddens argues, and “more or less constantly ‘on display’ to others.”30 Thus appearance “becomes a central element of the reflexive project of the self.”31 As the connection between our bodies and the world, our inner lives and outward appearance, clothing is central to identity. Clothing is “most closely attached to the corporal self ”: “it frames much of what we see when we see another” and thus serves as a “visual metaphor for identity.”32 Or, in Joanne Entwistle’s words, “It is the insignia by which we are read and come to read others.”33 For instance, as Judith Butler and other theorists have argued, gender— masculinity and femininity—is performed. When a woman wears a dress and

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make-up to appear more feminine, she too is acting, adopting culturally specific signs of femininity that are not in themselves indicative of her sex, her sexuality, or her identity as a woman. For this reason, psychoanalyst Joan Rivière described femininity as a “masquerade” in her 1929 article, “Womanliness as Masquerade.”34 In Butler’s words, “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”35 High heels and skirts may nowadays signal femininity, but these items are simply props in a performance: there is no direct relation, for instance, between femininity and high heels. Louis XIV and other French aristocrats in the sixteenth century wore high heels because they enhanced the appearance of the muscles of the calves, making them seem more “masculine” in their short pants and hose. These are culturally defined markers, with no direct relation to one’s actual sex or sexuality—markers that change over time and across cultures. As socially codified signs, fashion choices serve as shorthand means of expressing conformity—or resistance. Recall, for example, that men with long hair and relaxed clothing in the 1960s were resisting conservative norms and values visibly associated with close-cropped hair and structured suits. But we also employ clothing as individual self-expression, as a means of broadcasting our differences from, rather than similarities with, others. “Through clothes,” according to Jennifer Craik, “we … fabricate ourselves.”36 Consider, for instance, how Mexican artist Frida Kahlo selected traditional Tehuana pieces—tunics (huipiles), shawls (rebozos), and long skirts—in place of European haute couture, and made the unibrow a fashion statement rather than a grooming faux pas. Her choices reflected her personal experiences: her clothing concealed disfigurements from polio and a near-fatal bus accident, while broadcasting her Mexican heritage and support of indigenous politics.37 Military fatigues, black berets, and beards are as instantly identified with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the short-brimmed fedora is with Malcolm X or the black turtleneck with Steve Jobs. Even those out of the public eye fabricate an identifiable self. We select specific pieces that highlight our best features and hide our worst. We choose particular colors or styles; we always wear high heels or never do; we favor T-shirts purchased at concerts or vintage clothing found in consignment shops. We tailor our external appearance to reflect our interior selves—our personalities, our politics, our emotions, our aesthetic preferences.

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

These two senses of “fashioning” as crafting clothing and constructing identity are united in the word’s origins as a verb: it derives from the Latin facere (to do, make) and came into English through Old French (façon). “To fashion” something means “to make or shape,” “to fabricate.” We not only fashion garments but employ them to fashion ourselves. The term “to fabricate,” though, has a negative connotation that associates fashion and self-fashioning with deception. Clothing can not only reveal but also conceal. Merely wearing designer-branded goods is no indication that one possesses wealth: they could be counterfeit or stolen. Wearing a suit might make one appear to be a successful businessman but offers no guarantee. In this sense, clothing is merely costume: just as actors employ dress and make-up to create characters, we can do the same to construct contingent identities with no relation to the real.38 Coppola’s films interrogate the tensions between these possibilities of self-fashioning. As Fiona Handyside has argued, “Coppola’s films demonstrate fashion’s ability to renegotiate identity” but also the “vulnerability of an identity that can be so manipulated.”39 Goffman recognized this potential for manipulation. He also realized the distinction between his sociological model and performance on stage: The stage presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents things that are real and sometimes not well rehearsed. More important, perhaps, on the stage one player presents himself in the guise of a character to characters projected by other players; the audience constitutes a third party to the interaction—one that is essential and yet, if the stage performance were real, one that would not be there. In real life, the three parties are compressed into two; the part one individual plays is tailored to the parts played by the others present, and yet these others also constitute the audience.40 Goffman’s distinction centers on the question of audience: in real life, performances of identity have a tangible audience (of one or more people who are also engaged in their own performances), while staged performances have two audiences: the same tangible audience represented by characters on stage and those observing, unseen, from a distance in a darkened theater. Filmed performances entangle the two dimensions. Films directly and deliberately employ costuming for an audience of viewers. Fashion in film operates simultaneously on two levels: as part of the production, costuming

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defines characters for the film audience. As Nancy Steiner, the costume designer for The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, explains, “What we do is create characters … We have to make the audience know who that person is from how they look.”41 But within the fictional world of the film, characters (already defined by costume) employ clothing in their relations with other characters. For the film audience, these two dimensions tend to blur, particularly when clothing choices appear naturalistic and neither costuming nor the film’s fashions call attention to themselves, or, in the opposite case, where fashion is highlighted on both production and narrative levels. All of Coppola’s films share a thematic focus on appearance, identity, and surveillance. But they divide themselves into two groups mirroring the two deployments of fashion in film. One group—composed of Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled—refers overtly to fashion in costume and production design and within the narrative, with characters calling attention to their clothing and that of others. In the other group of films—The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Somewhere—fashion is not explicitly a subject for the characters or film viewers, but is nonetheless central to individual identity and the relationships among characters.

Fashioning a Self “In reading Coppola, we must attend insistently to both surface and depth in order to gather meaning.” Anna Backman Rogers42 In her introduction to Fashion in Film, Adrienne Munich distinguishes between films in which “costumes fuse seamlessly with characters’ identities” and those that emphasize the “act of deliberate seeing,” transforming costume into the “Look.”43 In such films, the act of watching the film becomes like reading a fashion magazine. Viewers search for “visual signs in attire” that convey meaning simultaneously through “strangeness and familiarity.” In other words, the costumes call attention to themselves as costumes, or, as Stella Bruzzi puts it, “clothes that are intended as spectacle.”44 Both Munich

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

and Bruzzi refer to personal costumes. Munich’s examples are “looks” created for individual characters, such as Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo and top hat in Morocco (1930) and Diane Keaton’s vintage menswear in Annie Hall (1977). Bruzzi focuses on individual couturiers, including Hubert de Givenchy’s gowns for Sabrina (1954), Jean-Paul Gaultier’s designs for The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and Kika (1993), and Giorgio Armani’s suits for American Gigolo (1980). In Coppola’s films, where fashion commands attention on the visual surface, the “look” is less personal or individual and more a general and persistent emphasis on clothing, accessories, and material goods—“Look” with a capital “L.” Equally important, fashion’s weight on the cinematic surface is reflected in the films’ action and dialogue at the narrative level, affirming its pervasive significance in identity formation and expression. This may be most obvious in Marie Antoinette, where fashion dominates in the form of elaborate costuming but is also central to the French queen’s identity. Coppola said in interviews that the film was about Marie Antoinette’s “inner experience.” Critics of the film took its surface brilliance as superficial. Anthony Lane countered, “Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie,” claiming its “one transfixing virtue” was its “unembarrassed devotion to the superficial.”45 Scholars have recognized that the film’s extravagant surface displays reflect depths of the queen’s experience. Her feelings are “expressed on the surface of the image,” Christina Lane and Nicole Richter argue.46 And, as Diana Diamond among others has recognized, Marie Antoinette’s interior journey is “conveyed through Milena Canonero’s costumes.”47 In the film, fashionable displays do not advance the standard narrative of the French queen’s aristocratic excess and indifference. Instead, based on Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography, Coppola’s film focuses on the transition of the young Antoinette from being a child in Austria to becoming the dauphine of France. Rather than a traditional biopic, which hews to the historical proportion of time from birth to death, Coppola’s film devotes two-thirds of its narrative to the first eight of Marie Antoinette’s twenty-one years at Versailles.48 As Mallory Young and I have argued elsewhere, it hinges primarily on imagining her position as a fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess separated from her family and forced to live among strangers at a

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foreign French court. Fraser subtitles her biography “The Journey,” presenting her life as a series of transitions—temporal, spatial, physical, and psychological— as she advances through stages of development readily identifiable to a female audience: independence, sexual initiation, marriage, and motherhood.49 Coppola found access to the historical queen through her letters to her mother: she could imagine “the real person behind the sarcastic teenage voice in her letters,” she claims in her introduction to the published screenplay, and describes her as a “lost girl, leaving childhood behind” who eventually achieved “the final dignity of a woman.” She was a “real girl,” Coppola asserts, who “tried to find her own way.”50 The film is structured as a string of questions related to identity: “Who am I now? What am I supposed to be? What if I can’t produce an heir? What if my husband … won’t have sex with me? What if the people hate me?”51 And fashion is paramount in imagining Marie Antoinette’s inner life. Material details abound in Coppola’s account: she pictured how lonely it seemed to be “just surrounded by decadent lovely things that are supposed to please you and make you happy”; “the ridiculousness of her dressing up like a maid”; her passage from “her grand public bedroom into her small private apartments, surrounded by her fabrics and trinkets.”52 As a result, the young woman’s passage—as a physical and psychological journey—is registered throughout the film by changes in clothing, beginning with the ceremonial change of dress at the border with France. For the official “handover” (the remise) from the Austrian to the French court, the former Maria Antonia must leave all of Austria behind, including not only her cherished lapdog but her clothes. The scene suggests the symbolic importance of the remise as a re-fashioning of self, presenting in great detail the elaborate ceremony literally stripping the teenage Maria Antonia of all physical remnants of her Austrian heritage.53 “While fashion will eventually become the young queen’s mode of influence and power, the rituals surrounding dress are initially indicative of her status as victim,” Young and I argued. In particular, the remise emphasizes the young Marie’s submission to an arbitrarily imposed set of foreign standards visible as dress. … The young future queen (Kirsten Dunst) arrives at the ceremony in an elegant gown, but one entirely free of color, suggestive of a blank canvas. We

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The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

Figure 1.1  Marie Antoinette at the handover. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

watch as the attendant French ladies remove her clothing revealing a back view of a young girl clad only in thigh-high stockings.54 Backman Rogers observes that, filmed as a series of rapid close-ups, the scene fragments her body, visually registering the rituals designed to break her identity.55 “She is then redesigned according to Versailles fashion, emerging in a luxurious, corseted, full-skirted blue gown, with her hair upswept and contained under a jaunty tricorn [see Figure 1.1]. Later, in an opulent scene filmed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Coppola presents her in a splendid wedding gown transformed, finally, into the Dauphine of France.”56 Scenes such as this not only provide insight into Marie Antoinette’s individual experience but reveal the paradoxical mechanisms of fashion in relation to identity. Elizabeth Wilson argues that “fashion cements social solidarity and imposes group norms, while deviations in dress are usually experienced as shocking and disturbing.”57 Understood as both dress and standards of conduct, fashion constrains. But, as a means of visible selfexpression, it can also be a vehicle of rebellion and liberation. Coppola presents Marie Antoinette’s experience as a transition from one pole to the other. The film presents the Versailles court as a space where appearance is regulated and behavior scrutinized:

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The court etiquette of dressing rituals requires Antoinette’s submission, even as Dauphine, to the most influential women at court to undress in the evening (the coucher) and dress in the morning (the lever). While presumably there to attend her, they render her powerless. Awakened after an uneventful wedding night, Marie Antoinette is stripped naked (for a second time in the film) in her cold bedchamber. She is then redressed in an elaborate ritual confirming the ranks of those who—fully clothed—“serve” her.58 Even when fashion is not overtly foregrounded in the film narrative, clothing conveys Marie Antoinette’s containment by the court. The courtiers gossip about the king and queen, speculating about whether they have consummated their marriage. Pamela Flores identifies no fewer than thirty-nine scenes prior to the consummation, exposing “a public system in which Marie Antoinette is permanently evaluated by others.”59 Cinematography and sound design underscore the omnipresence of public observation. We witness the young queen “walking or standing alone, either in long camera shots or isolated within close-ups. Repeatedly we see her walking down a long hallway or avenue as we hear not real conversation, but (literally) ungrounded, whispered rumors floating around her, often those of the courtiers themselves.”60 But costume is more visually potent. In one scene, Marie Antoinette passes through a hall of women who hiss, “Give us an heir.” Reading a letter from her mother, heard in voice-over, demanding essentially the same, “the screen queen struggles to retain her composure, eventually collapsing in a heap behind a closed door, weeping alone.”61 Her dress blends into the wallpaper, visually registering the impotence she feels (Figure 1.2).62 Paradoxically, as queen she is a publicly visible entity, but invisible as a human agent with her own thoughts and desires. Fashion’s potential to constrain or liberate plays itself out on the body, with the queen’s sexuality at stake: in the eyes of the court, she exists to produce an heir; in her own mind, she exists to satisfy her individual desires. As her containment is figured through fashion, so is her rebellion. In a montage reminiscent of the shopping scenes in scores of contemporary chick flicks, the teenaged Marie appears with her ladies trying on countless pairs of shoes, examining fabrics and modeling jewelry, while drinking champagne, gambling at cards and indulging in pink-and-white-frosted

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Figure 1.2  Marie Antoinette blends into the wallpaper. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

pastries, to the strains of Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” The scene closes with an army of the Dauphine’s coiffeurs affixing the finishing touches to her towering headdress.63 The film offers Marie’s lavish consumption as evidence of her efforts at selfexpression through fashion. The contemporary song’s lyrics of juvenile desire—“I want candy. I want candy”—reinforces the childish innocence of the young women’s actions, but also the insistence of Marie’s unfulfilled emergent sexuality. Close-up shots of the women biting greedily into pastries crowned with whipped cream or spilling champagne at the gaming tables reinforce the urgency of their desires, while the insistent punk rhythms of Bow Wow Wow’s song underscore the rebelliousness of their self-fashioning. Marie turns court surveillance to her advantage, employing what Samiha Matin terms “tactical aesthetics.”64 She is told “all eyes will be on you,” and exploits her visibility. She turns “fashion into a battlefield for the expression of her subjectivity … By transforming her body into personal discourse, she produces a social game that does not comply with the rules of the court but rather questions and confronts them.”65 She employs two battle strategies: parody and revolt. The heightened opulence of her gowns, ostentatious jewels, and elaborate coiffures lampoons the aristocratic excess visible in the court’s

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sumptuous dress. The bold solid colors of the fabrics she selects contrast markedly with the floral print that had literally turned her into a wallflower. Marie transforms herself from an object of court scrutiny into a deliberate spectacle, as though mocking the relentless tendency to judge her behavior and taunting her omnipresent audience through excessive display.66 In contrast to such expressive displays intended for public consumption, the film more subtly registers Marie’s independence as sexual freedom. For instance, she dons a disguise, a black gown and mask, to conceal her desire for Count Fersen from public view. In the privacy of her bedroom where he is the sole audience (apart from the film viewers), she stretches out on the bed wearing only her stockings with an outspread fan flirtatiously concealing her naked form.67 Such provocative displays—in public and private—are associated with youthful rebellion, testing boundaries and exploring limits. Once the queen has satisfied her sexual desires and become a mother, she opts for retreat and, as Matin argues, exercises her “liberty of choice” by forgoing elaborate gowns at court in favor of simple muslin dresses at her private palace, the Petit Trianon.68 Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s elevation of nature over civilization, she rejects artifice and embraces simplicity. Coppola’s film reflects Weber’s contention in Queen of Fashion that Revolutionary style came, paradoxically, “from her own repertoire of once controversial, simplified ensembles to make the opposite claim: that all women were created equal.”69 Weber describes the queen’s final moments as poignant efforts to appear regal even in death: she notes that Marie Antoinette kept a “special white chemise at the ready” and her serving girl recalled “it was her intention to appear in public as decently dressed as her impoverished circumstances allowed.”70 Her choice of the simple white dress is, to Weber, “the most brilliant fashion statement of her entire career,” proving that “even as she faced execution, Marie Antoinette’s will to control her image, to manage it through her clothing, had not left her.”71 Coppola’s film ends prior to her execution, staging her final fashion statement on the balcony before the unseen mob storming the palace. In a white gown, she bows down wordlessly before them as though a supplicant for mercy.72 The film—like others in Coppola’s oeuvre—questions the limits of individual agency in crafting personal identity and the dangers inherent on relying on image to convey substance. Weber notes that Marie Antoinette actively promoted her

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Figure 1.3 “Let them eat cake.” Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

own image, but “the young queen failed either to consider or to grasp the scandal that her personal splendor represented to her people.”73 Coppola dramatizes the disjunction in two scenes divorced cinematically from the remainder of the film: the opening sequence prior to the titles, and a scene late in the film reproducing the queen’s apocryphal retort to revolutionary unrest (Figure 1.3). In the latter: a close-up reveals the head and shoulders of the Queen, lying back in a bathtub wearing only a diamond necklace and earrings and reciting the line—“Let them eat cake”—flirtatiously to the camera. The scene is pointedly at odds in style to the rest of the film: Dunst wears anachronistically dark lipstick and the shot, drained of other color, uses stark lighting and a spare set design. A cut returns us to the film world to show a long shot of a fully dressed Marie Antoinette surrounded by her ladies. She protests, “That’s such nonsense. I would never say that.” The line is presented as tabloid-like fodder, the imaginary creation of anti-royalist rumormongers circulating compromising stories in the popular press.74 The film’s opening sequence similarly stages the popular representation of Marie Antoinette’s aristocratic indifference to her subjects’ poverty (see Figure 3.16). On the soundtrack, Gang of Four sings, “the problems of the leisure: what to do for pleasure. I do love a new purchase” as the

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camera reveals the young queen lounging on a pale blue chaise in a revealing white lace gown and feathered headdress as a maid delicately slips her foot into a pink pump. Surrounded by pink confections that precisely match the color of her shoes, she silently leans forward to taste icing from a cake poised nearby while looking directly into the camera, then sinks back as though chuckling at her insouciance.75 The two scenes share dramatically brighter lighting and set designs that isolate the queen against a starkly artificial pale-blue backdrop, as well as anachronistic details—music, make-up—that register their difference from the remainder of the film. Together they suggest the primacy of external surveillance and judgment over the more intimate portrait of the queen’s personal travails that the remainder of the film proffers.76 The Beguiled pairs with Marie Antoinette in several ways: it, too, could be termed a “costume drama,” though Stacey Battat’s designs, like Canonero’s, are less concerned with historical accuracy than with representing the era while establishing a bridge to our own. More meaningfully, the films share a fascination with desire’s role in transforming personal appearance and the dangers of taking exterior displays as clues to identity. The film, an adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s novel (and not simply a remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 film, as popularly believed),77 is set in the cloistered Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies, a Civil War community defined as rigidly in terms of social etiquette as Versailles, with its rules of Southern gentility dictated and enforced along equally hierarchical lines. Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) imposes antiquated standards of feminine education, assisted by Edwina (Kirsten Dunst). They inculcate their young ladies in the approved nineteenth-century curriculum: they learn conversational French, music, cursive, and other “feminine” arts, such as sewing. Edwina’s opening instruction to her charges—“Careful, keep your stitches in a straight row”—neatly elides clothing with conformity. The women’s dresses—with their long skirts and high collars—initially proclaim their buttoned-up existence, isolated as they are by their sex, their race, their religious education, and the Civil War, which they experience only dimly through distant sounds of discharged weapons and the occasional passing battalion on its way into town. Wartime exigencies have introduced practical

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relaxations in appearance. In the absence of servants, they perform menial tasks (laundry, gardening, cooking), making simple calico dresses, faded from wear and washing, the norm.78 They no longer wear the hoops to support them, since they have no audience for their dress other than each other.79 Once Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell) enters their cossetted feminine space, their behavior alters as they vie for his attention. Each of the seven modifies her appearance to attract him. The first morning after his arrival the change is visible: Edwina wears a floral dress ornamented by a pin. Others have followed suit by accessorizing: Emily (Emma Howard) wears earrings; Alicia (Elle Fanning) has a flower in her hair. Even pious Marie (Addison Riecke) wears jade earrings, stolen from Edwina. And they recognize that they are each engaged in a transformation for McBurney. Miss Martha comments, “Seems like the soldier being here is having an effect.” Their attire in two dinner scenes—one prior to McBurney’s fall down the stairs and another afterwards—is most revelatory of their character and intentions. The first dinner showcases the competition between the women with romantic designs on McBurney—Alicia, Edwina, and Martha—as they attempt to beguile him. Shot from McBurney’s point of view, the scene presents each as a potential object of desire. Alicia’s hair, which is loose rather than contained in braids or pinned up, reflects her sexual daring, previously expressed in a fleeting, covert kiss. Edwina’s off-the-shoulder blue silk gown contrasts with the muted rose tones of the others’, an ostentatious display simultaneously of allure and class difference. Miss Martha’s opprobrium targets both: It is not entirely suitable dress for a young ladies’ school, but we know that Miss Edwina is accustomed to town society with different views. I suggest we change the subject and that Miss Edwina might consider drawing her shawl to prevent any other speculation on the subject. While Martha’s response is expected given her role as the school’s headmistress, it subtly introduces her perception of Edwina as a potential rival. In an exchange with McBurney over a glass of brandy, she establishes her own pedigree: MISS MARTHA: My father had quite a cellar in his day. The house was full of parties … People traveled from all over to come here.

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MCBURNEY: I’ll bet it was splendid here, ma’am. MISS MARTHA: It was. There were elegant dinners and balls … ­carriages lined up, beautiful gowns and men in full dress … For McBurney, both Edwina and Martha revive a pre-war identity as elite Southern belles. The film toys with the ambiguity of its title: who is “beguiled”? McBurney or the women? As they tempt him sexually, he manipulates them for pleasure and protection. Like the women’s, his self-presentation hinges on appearance. Initially, his blue uniform marks him as the enemy. As at Versailles, rumors circulate: to Jane (Angourie Rice), “he’s probably a spy and will let the blue bellies in at night to raid our garden”; to Emily, he’s a mercenary. His initial encounter with Amy (Oona Laurence) adds a mythic layer for viewers: as she hunts for mushrooms in the dark forest carrying a wicker basket, she comes across the “wolf.” As in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, he comes in sheep’s clothing. Once stripped of his uniform, he fashions a distinct version of himself to each of the school’s inhabitants to win her favor. To Amy, he is “a fellow student of nature” and “her best friend.” He allows Marie to minister to him. For Alicia, he offers the promise of sexual adventure lurking outside the school. She thinks, “maybe the sight of him will remind us there is something else in the world besides lessons.” He offers Edwina understanding, love, and imminent escape, and flatters Martha by complimenting her on her strength and bravery. To overcome her resistance, he confesses his own weakness, confiding that he should not have been on the battlefield: “I’d just come from Dublin, I had nothing. I took three hundred dollars to take a man’s place.” McBurney’s apparent “confession” contains a warning: he has masqueraded as another in the past. His uniform, which brands him as a Yankee and enemy soldier, is merely a costume donned for financial gain, a paid performance. But rather than take this as proof that McBurney’s appearance—and his words—deceive, Martha sees another lesson: “the enemy as an individual is not what we believed.” To the entire group of ladies, he masquerades as masculine. He says, “you could use some help around here. A man’s help.” Shots of him working in the garden play up his masculine strength and sexual appeal from a female perspective.80 He digs among the roses, sharpens his axe, hacks off tree limbs,

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Figure 1.4 McBurney working in the garden. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

and saws branches. The camera frames his torso, focusing on his sweat-soaked shirt, open at the neck (Figure 1.4). Several times he catches the eyes of the girls admiring him. He and Edwina exchange glances as she tends the garden and later looks down on him from an upstairs window; Alicia and Jane wave flirtatiously as they pass through the garden. Their amputation of his leg emasculates him. He takes it as punishment for his dalliance with Alicia—and slights of both Edwina, whose push causes him to fall down the stairs, and Martha, who defended the surgery as necessary: MISS MARTHA: We had to do it. MCBURNEY: I’ll bet you did! Did you have to do it or did you just want to punish me for not going to your room? EDWINA: It was an accident. She saved your life. MCBURNEY: You’re worse than she is. Did you lure me up there and plan this together?! The blood on Martha’s nightgown, the only visual evidence of the surgery, underscores his accusation. He equates his amputation with his castration: “I’m not a man, I took your kindness and trusted you and you toyed with me and then butchered me.”

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The dinner scene following his “castration” mirrors the first, but with another seductive intention: to lure McBurney to eat poisonous mushrooms. The ladies’ beguiling appearances are the same. But their feminine masquerade disguises their murderous intent.81 Significantly, McBurney is dressed again in his mended uniform, unmasked as the enemy—to all but Edwina. Having consummated their relationship, her transformation is evident: the shoulders she covered in the first dinner remain defiantly exposed (Figure 1.5). Her hair, artfully pinned up at the first dinner, is pulled back loosely. Her gown’s color symbolizes her position: its white satin proclaims her innocence in his poisoning but its black lace trim presages the death of her beloved and, with it, her opportunity for escape. The ending incorporates visual metaphors of clothing to “sew things up,” as it were. One girl ties a blue rag on the iron fence to summon the Confederate soldiers. A close-up shows two sets of hands passing thread through white fabric. A cut to a wider shot reveals that the ladies, reassembled as in the opening around their needlework, are stitching McBurney’s body into a shroud (Figure 1.6). Martha’s instruction—“Keep your stitches in a straight line like I showed you”—echoes Edwina’s line from the opening and voices her

Figure 1.5 Edwina’s defiant dress. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

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Figure 1.6  “Keep your stitches in a straight line like I showed you.” The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

reassertion of power over her. Edwina returns to her buttoned-up appearance at Miss Martha’s side, meekly adding when prompted, “Not so tight, Miss Jane.” A long shot shows the group lifting McBurney’s body from the porch and carrying him to the gate, neatly reversing an earlier shot from the same angle of the girls lifting the injured soldier on to the porch and through the door to the house. The film ends with a slow dolly in from outside the gates, initially with the corpse at the bottom of the screen, but closing to end with an image as formally composed as their neat rows of stitches: the ladies, glimpsed distantly through the wrought-iron bars of the gate, form a small group on the plantation-house steps, centered between its formidable columns. With their twists on historic dress, Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled inevitably foreground fashion, owing to the clothing’s distance and difference from the present. By contrast, The Bling Ring, set in contemporary Los Angeles, heightens attention to fashion by making this era’s luxury goods the center of its heist plot and the keys in identity formation and self-presentation by celebrities and the fans who emulate them. The film’s title sequence, like the montage of goods in Marie Antoinette, intercuts pans of neatly arrayed shelves of high heels, drawers of diamond-encrusted jewelry, counters of designer-branded make-up,

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and shots of luxury-branded luggage and handbags, focusing visual attention on “bling.” Bling is the narrative focus as well: the film offers a fictionalized account of the brazen exploits of a group of suburban Los Angeles teenagers who made international headlines after breaking into homes and stealing more than $3 million in jewelry and luxury goods from celebrities including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson, and Audrina Patridge. In Coppola’s account, the teenaged characters were motivated less by greed than a desire to craft themselves in the image of their idols, employing the same tools of performance by photographing and broadcasting images of themselves on social media. Tellingly, their victims were predominantly “reality”-television stars, fostering the fiction that ordinary people could become celebrities without professional training, image management, scripted action and dialogue, direction, or talent but simply by “being themselves.” The material goods are key components in the teens’ self-transformations, but not as status markers. They do not want to emulate the celebrities but become them—or, as Backman Rogers argues, the images of them.82 The teens are less interested in the monetary value of the goods than in their associations with the celebrities, deliberately selecting items they recognize as having been worn by them, goods they have seen in fashion magazine photospreads, celebrity websites, tabloid television shows, and red-carpet appearance footage. “I want some Chanel,” Rebecca (Katie Chang) moans in one scene, but not just any Chanel-branded item. She wants Audrina Patridge’s Chanel goods: the celebrities grant the luxury brands an additional layer of enchantment, having directly possessed them. Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Reknown: Fame and Its History, finds a religious dimension behind their exploits, likening the phenomenon to touching the shroud: they want “to wear some object that connects [them] to that person. … Some garment that the star was wearing pulls you into that star’s aura, makes you a kind of doppelgänger of the star.”83 In a metonymic fashion, the stars’ possessions transfer the aura of celebrity to the burglars, who craft themselves as stars in their turn. Nicki (Emma Watson) sees herself as “being like an Angelina Jolie.” Just as the celebrities had employed the goods as props in images of their success, the Bling Ring members do the same, posting pictures of themselves with handbags, jewelry, and clothing on Facebook (Figure 1.7). They engage

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Figure 1.7  A Facebook post of Rebecca modeling Lindsay Lohan’s yellow Chanel bag. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

in the same process of self-promotion and self-branding. The items have no personal value, no enduring tie to their self-image or self-expression, but only transitory utility. After being “selfied” once to “promote a specific subjectified image,” as Maryn Wilkinson notes,84 they are discarded among the detritus in their closets or sold, as the characters are pictured doing with a collection of accessories from a table at the Venice Beach boardwalk. The characters act, in Coppola’s words, as though they have “an audience all the time,”85 performing a self, defined visually through fashionable goods, that duplicates another’s and is crafted for the same vague, diffused audience.86 Sara Pesce describes it as the “strategic creation of an identity to be endorsed and sold to others.”87 Broadcast online, such performances differ in kind from those with a direct audience, for, as Bauman notes, “the processes of self-formation, self-presentation and self-negotiation are in the online realm stripped of the most discomforting among their associated risks,” such as direct challenge or unscripted interaction. Posting on Instagram or Facebook fosters an illusion of impermeability: “I feel fully and truly in control of the choice of a self, complete with all its paraphernalia, their presentation and social acceptance.”88 Cinematically, the film replicates the relentlessly visual space undergirding such transitory and superficial performances. Coppola worked with cinematographer Harris Savides, shooting in a digital format to mimic the

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images captured by smartphones and posted online. The film incorporates footage from the websites TMZ and socialitelife.com, as well as shots of Facebook feeds, collages of magazine clippings, and rapid-fire montages of celebrity images, accompanied by “pinball” sounds to replicate the barrage of images proliferating in consumer culture. Such shots are cleverly self-reflexive, immersing us, as members of the audience, in the same practices of celebrity surveillance as the characters. Other shots, employing a green or gray filter, offer grainy images as though filmed through surveillance cameras. As the characters alternately evade detection (by wearing hats and hoodies) or play to the camera, they reveal their awareness of being watched. Together, these cinematic strategies implicate the audience, positioned as complicit in judging celebrity possessions but also as witnesses to the Bling Ring’s crimes. The film’s most celebrated shot offers the audience a view denied the characters: as two teens break into Audrina Patridge’s house we watch—at a distance—through its glass walls. We also see the police review the surveillance camera footage and scroll through Facebook feeds.89 The characters, savvy observers and confident performers for the cameras, are exposed as fakes with purloined bling. The exception is Marc (Israel Broussard), the only male member of the Bling Ring and the only character to provide his thoughts in voice-over. He is singled out in scenes that offer insight into his personal circumstances and document the role fashion serves in his self-definition. A transplant to the girls’ high school, he is initially isolated as the “new kid” and becomes the object of the school’s judgmental gaze as he appears on campus. Later, he reflects that he had “a lot of self-loathing and anxiety issues,” and felt self-conscious. His knowledge of fashion and celebrity draws Rebecca to him and cements their friendship: REBECCA (laughs): Yeah, I know, exemplary student … That’s so cute, I love that dress. I love Chanel. She points at a picture. MARC: Yeah, and the shoes are nice … but she needs to get some ­better extensions … REBECCA: I know, right? Are those Prada? MARC: No, Dior. REBECCA: Really? Hey, what do your parents do?

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MARC: My mom doesn’t work, my dad works for a film distribution company, they do a lot of stuff overseas … REBECCA: Oh cool, he’s in the “biz” … MARC: Yeah … it’s cool. I get to go to screenings and stuff. REBECCA: Nice … oh she’s so cute. MARC: But enough with the patent leather accessories, they look cheap. His brand identification skills and good taste, combined with his family connection to the film industry, win Rebecca’s respect. In later scenes, he bonds with the members of the larger group owing to his fashion and social-media savvy. He acts as personal stylist for Rebecca, Nicki, and Sam (Taissa Farmiga), offering advice as they try on clothes before his appraising eye. His inside knowledge of celebrity appearances at Hollywood events enables their group to target their victims’ vacant homes. At Paris Hilton’s mansion, he models for them in a pair of her pink stilettos and a leopard-print scarf while trailing a Louis Vuitton suitcase. Unlike the girls, who treat their stolen goods as disposable, Marc preserves his carefully under his bed (and later in his grandmother’s basement). Accessories subtly convey his new-found insider status. Prior to becoming a part of the girls’ group, Marc wears generic high-school staples: jeans and T-shirts, topped by an omnipresent hoodie. Following their robberies, he adds a scarf or a hat as a stylish embellishment. One scene poignantly conveys his desire—through fashion—to find his place among the girls but also himself. In a rare black-andwhite sequence, filmed as though from the camera of his laptop, Marc, with a scarf at his neck, smokes marijuana from a pipe while dancing for the camera, singing along to “Drop it Low” by Esther Dean. As his own audience, he is playing with roles conjured by the lyrics. He sings along to the chorus sung by an admiring male (Chris Brown)—“Drop it low, drop it low, girl”—but also mugs flirtatiously for the camera, pursing his lips and turning his back to the camera to shake his booty like the female who performs by moving hers on the dance floor. Later, we also witness him wearing Paris’s pink heels, again while alone, cementing their significance for him as a tool for experimenting with gender identity and self-presentation (Figure 1.8). At these moments, Marc’s isolation is palpable: he is alone in his nondescript bedroom, in contrast to scenes taking place in the

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Figure 1.8  Marc on his bed in Paris Hilton’s pink stilettos. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

girls’ rooms, which are cluttered with objects and people. His black-and-white solo performance contrasts cinematically with images of blandly sunlit Southern California suburbs and representations of the harshly colored world of reality television that inspires the girls’ self-fashioning. The conclusion of the black-andwhite scene draws attention to his distinct positioning: a jarring cut switches from the low-angle replicating the position of the laptop’s camera to a medium shot— in color—of Marc arranging outfits on his bed. Rebecca’s text, “Let’s go to Paris,” reintroduces the dynamics of appropriating celebrity goods and identity. Thus the promise of genuine self-fashioning that Marc represents is undercut in the film. His treasured pink stilettos, bagged as evidence, become fixed markers of criminality rather than props of imaginative self-transformation. And, like the other members of the Bling Ring, his identity remains defined by others. Following his arrest, his lawyer summarizes his transformation: “now you’re a star.” He achieved his desire for adulation, but not on his own merits. Marc explains: On my Facebook page recently I had 800 friends requests, I accepted them all, I didn’t even look at them, then I noticed someone had created a fan page for me. If it had been for something I had done to help the community or

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benefit something I’d love it, but it’s just kind of awkward for me that these people are loving me for something that’s looked down on in society … He encapsulates the bankruptcy of a self defined exclusively by external validation.

Surfaces and the Self “Costume designers work in obscurity because of their success.” Adrienne Munich90 Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled, and The Bling Ring emphasize the “Look,” placing fashion center stage on both visual and narrative levels. By contrast, in the three remaining films in Coppola’s oeuvre, clothing and material goods may not stand out ostentatiously on the visual surface but are nonetheless essential in establishing characters’ identities and relationships. As Munich notes, “what a character wears in a film often seems natural and transparent, though it is as carefully crafted and as intensely constructed as any other aspect of film production.”91 In all films, costume design is a “piece of film architecture,”92 a component in advancing the story. But in Coppola’s verbally spare films, where internal emotional and psychological transformation reveal themselves visually, clothing could be described as foundational. It is as consciously a cinematic and narrative component in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Somewhere as in the films that foreground fashion. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), the protagonist of Somewhere, experiences the consequences of being defined exclusively by others. As an actor, he inhabits fictional beings created by others for an audience of others, and adopts an off-screen persona for public promotional events. At one such event, a journalist asks, “Who is Johnny Marco?” The question goes unanswered, lingering as the central question for Johnny and the film audience. His interior life is opaque. He rarely speaks (with only fifty or so lines of dialogue, most consisting of monosyllabic utterances). But in one late-night call to his absent wife, Layla, from whom he is separated, he confides, “I’m fucking nothing … not even a person.” As he looks from his balcony at the Chateau Marmont over the Los Angeles cityscape at night, he sees a billboard asking cryptically and

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incompletely, “Do You Know What?” Twinned scenes at the start and end of the film of Johnny before his bathroom mirror register his anomie: in the first, shot from the side, we see Johnny scrutinize his face, touching a bruise received the night before in a fall down the hotel stairs, and pulling back his hair to examine his receding hairline (a tube of propecia on the counter confirms his anxiety about hair loss). The shot does not reveal Johnny’s reflection, apart from a fragment of his elbow. We see his inability to see himself. In the second, by contrast, shot over Johnny’s shoulder so that we do see his reflection, he looks directly into his own eyes, as though searching for self-acknowledgment, but then glances dejectedly down and away. When moments afterwards he tells Layla he is “nothing … not even a person,” we realize that the scene potently depicts his estrangement from himself. His rootless existence is signified by his temporary stay at the hotel, as well as the opening sequence picturing him driving his Ferrari in circles in the desert. He is, emphatically, going nowhere, rather than somewhere. His is “a crisis of identity depicted almost entirely along spatial lines.”93 At its apex, after his call to Layla, he floats aimlessly on a raft in the Chateau Marmont pool. Isolated on the right side of the long shot, he drifts out of the frame, unmoored and increasingly marginalized. The shot’s obvious allusion to The Graduate (1967) underscores Johnny’s directionless isolation: in Mike Nichols’s film, Benjamin, also in shades, floats alone on a raft as Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” plays on the soundtrack. The song’s lyrics speak of despair and separation: “In restless dreams I walked alone.” The singer confronted “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening” and his own words “like silent raindrops fell / And echoed in the wells of silence.”94 Johnny’s lack of personal direction or agency is heightened by allusions to menacing off-screen events: he suspects paparazzi are following him. He receives text messages from an unidentified presence asking, “Why are you such an asshole?” An unseen assistant directs his schedule, which is dictated by the studio’s demands. Even when he is being celebrated for his work—at an Italian awards ceremony—he is isolated by his inability to understand the language. He is, as Backman Rogers notes, in an “environment of perpetual disconnection.”95 Ironically, while as an actor he is the object of others’ gaze, in the film he is most often watching someone else perform,96 such as the pole-dancing twins who visit his hotel room (Figure 1.9), or his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning)

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Figure 1.9 Johnny watching pole-dancing twins. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

practicing her skating routine. He is, however, the object of the film audience’s gaze, and his appearance frustrates viewers seeking insights into his identity. His clothing underscores his indistinctness. For most of the film he sports a rumpled white T-shirt and jeans, topped occasionally by a sweatshirt or overshirt. So understated and inconsequential is his attire that it only invites attention when his co-star sarcastically tells him, while posing with him in front of a poster for the film they are promoting, Berlin Agenda, that he “looks great.” She adds, “Are you ever going to grow up and be a person?” Still, signs of Johnny’s personal development into adulthood do reveal themselves subtly in his clothing by the film’s end. He drives his Ferrari heading north out of LA in a straight line, rather than in circles, suggesting that he has acquired a sense of purpose. As he parks the car by the side of the road, he walks—self-propelled—away from the camera, revealing a white linen shirt over his standard T-shirt and jeans. The shirt’s significance comes from an earlier scene of Johnny watching a documentary about Gandhi. As the film cuts to the television screen to show images of Gandhi draped in white cloth, we hear, “Gandhi advocated the boycott of machine-made European clothing that had caused large-scale unemployment in India. As always, Gandhi wore only white linen cloth which had become a symbol of his entire movement. He took to making a handmade cloth called Khadi. Most importantly, it showed

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Figure 1.10  Johnny, in white, strides toward the camera. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

Indians how to be self-reliant.” The documentary associates white cloth with purpose and self-reliance. The final shot—a close-up of Johnny’s smiling face as he strides toward, rather than away from, the camera—captures his transformation into a purposeful adult (Figure 1.10).97 Coppola first featured a celebrity character questioning his identity and purpose in Lost in Translation. In this, her most lauded film, two characters, Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), find themselves staying at the same hotel in Tokyo. He is a famous actor experiencing a mid-life crisis; she is a recent college graduate unsure of her future path. Both are unhappily married. Their clothing visually represents their identity and status, as well as their relationships—to their spouses and each other. Bob’s profession as actor grants him high visibility in the context of the film: he is accosted by fans, surrounded by press agents, featured on Japanese television and in a whiskey commercial. Bob’s celebrity status is doubled for the film audience, who recognize they are watching a celebrity playing another celebrity—an effect most clearly pronounced in a scene dramatizing the taping of the commercial. Providing behind-the-scenes access, the sequence highlights the artifice of performance, with comic action focused on the Japanese director’s difficulty in conveying his commands to Bob. A long shot of Bob reveals his tuxedo clipped at the back (Figure 1.11). Ill fitting, it symbolizes his unease with his

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Figure 1.11  Bob Harris with his tuxedo clipped at the back. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

career, as well as the masquerade involved in projecting a fantasy of confident, masculine elegance on screen. As Backman Rogers notes: the scene is constructed in such a way that it is the very mechanics of constructing a persona (a cliché) that is emphasized—we do not see the glossy final product, but rather the intense and repetitive labour that is required to produce promotional material. In order to find the “perfect image” … that would shore up “Bob Harris” as the face of Suntory whiskey, he must employ a series of well-rehearsed clichés and stereotypes—in effect, a form of visual shorthand. This is a process or “act” that reduces him to type.98 When Charlotte jokingly says the first time she saw him he was “dashing in his tuxedo and mascara,” she further deflates his image. As with Johnny Marco, Bob’s discomfort with his career is tied to distance in his personal relationship, represented in the film by his absent wife Lydia: whereas he is highly visible, she is unseen, communicating with him by fax, mail, and phone. (Nancy Steiner, the film’s costume designer, supplies her voice.) Charlotte and her husband mirror Bob and his wife: her muted personal style contrasts with her husband’s. Charlotte dresses as a philosophy major might, in simple shirts, sweater vests, pants, and sneakers in muted tones of black and white. As she explores Japan, her understated Western garb contrasts

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Figure 1.12  Charlotte framed by Kelly and John. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

with the bright colors of monks’ orange and red robes, pink cherry blossoms, and red umbrellas, indicating her distance from the culture. By contrast, John (Giovanni Ribisi), a professional photographer, dresses fashionably, with brightly colored shirts under sport coats, as do his Japanese fashion friends and his celebrity clients, including Kelly (Anna Faris), whose brilliant red top and aggressive verbosity contrast starkly with Charlotte’s appearance and manner.99 A shot with Charlotte framed silently, in a gray sweater vest, between John and Kelly chatting animatedly across her makes the distinction clear (Figure 1.12). Bob and Charlotte share a “deep sense of detachment,” as Sharon Lin Tay and other critics have noted.100 It exists on several levels in the film: on the personal level, the characters are distanced from their spouses but also from themselves, unsure of their identity or purpose. Bob tells his wife by phone, “I’m just completely lost.” Charlotte tells Bob, “I’m stuck … I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.” Their physical situation symbolizes their psychological condition. In Tokyo they are geographically and culturally displaced— circumstances augmented by staying in an American hotel. Their physical displacement also induces jet lag and insomnia. Combined, “their claustrophobic and alien location … effect a contemplation of one’s own identity and life.”101

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Both seek connection, and find it—gradually and temporarily—in each other. They do not speak to each other until thirty-two minutes into the film. When they do, they acknowledge their shared detachment. She tells him, “You’re probably just having a mid-life crisis. Did you buy a Porsche yet?” He tells her, “I’m sure you’ll figure out the angles.” In lieu of dialogue, their clothing tracks their developing intimacy. When Charlotte invites Bob to join her for karaoke with friends, he arrives wearing an orange camouflage-patterned T-shirt, which she takes as proof he is indeed having a mid-life crisis. She forces him to turn it inside out and top it with a jacket. Each item serves as a sign of their connection: he allows her to alter his appearance, and later loans her the jacket. At the karaoke bar she dons a pink wig, and its splash of color, combined with the words of the song she sings, “Brass in Pocket,” signals her shifting self-perception: ’Cause I’m gonna make you see There’s nobody else here No one like me I’m special, so special I gotta have some of your attention give it to me. She demands his attention, and commands it by singing directly to him. Reaction shots show that he returns her gaze, as she does his while he sings, “More than this / There’s nothing more than this.” The sequence closes with a shot of the two centered in the frame and slumped together, with her pink wig resting on his jacketed shoulder, wordlessly sharing a cigarette—an image that, in terms of both mise-en-scène and costume, visually represents their bond. Rather than these props (his hipster camo shirt, her punk pink wig), more mundane and intimate pieces of clothing worn close to the skin reveal the depth of their connection. The film famously opens with a near-static shot of a reclining female form shot from behind (see Figure 3.13). Her body is truncated—from just above her waist to just below her knees—focusing our attention on her simple cotton panties.102 The subtle motion of her legs is the only sign that we are watching a moving rather than a still image of Charlotte dozing in her hotel room. Subsequent scenes feature her similarly clad in a shirt and underwear, her intimate garments reflecting the privacy of the space. While obviously staged for

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an audience, such scenes foster the illusion that we are seeing Charlotte at her most unguarded, dressing for herself rather than an audience. Equally personal garments—robes and pajamas—cement their connection. They are wearing the same generic white terry cloth bathrobe supplied by the hotel when they encounter each other at the pool and decide to explore the city together. When they finally do sleep, they are together in his bed, in complementary loungewear topped by dark sweaters, with his hand resting on her bare feet (Figure 1.13). Coppola’s film subverts generic conventions by denying audiences the expected sex scene affirming the couple’s intimate connection.103 Though fully clothed and barely touching, with Bob actually facing away from Charlotte, their emotional intimacy is actually heightened: together they experience the sleep that had eluded them individually, and their parallel attire externally registers their compatibility and ease in each other’s company. The night before Bob departs, they meet each other outside after a fire alarm, dressed similarly in pajamas. A shot of generic hotel slippers speaks volumes. After Charlotte says she will miss him, he assents wordlessly. A cut shows her glancing down and we see her aerial view of his toes, protruding over the top of his too-small slippers. The humor of the sight punctuates the seriousness of the moment, just as they are about to articulate their feelings.

Figure 1.13  Charlotte and Bob in matching sleepwear. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

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A complementary scene occurs near the end of the film, before the famous final scene of their parting. As he prepares to depart the hotel, Bob does not see Charlotte in the lobby. Clearly desperate to see her once more, he calls up to her room, asking her to return his jacket as a pretext. When she does not answer, he leaves a message, joking, “Goodbye and enjoy my jacket, which you stole from me.” Having been on her way down in the elevator as he called, she appears and returns it to him, a gesture that more definitively signals the end of their intimacy than the awkward goodbyes they exchange. Since their final words to each other when he catches her in the street cannot be heard by the audience, the jacket exchange speaks for them. She had possessed a piece of him, a token of their bond; by returning it, she announces the end of their relationship. Clothing also speaks in place of dialogue in Coppola’s first film, The Virgin Suicides. Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, the film recounts the legend of the Lisbon girls, who are viewed entirely through the perspective of the young neighborhood boys obsessed with them. While the girls do speak in the film, the boys dominate through Giovanni Ribisi’s voice-over. As novelist Megan Abbott notes in her introduction to the Criterion edition DVD, there is a “gulf between what we hear and what we’ve seen”: the boys tell, while the girls show.104 Shot after shot stages the boys’ positions as onlookers, as they watch the girls at a distance through windows and telescopes. “If we kept looking hard enough we might understand,” the narrator says. Clothing and accessories become clues to the girls’ behavior. Coppola and costume designer Nancy Steiner “worked to give the girls identities through outward appearance.”105 Beaded bracelets over Cecilia’s bandaged wrists show the sisters’ efforts to restore normalcy following her suicide attempt. Lux’s tube-top, with one strap falling from her shoulder, registers her attempts at seduction. The girls’ handmade homecoming dresses—described as “four identical sacks” by the boys—reveal their mother’s desire to contain their sexuality (Figure 1.14). The name “Trip” written on Lux’s underwear under the dress shows her resistance. But fashion also defines the boys who attract the girls. Dominic is the first boy in the neighborhood to get sunglasses. And Lux’s crush, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), enters their school in a sequence filmed as though he’s a model on a catwalk, sporting Ray-Bans and pukka beads with a leather jacket flung over

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Figure 1.14  The Lisbon sisters in identical homecoming dresses as captured by their father’s instant camera. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

Figure 1.15  Trip Fontaine’s catwalk entrance. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

his shoulder (Figure 1.15). His velvet suit at the homecoming dance eclipses his date’s dress and affirms his narcissism, anticipating his abandonment of Lux on the high-school football field after sex. Still, for all the weight accorded these fashionable details, the characters, particularly the girls, evade understanding. The narrator says, “In the end

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we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained. Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” Like Somewhere and Marie Antoinette, the film emphasizes the fallibility of external judgment of appearances. The gossiping neighbors who watch the Lisbons through the windows of their home are as catty as the courtiers at Versailles. Following Cecilia’s suicide, Mrs. Buell claims, “That girl didn’t want to die, she just wanted out of that house.” Her friend Mrs. Scheer responds, “She wanted out of that decorating scheme.” The film foregrounds the limits of social observation by emphasizing that the characters view the girls not directly but at one remove, through frames or lenses that alter perception. The neighbors see only the Lisbon home’s exterior and through their windows—barriers that delimit their views. The boys’ telescopes and binoculars equally introduce distortion, narrowing their perspective even as they promise to bridge the physical distance separating them from the girls. Since the film presents their recollections of the girls twentyfive years later, time and memory introduce additional layers of distortion, as does the boys’ desire for the girls.106 As in Marie Antoinette, the film includes an early sequence following the titles at odds in style with the remainder of the film: against a gauzy sunlit sky, Lux’s head is framed by clouds and she winks at the camera, before the narrator begins his voice-over, “Everyone dates the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls” (Figure 1.16). The image of Lux appears as filtered through the boys’ reveries and memories. Similar fantasy scenes—as one boy sniffs lipstick in the girls’ bathroom or as they read Cecilia’s journal—dramatize how their imaginations transform the girls into idealized images. A scene with an adult Trip in rehab conjuring up memories of Lux’s eyes and lips, inserted individually in closeup, shows the enduring power of both desire and fantasy, and reminds viewers that the film unfolds entirely from the boys’ memories. Anticipating the Bling Ring, the film also alludes to the intervening influence of the media on our perceptions of others. A local reporter for Channel 8 News initially shapes the story of Cecilia’s suicide into a warning to parents of the lurking epidemic of adolescent suicide. Later, the same reporter spots the remaining sisters, in their nightgowns, locking arms to encircle an elm tree to prevent city workers from cutting it down (Figure 1.17). They argue that the tree should be allowed to succumb to Dutch elm disease naturally. By contrast,

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Figure 1.16  Lux filtered dreamily through the boys’ fantasies. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

Figure 1.17  “I want those girls in the nighties.” The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

the reporter sees an opportunity to latch their environmental protest onto her narrative about Cecilia’s suicide. As the news van stops before the girls and the tree, intruding into the frame and pointedly blocking our vision, she shouts, “I want those girls in the nighties.” Their clothing fits her pre-existing narrative: their matching attire implies sisterly solidarity, while their “nighties”

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convey innocence. Although the girls disperse before she can set up the shot, the resulting broadcast, with the reporter standing before the tree, represents the girls as putting their lives at risk to defend the tree their sister so dearly loved. The subsequent sequence contradicts her narrative: one sister—now fully clothed—blithely waters bushes with her back to the workers removing the debris around the remaining stump.

Seeing and Being Seen “The relationship between self-representation and image production is … explored in all of director Sofia Coppola’s films.” Christina Lane and Nicole Richter107 The boys in The Virgin Suicides have been described as “cinematic voyeurs,”108 occupying a position of spectatorship like the film’s audience. As we have seen, this is true of all Coppola’s films, which foreground the activity of searching for keys to identity based on visual clues, particularly clothing and other material goods. Her signature shot—of a character in a moving vehicle looking out the window—symbolizes the visual dynamics between seeing and being seen at play.109 This shot appears in each film (apart from The Beguiled), including her short Lick the Star. Viewers see a character in transition framed by window, gazing out. Glass—highlighted by reflection, lens flare, or physical framing— separates the character from the passing world, conveying Coppola’s recurrent theme of displacement or alienation. But the barrier equally separates the viewer from the character, calling attention self-reflexively to the constructed nature of film and reminding viewers that their perceptions are also filtered and partial. Like the boys who watch the Lisbon girls through telescopes, binoculars, and windows, the film viewer regards the characters through the intervening mechanisms of cinematography and direction. The implications are clear: when we take visual evidence as meaningful clues to identity, we are as naïve as the boys. We have no unmediated access to another person, and selfpresentation may be transparently expressive or manipulatively deceptive. For instance, despite their rigorous observations, the boys fail to detect the Lisbon

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girls’ suicidal intentions and Corporal McBurney fails to see the murderous intent behind the ladies’ beguiling appearance at dinner. The films that self-consciously address the act of visual representation— visual surveillance, media broadcasts, reality television, film and television production—make a more complex point. The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette note the disjunction between media reports and actual facts, suggesting that any account of a private life, including that of a public figure, can be only partial. “An accurate historical film is impossible,” Todd Kennedy says of Marie Antoinette, for as Coppola’s version acknowledges, “no version could ever be hers.”110 As we’ve seen, The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette impress this realization on viewers in isolated scenes that call attention to image creation. The Bling Ring, however, offers a sustained immersion in a space of mediated images by replicating social surveillance by video camera and social media. It places viewers in the same position as its characters, opening us up to the same charges of gullibility. For the duration of the film, in the shelter of the theater or before the TV, we allow ourselves to be hustled by actors appearing to be people they are not, whom we accept as real (or at least realistic). They employ tools of costuming and performance to craft an identity, just as real people do to represent themselves to others. And they use fashionable commodities to appear successful. Rather than disguising the duplicitous nature of visual performance, the film calls attention to it and submerges viewers in the experience of it. The implications are clear: film viewers are as susceptible to the hustle in life as in art. If individuals create images of success that they sell using the same strategies as in film, what prevents us from mistaking their fictions for the real? The film offers a cautionary tale about the dangers inherent in a culture granting unparalleled power to image construction through visual means, particularly when success is defined crudely by the display of amassed consumer goods. In a single scene, Somewhere provides an even more immersive experience for viewers to induce a more profound reflection: can we ever know another if we rely on surface appearance alone? The scene occurs at a special-effects studio where Johnny has been summoned to have a mold of his head created as part of the make-up process for a new film. We watch as the mold is applied by three men, but the bulk of the sequence consists of a ninety-two-second shot of

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Figure 1.18  Johnny Marco literally behind a mask. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

Johnny, seated and still, as the mold hardens (Figure 1.18). As he waits, alone, all we hear is the sound of his breathing and swallowing over the ambient noise of the air conditioner. His isolation is palpable—as is the audience’s discomfort.111 As the camera zooms in slowly, viewers have no option but to reflect on their status as observers, forced into a position of steady surveillance but denied all access to the object of our gaze and interest. The resulting frustration induces two insights: we expect to gain knowledge of others based on watching them, but we cannot. It’s not simply the mold that prevents it; it is impossible to gain access to interior mental states on the basis of appearance alone. Such profound insights into human nature are the depths visible through the surface of Coppola’s aesthetic. In fact, as the next chapter demonstrates, the material surfaces of her films are themselves deep with meaning. The thematic concerns of her film narratives with self-fashioning register themselves tangibly in fashion through production, costume, and sound design.

2 Fashioning Worlds

“Coppola’s obsessions have always been revealed in the small details—a glance, a chance encounter, the cut of a dress—that can provide a sudden understanding of a particular world.” LYNN HIRSCHBERG1 In films that foreground self-fashioning and dramatize the dynamics of seeing and being seen, clothing assumes thematic importance and commands visual attention. But clothing is only one facet of self-fashioning, just as costume design is only one component in constructing a film’s visual world. The term “fashion” refers not only to clothing (meaning, as many theorists have defined it, “dress that embodies the latest aesthetic”2) but refers in an expanded sense to a gamut of aesthetic practices—in interior design, architecture, art, transport, and music—that are judged popular and desirable. A fashionable existence is displayed through choices in hair style and home décor, manners and music, gestures and garments.3 Fashion, in both its narrow and its expanded definitions, is characterized by ceaseless change: the prevailing aesthetic goes in and out of popularity. As Elizabeth Wilson put it plainly: “Fashion, in a sense is change.”4 Paradoxically, this quality makes fashion time bound. We can readily identify the fashions of a particular era, from the Jazz Age to the Swinging Sixties. The 1920s conjure images of cloche hats, page-boy haircuts, and fringed dresses, as well Art Deco décor, architecture, and jewelry, and roaring roadsters, all accompanied by the music that has become synonymous with the period. Film exploits visual shorthands such as these to establish an identifiably

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authentic world, whether set in a past, current, or future era. Fashion in film, then, extends far beyond costume design to incorporate all aesthetic elements, from location choices and set design to hair and make-up, as well as cinematography and sound design. By claiming that “her films appear designed as much as directed,”5 Jesse Fox Mayshark identifies the pervasive engagement with fashion writ large in Coppola’s films. Mayshark’s claim further captures the collaborative nature of filmmaking, for audiovisual artistry combines the talents of production, costume, and sound designers, working in concert with the others who comprise their units. As director, however, Coppola is “the central agent and creative force” guiding their work.6 She has collaborated with costume designers Nancy Steiner on two films (The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation) and Stacey Battat on three (Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled), and with production designer Anne Ross on four (Lost in Translation, Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled). Sound designer Richard Beggs has worked on all six, a testament to the fundamental role of audio components in her films’ aesthetic.7 Cinema shares its use of set and costume design with theatrical productions but also fashion. As Caroline Evans has noted, “Fashion shows and films came into being almost simultaneously” in the late 1890s.8 Like films, runway shows employ elaborate sets to establish a theme, orchestrating displays of clothing, hair, and make-up with choreographed movements and dramatic lighting, all to the rhythm of a recorded soundtrack (sometimes augmented by video). Chanel is a famous example, with Karl Lagerfeld as director.9 A nod to the set’s importance can be seen in the conscription of Rachel Feinstein, an artist known for her sculptural installations, for Marc Jacobs’s 2012 Fall show.10 Retailer H&M mounted its Spring 2019 collection as an immersive theater project in Sedona, Arizona, employing the landscape which inspired the clothing’s palette as the setting for “a narrative about wanderlust and exploration.”11 Fashion and theatre combined in Valentino’s production of La Traviata for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in 2016, directed by Coppola, with sets designed by Nathan Crowley, known for his fashion installations for museum exhibitions. With clothing more couture than costume and an

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elaborate floating faux-marble staircase serving as a runway for the opera’s star, the production transformed operatic performance into fashion spectacle.12 Coppola’s participation in the project testifies to her unique position: naturally, as a filmmaker, she orchestrates the same theatrical components (sets, lighting, acting, music, narrative). But she brings a personal history of costume design, having designed costumes for “Life with Zoe” in New York Stories (1989) and The Spirit of ’76 (1990), as well as direct involvement in the fashion industry (see Chapters 3 and 4).13 In her own films, however, this synergy attains greater depth and meaning, as audiovisual fashions are wedded to narratives preoccupied with clothing and identity. As Nick Rees-Roberts noted, “The target of much critical suspicion of fashion on screen comes from the sort of production design that submerges the narrative in a stagnant aesthetic coding, which is reliant on the clichéd look of editorial or advertising imagery.” He cites the work of fashion-designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford, whose film A Single Man (2009) was “criticized for its contrived shots of designed interiors and its over-insistence on immaculate garments.”14 Ford’s luxury aesthetic subsumed its source material (Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel) and the film’s story. As Pamela Church Gibson put it, “fashion has a new degree of visibility that becomes disjunctive, which does disrupt and disturb” the cinematic narrative.15 By contrast, Coppola’s films seamlessly fuse fashion and cinematic narrative. Production, costume, and sound design do not detract from but directly serve stories about self-fashioning and visual culture. This chapter examines the processes of fabrication involved in fashioning the worlds of Coppola’s films. Fashion is simultaneously composed of material objects and participates in creating an illusory, imaginative world on screen.16 Fabricators—production, costume, and sound designers—craft fictional worlds (fabrications, if you will) out of physical materials—including fabrics. While “Coppolism” may, as the previous chapter discusses, emphasize aesthetics over dramatic action and dialogue, this analysis reveals that the so-called “surface” of her films is a richly textured audiovisual fabric, meaningfully connected to film narrative and cultural history.

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Atmosphere “I like starting with the atmosphere and then thinking about the music and how it might look.” Sofia Coppola17 Before examining the complex confluence of design in individual films, it is worth emphasizing a few overarching consistencies. For instance, Coppola shoots on location, rather than constructing sets. She has explained her preference: “the atmosphere seeps in.”18 This is as true for period pictures— Marie Antoinette was filmed at Versailles, and The Beguiled on plantations in Louisiana—as for films set in the present. She scoured midwestern locations to find a street denuded of elms for The Virgin Suicides, eventually finding her image of the “street of stumps” described in Eugenides’s novel in Toronto, Canada. The bland sameness of suburban homes in Calabasas contrasts starkly with the opulent architecture of Audrina Patridge’s modernist glass home and the gaudy interiors of Paris Hilton’s mansion in Los Angeles. Chateau Marmont provides Somewhere with additional layers, pre-existing narratives of celebrities who have stayed there, making the hotel, as several critics have noted, a character in its own right.19 The Milan hotel Principe de Savoia in that film and the Park Hyatt Tokyo in Lost in Translation provide authentic rooms and public spaces, foregrounding the transience and anonymity of travel. In each case, locations anchor the film narratives in place and time while serving thematic preoccupations. Several commentators have noted that Coppola chooses “in-between places,” bridging public and private realms.20 Bob and Charlotte, isolated in their hotel rooms, meet in elevators and at the pool. Johnny Marco alternates between public appearances and retreats to his bungalow. The celebrity homes in The Bling Ring similarly fuse intimacy and spectacle. Marie Antoinette lounges with friends in her rooms at Versailles or her Petit Trianon retreat, but dines in sumptuous spaces surrounded by courtiers and servants or passes through vast hallways before surveilling crowds. The Lisbon sisters shuttle between their confining home and school. Even the ladies at the Farnsworth school venture out from their hierarchically ordered rooms to its surrounding gardens and forest. The locations embody

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the film’s thematic concerns, namely transitions in identity and self-fashioning as an ongoing interaction between the self and world. In Anna Backman Rogers’ words, the locations evoke “that threshold moment in which one finds oneself on the cusp of incontrovertible change.”21 If location determines the visual atmosphere, music anchors the aural. As Belinda Smaill argues, music is “central to the overriding sensibility of the film’s and Coppola’s signature style.”22 It is, in other words, central to her “expressive palette.”23 Coppola’s initial cinematic experiments were music videos. She directed Walt Mink’s “Shine” (1993) and The Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe” (1996) before Lick the Star (1998).24 Only once she has chosen the music does the film emerge: “I find the movie after the sound mix.”25 As in music video, the soundtrack tempo affects the rhythm of editing, as in the rapid pinball sounds that accompany a hectic montage in The Bling Ring or the drum beat from Amp’s “Tipp City” that sets the pace of Chloe’s slow-motion entrance in Lick the Star.26 The same can be said of many filmmakers, the most famous example being Hitchcock’s use of Bernard Hermann’s score in Psycho’s shower scene. Again, what differentiates Coppola’s films is that music—both score and popular song—is wedded to fashion. Tim Anderson argues that “the meaning of popular music often emerges from the many fads, fashions, styles and creative acts with which it comingles.”27 Like dress, popular songs can evoke particular cultural styles and moments. In Coppola’s films, we see that they can provide aural authenticity to recreations of a distant past—1970s’ standards in The Virgin Suicides or contemporary rap in The Bling Ring—or emotional fidelity—as in the anachronistic punk soundtrack in Marie Antoinette that acts as an aural shorthand for her rebellious actions. In addition, sound and/or song heightens attention to fashionable details themselves, wedded to pans across objects, accompanying movements of fabrics or clothed bodies, or comingled with period photography to recreate an era’s cultural style. Underpinning both location and music are the tangible, tactile details of costume and production design that create the look of the film world. “Fashion,” argue Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, “consists of material objects and involves a bodily practice of dressing.”28 In reproducing an era’s fashions, film strives for authenticity rather than realism—not slavish duplications of clothing and objects, but believable recreations of details. Exact duplication

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in film (or in any other medium) is impossible, of course. While, as Ludmilla Jordanova argues, “There can be no single satisfactory definition of ‘realism,’” we can generally agree that: Realism is a set of representational practices, theories, and assumptions, whether philosophical or aesthetic. It refers viewers/readers on to other supposedly more genuine, authentic, or real states of affairs. In literature and the visual arts a range of strategies is deployed to give that sense of firmness, security, and credibility that is the hallmark of “realism.” But no one reading or looking at such work is unaware of its status as art.29 Consider how filming in black and white negates color: instead, costumers create contrast through texture, employing sequins or shimmering fabrics, for example, to convey opulence for glamorous stars in the 1930s and 1940s by exploiting film lighting. The effect is not realistic, but reflective, understood as both representation and reflection. And it enhances film artistry as well as fashion: “Film’s ability to reflect the world is exhorted gloriously in the glossiness of silk, satin and gauze, the twinkle of sequins, beads and tinsels. The fuzzy textures of feathers, fur and lacy filigree are tickled by lighting and tease the shadows. Light is reflected and bent back in sparkle and scattered glare.”30 In addition to leveraging light, cinema exploits shots to highlight objects, as in close-ups of vehicles (carriages, taxis, a Ferrari), technological devices (record players, flash cameras, iPhones, laptops), products (tampon boxes, whisky bottles, Starbucks cups), and food (pastries, Eggs Benedict, pot roast, wild mushrooms) that anchor the film authentically in time, to make it “feel right” and grant it legitimacy as a recreation.31 By placing things and beings in motion, film further naturalizes its representations, stressing the embodied experience of clothing, spaces, and objects. Fashion, after all, “is not just about the creation of a certain ‘look’, but is a way of being-in-the-world, which transcends the visual.”32 Concerns guided by narrative and character further override point-by-point correspondence. The baggy sameness of the Lisbon sisters’ homecoming dresses suggests their homemade origins, while the exacting fit of Marie Antoinette’s gowns results from an army of seamstresses using needle and thread rather than a sewing machine. The brilliant sheen of silks and elaborately embroidered

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brocades convey the wealth of their purchasers as well as the leisured ease of their wearers. By contrast, the faded and worn fabrics in The Beguiled show the repeated washing and mending entailed by Civil War deprivation. A single pair of earrings carefully preserved for future post-war occasions has greater value than drawers of amassed bling or shelves of high heels, which, by sheer accumulation, broadcast disposability and waste. Overflowing glasses of champagne and trays of decorated pastries and confections do the same. Handpicked mushrooms convey labor and scarcity. The dizzying amalgam of patterned wallpaper, ornate furnishings, and decorated objects on display in Marie Antoinette overwhelms viewers to signal abundance, as does the endless repetition of Paris Hilton’s image on walls and sofa cushions in The Bling Ring. Sparsely furnished hotel rooms in Lost in Translation and Somewhere stress anonymity, transience, and anomie. As this brief preview suggests, the smallest details are enormously meaningful. In what follows, I explore how sound, production, and costume design converge in each of Coppola’s films to create cinematic worlds authentic to fashion and self-fashioning.

Fashioning Worlds: The Past “She cares about the clothes. And it’s not just about the clothes. It’s the set, the photography, the music. She cares about creating a world.” Stacey Battat33 The Virgin Suicides provides a good starting point, not simply for its lauded reproduction of 1970s’ clothing, but its fusion of the culture’s fashions in music and design with its thematic focus on identity. The actions of the film’s design team parallel the boys’: both groups endeavor to reproduce the lives of the Lisbon sisters through the clothing they wore, the material objects they possessed and left behind, the music they listened to, and the images they consumed from television, home videos, and catalogs. The boys revive the lost Lisbon sisters through memories conjured out of the detritus left in the wake of their suicides; Coppola’s production team realizes them on film in authentic period detail.

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As we saw in Chapter 1, Nancy Steiner employed costume to give both the boys and the girls visually identifiable personalities, but she did so meticulously within the context of 1970s’ fashion. Collectively, their clothing reflects the trends of the era, from Lux’s tube top to Trip’s pukka beads, the TV journalist’s cowl sweater to Mr. Lisbon’s polyester suits. Steiner, who came of age in the 1970s, brought her yearbooks with her to set, striving for authenticity in her designs.34 The costumes were not simply visual duplicates, however. The fit of her designs influenced performance: high-waisted, belted jeans, for instance, altered the boys’ posture and walk. Dominic, in his Ray-Bans, struts along the sidewalk in his bellbottom jeans. Fit, she noted, “changes the way you move … It puts you in a different place.”35 The girls’ identical homecoming dresses display the Empire waists and puffed sleeves common to the era, as well as the then-common practice of home sewing. Steiner was “convinced that their mother was so frugal that she would have made the dresses from one pattern” bought at a fabric store. Steiner duplicated the process, making the pattern and buying the material at a local shop.36 The Lisbons’ suburban home bears the stamp of the era, too, from its trees infected by Dutch elm disease to the wood-paneled rec room and the spiked wrought-iron fence where Cecilia impales herself. An opening shot captures a girly still life: on a shelf against a window we see assorted perfume bottles, make-up brushes, creams, nail polish, bracelets, and a paper fan opened to display its pattern. A rosary dangling from one of the bottles turns the collection into a sort of shrine, an association underscored by the background sound of distant sirens before the voice-over announces, “Cecilia was the first to go.” Later, following the other sisters’ suicides, the camera moves through the empty house, panning over items tagged for sale: the flash camera that their father used to photograph the girls before the homecoming dance, the tiara used to crown Lux homecoming queen. The objects, once possessed by the Lisbon sisters, retain a talismanic significance. They conjure memories, simultaneously, of the female characters and the era. Chief among them is their record player, not only a staple 1970s’ product but the source for a key scene employing period song in place of dialogue among characters. Separated spatially, the boys and girls communicate by playing songs to each other over the phone (true to the period, they are rotary dial versions with coiled cords). Anderson argues that records are “emotional ciphers through which adolescents communicate,” and notes

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that all the music in the phone call consists of love ballads and soft rock songs.37 They swap 1970s’ hits by popular artists. While musical style, combined with the dynamics of exchange, suggests the possibility of romantic connection, Justin Wyatt notes that the songs are “yet another failure of communication.” The girls’ choices—“Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan and “So Far Away” by Carole King—are signs of “the suicidal ideation, the depression, and the apparent lack of options open to the girls.” In their selections, the boys entreat the girls to join them: “Hello, It’s Me” (Todd Rundgren) and “Run to Me” (The Bee Gees). In the boys’ minds, the girls require saving and they cast themselves as their romantic rescuers.38 The lyrics and romantic nature of the 1970s’ songs blind the boys from considering an alternative motive: the girls want them to discover their suicides. The film audience is equally duped, accepting the songs’ romantic subtext at face value, while lulled by the nostalgic associations of adolescent innocence they evoke. Visual styles equated with the 1960s and 1970s reinforce the music. Midway through their exchange the screen splits, with the girls on top and boys below, employing a style from films like Indiscreet (1958), Pillow Talk (1959), and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) to suggest, slyly yet chastely, sexual chemistry (Figure 2.1). As in the case of the musical selections, the choice is ironic:

Figure 2.1  The boys and girls, in split screen, communicate using rotary phones and record players. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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rather than visually reinforcing opposite-sex attraction, the split emphasizes disjunction. The boys and girls occupy the same frame in split screen only temporarily, as cuts between alternating scenes of the groups in their separate bedrooms resume. Elsewhere, 1970s’ songs are used more conventionally, as in romantic comedies, to comment on the action pictured on screen.39 As one would expect, the homecoming dance features then-popular songs of romance (“Strange Magic” by ELO and “Come Sail Away” by Styx), which prefigure Lux’s tryst with Trip on the football field. They kiss in his car to Heart’s “Crazy on You.” Yet Coppola’s choices are often more complex. In the basement party that precedes Cecilia’s suicide, they play Todd Rundgren’s “A Dream Goes on Forever” and The Hollies’ “The Air that I Breathe.” While, as Wyatt notes, the songs signal the boys’ obsessions with the girls,40 they also act, in retrospect, as ironic commentary: the party, and the dream, ends with suicide; Cecilia no longer breathes. Even more multilayered is a sequence following Trip Fontaine set to the tune of Heart’s “Magic Man.” The song—about a young woman captivated by a man who claims, “I cast my spell of love on you, a woman from a child”— conveys Trip’s spell over his female classmates, who are pictured as looking with longing at him as he saunters through the hallways or smiling at him as they slide test answers to him or deliver a biology report under a plate of brownies. However, as the camera lingers on Trip’s appearance, the song reinforces the spell cast by his clothing and accessories: the white Levi’s shirt and dark slacks he wears as he walks toward the camera through the starkly lit school hallway (see Figure 1.15), the patterned trunks he wears as he floats on an air mattress in his backyard above-ground pool, the white towel he drapes over them to answer the doorbell. His magic appears to emanate from the pukka beads around his neck, a constant presence whether his torso is covered or exposed. Simultaneously, the audiovisual mix captures fashion— both Trip’s individual costume and 1970s’ style—as well as self-fashioning, as Trip’s crafted image of himself as a seducer is affirmed by his female classmates. Tellingly, the song ends when the “Magic Man” encounters Lux, who casts her spell over him. Without the added potency of Heart’s song, his magic disappears, a fact underscored by a cut to Trip recounting the moment of their meeting twenty-five years later: “She was the still point of

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Figure 2.2  Trip’s Western-style shirt ties him to 1970s’ style and his past self. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

the turning world, man. I never got over that girl. Never.” His Western-style shirt reinforces the enduring power of the moment (Figure 2.2). It links him to his younger self but also to the era. He is stuck in the 1970s—physically, emotionally, and psychologically. While the film recaptures 1970s’ fashion through production and costume design, its soundtrack forms a bridge between the era’s music and the 1990s. Coppola listened to Air’s Premiers Symptômes (1997) while writing the screenplay, and the group’s “specific kind of melancholy” contributed to the atmosphere she sought to create.41 Their instrumental “Clouds Up” plays during the film’s credit sequence, as the moving camera pans up from the treelined suburban street through its canopy of leaves to the sky, superimposed by images of “The Virigin Suicides” traced in girlish script and a shot of Lux coyly winking at the camera. The contemporary score thus underscores the atmosphere derived from the location, as well as the nostalgic fantasies of the boys, later revealed to have conjured Lux’s image out of their reveries. Air’s “Ce Matin La” also accompanies that later scene, when the boys read Cecilia’s diary, infusing their fantasies with an upbeat “easy-listening” groove inspired

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by Burt Bacharach.42 The French duo (Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin) created contemporary electronic music that was “indebted to 1970s ‘analog sound’ through Moog synthesizers and valve amplifiers.”43 Thus, along with Sloan, whose songs are featured in the homecoming dance sequences, Air connects the film’s 1970s’ visual aesthetic and melancholy mood to contemporary experiences of adolescent longing and loss. Perhaps subtler are the contemporary traces detectable in the visuals. Fashion photographer Corinne Day contributed the still images employed in the film, such as the snapshot of the girls in their homecoming dresses, represented as their father’s amateurish work with his instamatic camera (see Figure 1.14).44 Day was one of the “new realists” of the 1990s, along with Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller, who photographed Coppola in ads for Marc Jacobs perfume.45 Perhaps for that reason, one critic argued that “the virgins of the title looked like they had been created by Coppola’s fashion buddy Marc Jacobs.”46 The 1990s’ grunge aesthetic associated with Jacobs’s fashion influenced photographers as well, who eschewed artifice and formalism in favor of gritty realism by shooting amateur models in real locations, such as Day’s own living room in her London flat. Thus, at moments in the film, 1970s’ naturalism is filtered through the lens of 1990s’ grunge. Surprisingly, the 1970s’ fashions of The Virgin Suicides can be detected beneath the Southern Gothic stylings of The Beguiled. Coppola has described it as a “development” of the earlier film, a darker version sharing elements of costuming—“pale, floral dresses”—and narrative, with its focus on women “trapped in the house” and exploration of “how mysterious men are.”47 With equal care, The Beguiled reproduces details of Civil War clothing, décor, and architecture, while injecting allusions to the period that produced its source text, Cullinan’s 1966 novel and its previous film adaptation by Don Siegel (1971). Period details visually and aurally register the dynamics of beguilement at play between McBurney and the ladies of the Farnsworth school with a level of understatement that matches the subterfuge working beneath decorous surfaces. The opening features shots of the moss-covered trees surrounding the Farnsworth school, as a young girl (later revealed to be Amy) hums “Lorena,” a love song popular during the Civil War with both Northerners and Southerners.48 The soundtrack also features her footsteps, registered

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rhythmically as marching, with artillery fire exploding in the distance, smoke visible above the trees. Since Coppola’s films typically feature popular songs that stand out by their centrality to the action (as in The Virgin Suicides) or by their anachronistic contrast to period visuals (as in Marie Antoinette), The Beguiled contains strikingly few musical intrusions, authentic to the era (as existing prior to recorded music) and to war-time experience. Any music heard at the Farnsworth school is provided by the girls during practice or performance. Since McBurney occupies the music room, such occasions are rare during his stay. Thus ambient sounds—of insects, birds, artillery—predominate on the soundtrack. “Lorena” stands out, for it is performed twice—wordlessly, as Amy hums the melody prior to discovering McBurney, and later when the girls sing the song at the piano to entertain him following their first dinner. Each moment emphasizes the interpersonal, rather than national, politics underscoring the characters’ self-fashioning, first as McBurney beguiles Amy into leading him to the Farnsworth school, and second as the individual girls, dressed in their finery (see Figure 3.23), perform for him, clothed in his mended uniform. By supplying the lyrics absent in Amy’s version, they augment the seductive intent on both sides. They sing the words voiced by a man, about his enduring love for Lorena, about hearts throbbing on and pulses beating fast. In both instances the song is interrupted by intrusions of the war: Amy stops humming at the shock of discovering a Union soldier in Confederate territory; the girls’ performance breaks off when Confederate soldiers knock at the door. Thus the romance of the song is dogged by threats of violence. The locations lend authenticity but also represent this doubled layer of battle—for attention and affection, and for possession and territory. The exterior—shot at Madewood Plantation in Napoleonville, Louisiana—features towering columns and wrought-iron fencing, a civilized fortress cosseting the ladies from the wilds of woods and war beyond its gardens and gate. The interior—filmed at the New Orleans home of actress Jennifer Coolidge— reverses the structural arrangement. The Union soldier is confined to one room, a space feminized by its intended use (musical performance) and décor. Lace curtains and heavy formal drapes provide an additional barrier to the outside elements. The room initially overflows with decorative embellishments:

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ornately carved furniture, elaborately brocaded screens and couches, glass oillamps, porcelain pitchers and basins. The soldier is enclosed within a domestic space that separates the women from the war, a Chinese-box-like arrangement that configures the battle between the sexes within the school as a personal civil war of Confederate ladies against the Union soldier. The transition from the exterior to interior spaces opens with a close-up of a lace curtain wafting in the breeze, suggesting movement from the public field of war to the private, domestic realm of the ladies’ seminary. But lace gains additional resonance—as a beguiling embellishment on Alicia’s pink dress to gain McBurney’s attention and as the veil through which Edwina watches him work in the garden. In keeping with Coppola’s fascination with looking, the characters regard each other through the curtain—Edwina from within, McBurney from without (Figure 2.3). For both, the curtain acts as a veil. Edwina looks down with longing which she seeks to shield from his view; he looks up, recognizing he is the object of her gaze, but the curtain impedes forthright acknowledgment of their attraction.49 The curtain both reveals and conceals, and its shifting motion acts as a metaphor for the hesitant movement of seduction.

Figure 2.3  The beguiling nature of lace. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

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Production, costume, and sound design converge to register the shifting dynamics of beguilement. As the women’s initial fear of and resistance to their enemy prisoner softens and shifts toward desire for his favor, he moves out of the music room to the dining room and gardens, occupying their domestic territories, until he ventures upstairs to Alicia’s bedroom. Edwina’s jealous reaction, however, returns him downstairs—violently—and induces an audiovisual shift signaling the escalation of conflict. The score, created by the French band Phoenix from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Magnificat,” enters in a low drone after Martha requests the anatomy book, introducing a nearly imperceptible note of menace.50 Martha’s blood-stained nightgown underscores it further, as does the gradual darkening of the interiors, through lighting and the removal of light feminine touches, such as the brocaded screen.51 The same deep instrumental hum accompanies the women’s burial of the amputated leg, ending abruptly as McBurney screams in recognition of its loss. The score reenters at each subsequent action to oppose McBurney—Amy’s failed effort to tie the blue rag on the gate to signal his presence to the passing Confederates, her picking of poisoned mushrooms—but it only announces its presence at the climax. When McBurney fires his pistol at the ceiling to scare the women, cowering together on a sofa, it surges.52 The score marks two sonic explosions—of the pistol and the chandelier that crashes to the floor. The ornate chandelier’s destruction announces, in its turn, the women’s shift from acting as decorous females terrorized by a man and requiring male protection to being agents plotting actions of their own. Femininity, in other words, shatters. Acting in parallel, but at odds, Edwina goes to McBurney while the others plot his poisoning. As Edwina offers herself to McBurney sexually, the buttons from her blouse scatter across the floor. As in the case of the chandelier, decorative feminine objects are brutally cast aside. However, in this case, Edwina initiates the action and production design underscores her agency: before approaching McBurney, she slides a heavy side table in front of the door. By contrast, the others disguise their murderous intent under a masquerade of femininity, dressing elaborately for an ornate dinner and deferring to McBurney by offering him all the mushrooms. Similarly, the film’s meticulous reproduction of Civil War aesthetics enfolds a more contemporary narrative of female action. And fittingly, the visual surface bears traces of the 1970s’ era, when the story first appeared as a novel and was

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Figure 2.4 Nicole Kidman’s Martha resembles Nastassja Kinski’s Tess. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016/Tess, directed by Roman Polanski © Renn Productions, Timothy Burrill Productions, Société Française de Production 1979.

adapted into film. Coppola turned to Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) for visual inspiration.53 The 1970s’ films recreate the same late-nineteenth-century period as The Beguiled through location and costuming. Like Polanski’s film, Coppola’s features atmospheric images of female figures in virginal white against befogged landscapes of towering trees. Similar images occur in Weir’s film, which, like Coppola’s, centers on entrapped young women. When Nicole Kidman strides through the garden wearing a white dress and hat, she conjures up images of Nastassja Kinski in Tess (Figure 2.4). The costume designers for Coppola’s and Polanski’s films both studied period dress, but were influenced by more contemporary reappropriations: Anthony Powell by Laura Ashley’s designs in the 1970s and Stacey Battat by Powell’s costumes.54 Powell sought to reproduce nineteenthcentury cotton prints, but instead employed then-fashionable Laura Ashley fabrics—1970s’ versions of 1800s’ prints.55 He capitalized on not only the 1970s’ vogue for vintage textiles, but also the popularity of the maxi dress in reaction to the mini-skirt craze of the 1960s. A sign of the contemporary resonance of his costumes was their influence on retail fashion: Powell noted that Ralph Lauren did “Tess-type looks” for three seasons, calling his the “Prairie Look.”56 Battat’s designs, filtered through the lenses of Powell’s, were, in their turn, partly credited for a resurgence of prairie chic in fall 2018. A New York Times description captures the confluence of the 1800s and 1970s: “The prints are

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Laura Ashley-esque micro-florals, calicos and gingham, the necklines are high, sometimes there is a bib or apron, there is usually at least one ruffle.”57 The initial trend and its resurgence have been linked to reassertions of feminist activism, in keeping with the gender politics of Coppola’s film. The “feeling of femininity and frustration” Coppola sought to create in the film was also inspired by Jo Ann Callis’s Woman with Blue Bow (1977).58 The image conveys confining feminine strictures through dress and décor: the woman’s lace dress is suspended by a blue ribbon tied at her neck, her head flung backward to ease its tight hold (Figure 2.5). The photo could equally have inspired—or been derived from—Marie Antoinette. In Callis’s photo, the wallpaper, decorated with birds in flight, offers a pointed contrast to the woman straining against her confining dress. It recalls the image of Marie against an equally decorative backdrop, hectored on all sides to produce an heir (see Figure 1.2). Marie’s dress, by contrast to that of the woman in Callis’s photo, fuses

Figure 2.5  Jo Ann Callis, Woman with Blue Bow, 1977, chromogenic print, 14 5/16 x 17 15/16 in. (36.4 x 45.6 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Gay Block.

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with the patterned wallpaper, and combined with her posture of submission shows her capitulation, rather than resistance, to constraining ideas of femininity. The ribbon at her neck, though, echoes Callis’s blue bow and symbolizes the dangers of capitulation to fashion. In Marie Antoinette the recurring image of the ribbon at Marie’s neck foreshadows her execution,59 the consequence of her overinvestment in ornamentation. The film’s concluding image of a shattered chandelier does the same—and prefigures the destroyed chandelier in The Beguiled. In both films the chandelier represents an aristocratic attachment to decorative objects associated with women. However, its destruction in The Beguiled compels the women to act against their confinement, while in Marie Antoinette it stands in for the queen, herself a decorative object fatally shattered. “The party’s over.”60 So Coppola summed up the demise of the “grand days” of antebellum balls in the manor housing the Farnsworth Seminary, but the same applies to the Lisbon home and Versailles. The final shot in Marie Antoinette (Figure 2.6) condenses the entire film, as Dennis Bingham notes, In this remarkable shot is everything: the morning dress rituals, the early sexual failures with Louis … It’s also a symbolic imprisonment and execution, as every means by which Marie was defined by court and public is summed up in that bedchamber, and now it has been killed.61

Figure 2.6  “The party’s over.” Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

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Her demise is conveyed “through images of the defilement of her clothes, furniture and objects.”62 As such, it might be argued that Marie Antoinette is the apotheosis of a costume film, defined in its contemporary manifestation as participating in “a broader history aesthetic that foregrounds other cultural forms such as fashion, interior decorating, and architecture that can all be combined synergistically in cinema.”63 The heightened attention to fashion and self-fashioning at the narrative level in the film, discussed in Chapter 1, naturally translates into ostentatious costume, production, and sound design. Coppola’s locations—Versailles and the freshly restored Petit Trianon—enabled the film’s meticulous recreation of the pre-Revolutionary courts of Louis XV and XVI. In fact, her set decoration team refurbished Marie Antoinette’s private theater and the palace’s Hall of Mirrors.64 Nonetheless, cinematographer Lance Acord claimed the filmmakers’ “obsession from the start was to be the exact opposite of a costume film.”65 By this, he appears to mean that the team did not follow the convention of referring to historical paintings as their guide. But Acord may be overstating the case. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz contends, “Coppola’s attention to surface is manifested … not against, but through the fabric of the costume biopic.”66 Consider, for instance, Marie’s shoes created for the film by contemporary designer Manolo Blahnik. They were inspired by the multicolored satin slippers trimmed by bows and jewels featured in portraits of the queen, yet bear clearly anachronistic touches, such as stiletto heels.67 As Diana Diamond has detailed, Milena Canonero’s gowns similarly retain a “spirit of historical authenticity” by “replicating the elaborate patterns, fabrics, and styles of the original clothes, crafted of silks and satins, brocaded and embroidered, ruffled and flounced, some being faithful copies of the originals.”68 Still, Canonero has described them as a “stylization,” at times “symbolic,” at others “stylish,” and at others “psychological.”69 In fact, they are all three at once: Canonero’s stylistic alterations invariably represent Marie Antoinette’s subjectivity. For example, the ribbon at Marie’s throat discussed above is symbolic of her constricted existence and impending execution. A better example comes from the handover scene: when Marie emerges transformed into the dauphine of France, she wears an exaggerated version of a blue bow represented in an historical portrait, signifying her status as a decorative object, packaged for presentation to Louis (see Figure 1.1).70

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The beaded black gown she wears to the masked ball adheres to contemporary, rather than historical, color dictates. In place of full costume, some revelers at masquerade balls elected to wear black dominos (cloaks) over their gowns, with a mask covering the upper half of their faces to disguise their identity. The film retains the seductive possibilities of the historical practice: participants could express illicit desires under the cover of costume (and the license granted by the tradition’s origins in Venetian carnival celebrations). But Marie’s costume reveals, rather than conceals, her sexual attraction to Fersen (Figure 2.7). Black, no longer a protective covering, encases her body, sheathing it for the purposes of seduction. The domino is transformed into a modern black dress, donned to signal sophistication and elegance, as well as mystery—associations derived from John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X (1884), Man Ray’s photo of Coco Chanel (1935), or shots of seductresses on screen: Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1964), Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960), and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).71 The slim, transparent ribbon Marie sports hardly conceals her identity as a mask would. Instead, it merely veils her flirtatious glances and allows her to allude, in a knowing, contemporary way, to the impossibility of concealing her celebrity status as queen. Together, the changes reflect Marie’s psychosexual development and affirm the film’s

Figure 2.7  Marie Antoinette’s black gown and “mask” scarcely conceal her desire. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

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overriding interest in the intersection of fashion and self-fashioning—in the historical queen’s life but also in contemporary culture. Thus production designer K. K. Barrett describes their project in the film as creating a “transhistorical aesthetic,” not historical accuracy.72 Key to establishing Marie Antoinette as a “real girl” rather than an eighteenth-century caricature is conveying her inner experiences as transcending their temporalspatial origins. If the historic locations anchor the narrative visually in the past, costume and sound design conspire to bridge the temporal divide by sifting her emotional depths through audiovisual filters of contemporary fashions in dress and music. The often-noted shot of lavender Converse hightops stuck into an array of Blahnik’s period-inspired slippers—inserted as a joke by Coppola’s brother Roman, who served as second unit director—wittily marks the disjunction between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries while calling attention to the film as a contemporary recreation of the past. Simultaneously, however, it efficiently conveys the enduring appeal of fashionable footwear: Marie’s slippers are her generation’s equivalent of sneakers, collected with the same obsessive attachment. But, as Heidi Brevik-Zender has noted, the shoes further muddy historical categorization: The Converse hightops that viewers read as anachronistically modern were, in fact, invented as basketball shoes in 1917, and enjoyed their first of many waves of popularity when marketing genius Chuck Taylor attached his name to them in the early 1920s. When Marie Antoinette debuted in 2006, “Chuck Taylors” were a nearly ninety-year-old fashion classic. The spectator is then left to puzzle: which accessory is in fact modern? A basketball shoe from the 1920s that generations of youth have adopted for decades, or a stylized Manolo created by one of today’s most recognizable high-heel designers?73 The answer, she says, is “both,” for neither belongs entirely in 2006 or the eighteenth century. The film’s “transhistorical aesthetic” is not limited to the visual. The soundtrack—in conjunction with or opposition to—production and costume design presents the historical queen’s life as indistinguishable from that of any modern woman defining herself. More pointedly anachronistic than Blahnik’s or Canonero’s hybrid designs, the music conveys her emotional turmoil, from

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melancholy to rebellion to contentment, as contemporary. Sound designer Brian Reitzell describes it as a “collage”: “The soundtrack is a double disc, a post-punk-pre-new-romantic-rock-opera odyssey with some 18th-century music and some very new contemporary music.”74 The songs that command attention are post-punk songs from the proximate past, from the late 1970s to the 1990s rather than the 2000s. Selected for their emotional relevance, not as a naked ploy to appeal to contemporary consumers, they do not limit the film’s appeal to its 2006 audience. For instance, Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Hong Kong Garden” (1978) plays as the guests dance at the masquerade ball. A stringed version of the song’s opening accompanies Marie’s entrance, transporting the modern into the past. As she descends to the dance floor, the song continues in its original punk form, in contrast to dancers engaged in an approximation of a period dance. Fighting her way through the crowded assembly, however, Marie bounces to the beat as a contemporary would, her delight in jostling with strangers registering her desire to pass as one of them. As she flirtatiously exchanges glances with Fersen through her “mask” and coyly withholds her identity, Bow Wow Wow’s “Aphrodisiac” (1983) can be heard playing in the background, quite literally underscoring their sexual chemistry. Initially the lyrics are masked by their exchange, but as the queen departs we hear “If you want to fall in love with somebody.” Post-punk’s insistent rhythms and rebellious lyrics convey the pent-up frustrations and defiance characteristic of adolescence. As with the shoes, the music carries its own associations beyond the easily grasped significance of its lyrics. Coppola and Reitzell’s choices—Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants—have influential ties to fashion. Malcolm McLaren managed and promoted both bands as a showcase for his wife Vivienne Westwood’s designs. The fashion synonymous with their post-punk music— New Romantic—was inspired by dress of the Romantic era, the Revolutionary period ushered in by the king’s and queen’s executions. Thus as Adam and the Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” plays during Marie and Fersen’s dalliance on the lawn, Fersen’s uniform recalls Adam’s signature military jacket (Figure 2.8).75 The lyrics’ references to “a new royal family” and “wild nobility” comment on the unbridled action on screen, but the image equally underscores the equivalence of Adam’s costume and Fersen’s. Viewers are confronted with another transhistorical

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Figure 2.8  Count Fersen channels Adam Ant. Michael Putland / Getty Images.

tangle: post-punk New Romantic fashion influences Coppola’s vision of Fersen, a military officer from the eighteenth century. This mélange of fashion and music is also a reminder that in the age of music video, popular songs conjure pre-existing images that fuse with the images before audiences on screen. All music, though, can be experienced by listeners as imaginatively inducing a stream of visuals, inducing a synesthetic immersion. Cinema heightens this effect.76 When Lesley Chow writes, “Even the last shot, with the palace thrown into disarray, is an album cover,”77 she captures this potent fusion: void of music, with diegetic bird song the only sound, the final image nonetheless calls music—and its visual packaging—to mind. But the connections between sound and visual elements of film are even more complex. Lucy Fife Donaldson has argued that sound is, in fact, another surface—a sonic surface—interacting with visuals to create the texture of the film: Sound effects can match surfaces seen on-screen, fill in textural details of what is unseen, or provide a material context for an environment, even

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if not matched directly. The progression of music, its contours and shape as modified through rhythm, harmony, and pitch, creates expressive sensations. The combination of the soundtrack elements in the mix can be registered as multiple surfaces forming an overall texture … Qualities of sound are just as important as the look of a space and the objects in it for determining texture, and for informing us about the nature of its surfaces.78 Coppola’s team exploits these textural possibilities, creating riotous sequences mid-film to capture Marie Antoinette’s exuberant opulence and boundarypushing innovations. Saige Walton notes that “from the up-beat tempo of the music, the energetic rhythms of film editing, the privileging of gesture and physical movement, and the film’s own material-visuality, we are encouraged to feel the richness of Antoinette’s life at Versailles, rather than watching it with the eyes alone.”79 The frenzied beats and energetic vocals of post-punk songs accompany shots of ascending piles of food, stacks of colored gambling chips, soaring towers of cascading champagne, and overstuffed pastries, all fusing to convey excess. Sounds and visuals are over the top, analogous to the absurd heights of the queen’s signature pouf.“It’s not too much?” she asks. In fact, the wretched excess of the style provoked some of the first attacks against the queen in the popular press. Caroline Weber speculates that the pouf may be directly related to the spurious “Let them eat cake” rumor: “it is not implausible that the lasting association between her callousness and baked edibles in fact originated with her habit of parading her powdered, wedding-cake hairstyles before a bread-starved nation.”80 Production design reinforces the association, for the textures converge seamlessly—a fact not lost on reviewers. “We get wigs that look like desserts, cookies that look like jewels,” one noted.81 Marie herself is merely a confection. As one gossip at court says, “she looks like a little piece of cake.” (No wonder that an entire department oversaw the production of pastries for the film.82) Canonero’s costumes, their palette inspired by Ladurée macarons, enhance the effect, as does Acord’s bright, high-key lighting, a choice, he notes, that, like the palette, works counter to conventional historical dramas, which are typically darker.83 The “pop”—of color, music, lighting— grants the goods a contemporary appearance (a fact not lost on the editors of Vogue, as Chapter 4 discusses).

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Sequences from other periods in the queen’s life feature their own distinct visual and sonic textures. Post-punk music—“The Melody of a Fallen Tree” by Windsor for the Derby—also accompanies her physical transition and transformation following the handover, in keeping with the equation of fashion with modernity as she redesigns herself as the “queen of fashion.” Prior to the handover, her journey from Austria is accompanied by a piece—“Opus 17” by Dustin O’Halloran—that appears more in keeping with the period. As Reitzell notes, this work of solo piano “feels appropriate to both the period and the melancholic sadness that accompany Marie Antoinette’s literal stripping of Austrian significance.” However, it is a contemporary creation, not a period piece, recorded in a castle to “sound right.”84 In the absence of artifice—when Marie is stripped naked for the handover and later dallies in the grass with her daughter in a simple white muslin dress—the soundtrack contains no music at all (see Figure 3.6). Instead, natural sounds—birdsong, the rustle of fabric and grasses, wind, conversation—predominate. As the queen matures and her costume simplifies, the music appearing on the soundtrack consists of contemporary recreations of eighteenth-century forms: members of the band Phoenix, dressed as courtiers, serenade her as she lounges in the Petit Trianon; another courtier plays harpsichord as Louis and their guests play cards. Over the harpsichord, one female guest can be heard gossiping cattily about another, “she should buy a new dress.” Marie, however, is pictured as divorced from the action and conversation, fantasizing about Fersen. Her desire takes precedence over fashionable concerns, signaled visually by her fleeing the action to the strains of The Strokes’ “Whatever Happened.” The popular song here, as in the scene of their dalliance, is equated with an altered instance of rebellion: sexual freedom in place of a revolution in fashion. When Marie gives birth to the dauphin, an elegiac aria—“Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux” (mournful apparitions, pale flames) from Rameau’s opera Castor & Pollux (1737)—underscores a sequence that culminates in his coffin being carried from the palace. The queen walks despondently through the same passage where she had so gleefully escaped from cards to take refuge in her fantasies of Fersen, wearing a black gown as she had at the masquerade ball. Now her dress fulfills an altered symbolic function: mourning in place of glamorous, playful mystery. A wide shot of the queen walking along a path through the

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Figure 2.9  The triangular silhouette of Marie Antoinette’s dark gown merges with that of the manicured trees. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

palace gardens underscores her isolation. The triangular silhouette of her dark gown merges with that of the manicured trees (Figure 2.9). Location, costume, and music combine to foreshadow her imminent demise. By its conclusion, Coppola’s contemporary recreation consigns the queen to history, as period detail dominates. The New Romantics surrender to the Romantics.

Fashioning Worlds: The Present “I remember people asking me, ‘Is it a period film or is it contemporary?’ To me, it didn’t really matter.” Sofia Coppola85 Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled, and The Virgin Suicides all deliberately reproduce fashions associated with recognizable eras in the distant past: preRevolutionary France, Civil War Virginia, 1970s’ Michigan. They are decidedly period pieces, albeit, as we have seen, artfully filtered through contemporary lenses. The Bling Ring, Lost in Translation, and Somewhere in a sense do the reverse: set in the present, they employ the same design strategies in

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production, costume, and sound to capture the contemporary fashions central to the characters’ self-fashioning. Yet, simultaneously, they allude to fashions anchored in more distant eras. If Coppola’s costume dramas are transhistorical, her films set in the contemporary moment are paradoxically timeless. In the quotation included above, Coppola refers to The Bling Ring, which appeared in 2013, based on Nancy Jo Sales’s March 2010 Vanity Fair article about a series of burglaries occurring from October 2008 to August 2009. Based on historical fact, like Marie Antoinette, the film exploits its real-life location: Los Angeles.86 In fact, the film’s locations physically embody the teenagers’ aspirations: Calabasas homes reflect their suburban reality, while Beverly Hills mansions represent their celebrity ideal. Paris Hilton, one of the ring’s victims, opened her mansion to the filmmaker, giving the crew access to a contemporary palace, the private retreat of a trendsetter dogged by tabloid gossip, a modern-day Marie Antoinette. The location’s authenticity, however, foregrounds the problematics associated with Hilton’s reality-TV celebrity. While the mansion is not a set designed for the film, it is nonetheless itself a set rather than a home. As Laura Henderson explains: Its presence on the screen is being used as authentication of the mythology of Paris Hilton’s celebrity. Its strip club atmosphere has been built with the specifications of Hilton’s personal story in mind. With a built-in pole dancing stage and an in-house nightclub room, the house supports the fiction of Hilton’s sex-bomb persona. Echoing the press clippings on Hilton’s walls and her pillows (each bearing a silkscreened image of her face), her home illustrates exactly how Hilton achieved her level of celebrity. Hilton constructed frames around her image and her most intimate moments, and fame soon followed. Thus her home, where it is impossible to discern what is real and what is set dressing, illuminates the extent of modern permeation. In its dual role as film set and domestic abode, the mansion exists liminally between reality and cinema.87 More simply, Hilton’s mansion is a “reflection of a reflection,”88 a cinematic representation in Coppola’s film of a reality-TV life. Thus it neatly embodies the teenagers’ desire to reproduce Hilton’s life in their own lives, by possessing the objects that decorate her home and her body.

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When the objects on display are not reproducing Hilton’s image—the pillows, pole, and pictures—they are arrayed as in a luxury store, reflecting not the commodification of her celebrity image but of the high-end goods she and the reality stars the teenagers emulate employ as props to construct themselves as a “brand.” Shots of the photos include a cover portrait under the title “Label” and a full-length image of the star wearing a T-shirt asking “Can You Afford Me?” to underscore the point. Scenes in Hilton’s closets reinforce commodification. Sara Pesce notes that the organization duplicates that of luxury stores, with “a front area displaying handbags and accessories.”89 Marc and Rebecca pass through glass shelves displaying designer sunglasses, lit, as in a boutique, by chandeliers. Rebecca recognizes a pair by Alexander McQueen and plucks them from the shelf to try on, as a shopper would. Grabbing a handbag to employ as a shopping bag as she enters another closet, she pulls underwear from drawers indistinguishable from the display wardrobes at Victoria’s Secret. During a subsequent break-in with others, the group confronts racks of designer dresses, breathlessly reaching for creations by Balmain and Hervé Léger, and run their hands over shelves of color-coordinated stilettos. Sales titled her article, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” name-checking, as the thieves did, a footwear brand identified by its solid red soles, as instantly recognizable as Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo stilettos. The shoes in Hilton’s closet, however, also come from her own line, which targeted not luxury consumers but the aspirational middle-class—like the teenagers who stole them. No wonder, then, that Nikki says, “Let’s go shopping” as a shorthand for breaking in to celebrity homes. A celebrity existence is as accessible to them as Hilton’s home and the goods in it. The film authentically represents the constructed and contrived nature of Hilton’s commodified existence. By contrast, the teenagers’ existence in the Southern California suburbs is rendered with meticulous fidelity to its mundanity. The girls’ bedrooms are as crammed with feminine detritus as those in The Virgin Suicides, down to the snapshots and magazine clippings gracing their walls. In the bland, sunlit spaces of their Calabasas McMansions, they wear sweat pants and cut-offs. On the high-school steps they are clad in standard teenage garb: jeans, cut-offs, T-shirts, sundresses. Costume designer Stacey Battat, guided by the conventional idea of costume design—to define and distinguish characters—crafted identifiable personalities through their

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Figure 2.10 The teenagers’ clothing reflects their personalities. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

wardrobes. Chloe channels grunge in flannel-checked shirts over T-shirts, in keeping with her defiant wildness and unfiltered language; Rebecca prefers sundresses, reflecting her feminine interest in fashion design (Figure 2.10). Their clothing subtly defines their personalities, rather than calling attention to itself as fashion, as the celebrities’ designer goods do. Chloe wears generic grunge, not Marc Jacobs. The soundtrack equally conveys the disjunction experienced by the teenagers between the mundane, suburban realities of school and home and the glamorous worlds represented on reality television. Non-diegetic music provides the soundtracks to their fantasies, as in the techno track “FML” by deadmau5 overlaid over slow-motion scenes of cocaine- and alcohol-fueled dancing at nightclubs. The music, rather than originating from the club’s speakers and timed with their dancing, emanates from the soundtrack, as though, like Marc’s voice-over, representing their subjective state. The club scenes follow successful raids on celebrity homes, and thus convey the teenagers’ sense of triumph in attaining the glamorous nights of partying enjoyed by celebrities. (Paris Hilton appears in one scene, and the group targets her home based on news that she is out of town hosting parties in Las Vegas and Miami.) “Sunshine” by Rye Rye plays on the soundtrack during Rebecca and Marc’s joyride in a stolen Porsche

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down palm-tree-lined streets, an image ubiquitous in registering Hollywood glamour on screen. Marc photographs Rebecca, imbuing her “with a cinematic aura,” according to Delphine Letort, who argues that the shot is reminiscent of the opening sequence of Sunrise Boulevard (1950).90 By contrast, diegetic music signals the group’s failed aspirations. We recognize the party is over for the Bling Ring as the techno song accompanying their dancing shifts from non-diegetic to diegetic while the police scroll through images on Facebook. Cuts to increasing close-ups of Rebecca with Lindsay Lohan’s yellow Chanel bag, like the shift in music, show that the authorities are closing in. Driving is not a glamorous activity but an essential chore in Southern California, particularly for teenagers commuting from the San Fernando Valley to central Los Angeles. Scenes shot in enclosed car interiors show the characters singing along to rap songs emanating from the car speakers. Two feature Chloe at the wheel, as they sing and mug for each other to rap songs. On the way to the beach they listen to Rick Ross’s “9 Piece” and, after celebrating using cash stolen from Paris Hilton’s mansion, M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls.” The popular songs represent the contemporary era’s musical fashions, but introduce additional layers of significance in the context of the film’s interrogation of identity, fashion, and celebrity. A blonde girl driving a Lexus singing along to “the most thug song” possible—this would be “the most poseur-ish” choice, Coppola thought.91 It is not only “poseur-ish,” yet another instance of Chloe pretending to be someone else by posing as a gangster, but it gains added resonance in relation to the film’s thematics of theft. She appropriates musical and gestural stylings derived from Black culture, created sometimes by artists with real criminal pasts, but more often by those posing as gangsters. While Miami rapper Rick Ross sings about drug deals in “9 Piece,” he is playing a role. He took his stage name from the drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross. In real life William Leonard Roberts II served as a corrections officer. Ironically, when Chloe sings along to “Bad Girls,” she is one, having stolen cash, goods, and a weapon from Paris Hilton’s home. The lyrics “Live fast die young / Bad girls do it well” are punctuated suddenly, as her vehicle is struck by another. A silent sequence of mug shots—the antithesis of glamour shots—undercuts her carefree “bad girl” fantasy. The film’s rap selections introduce further layers owing to hip-hop culture’s association with “bling.” The term itself derives from rap, initially used in Dana

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Dane’s “Nightmares” in 1987 to refer to the sound effect used in cartoons to punctuate images of money, jewelry, and gems. As a stand-alone term, it appeared in lyrics by others in the 1990s: background singers sing “Bling! Bling! Bling! Bling!” in Diggable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” (1993); rapper 3rd Eye (Jesse West) uses “bling bling” on Super Cat’s “Dolly My Baby (Remix)” (1993); Tupac boasts of his diamonds in a 1996 song, “everyone gonna blink (bling bling bling).” By 1999 the term was mainstream, featured in the title of B.G.’s song “Bling Bling” and referring not only to jewelry but branded goods: Everytime I come around your city bling bling; Pinky ring worth about 50 bling bling; Everytime I buy a new ride bling bling; Lorenzos on Yokahama tires bling bling. The equation of bling with luxury brands in hip-hop culture also derives from Dapper Dan’s designs in the 1980s. Dubbed the “original auteur of gangster chic,”92 he transformed the logos stamped by Gucci and Louis Vuitton on handbags into printed fabrics for handmade suits, dresses, and even custom car upholstery. By enlarging the logos, he turned his clients into branded merchandise: he said to himself, “Just imagine—if I can have them walking around looking like that bag, I could change the whole game.”93 His outsized logo designs initially appealed to street hustlers, denied access to couture designs despite their means, and then the hip-hop musicians who sought to emulate gangster style. Rather than merely carrying branded accessories as tokens of wealth, hip-hop consumers branded themselves. In the process, “Dapper Dan made luxury even more luxurious, producing custom looks in fur and designer leather, scarcely affordable for anyone outside the elite circles of sports stars and drug kingpins.” His were not knock-offs but “knock ups.”94 (It should come as no surprise, then, that the designer who bootlegged luxurybrand logos now has his own line for Gucci.) Fittingly, as Nicki and Chloe model their clothing for Marc’s approbation, Reema Major’s “Gucci Bags” plays in the background, its lyrics, “Yes I’m a shopaholic, I’m a Gucci addict,” detectable beneath the group’s conversation. The song name-drops multiple brands besides Gucci—Fendi, Prada, Valentino,

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Versace, Juicy Couture—as its protagonist boasts, “I’m all about the dough … Everybody stop and stare like I’m the fashion show.” Frustrated with the items in her own closet, Nicki announces, “I want to rob.” The confluence of clothing, music, and action is not incidental: the diegetic soundtrack to the Bling Ring’s lives does not simply capture contemporary musical fashion—the dominance of rap—but alludes more complexly to the dynamics of identity, celebrity, and consumerism. Like the film’s characters, rap stars perform roles, employing branded goods as part of their costuming, just as the group’s celebrity victims do. The Bling Ring is engaged in rip-offs on multiple layers, appropriating gangster and celebrity style simultaneously to fashion themselves as “bad girls.” (No wonder that they idolize Lindsay Lohan, arrested multiple times for shoplifting and DUI.) Rap music’s historical transition from its counter-cultural origins to contemporary mainstream success mirrors the recurring pattern of popular fashion: streetwear associated with resistance and rebellion is appropriated by couturiers and mass-market manufacturers. Hippie chic, punk, grunge, hiphop—oppositional style (“anti-fashion”), coopted and commodified, becomes fashion.95 The Bling Ring embodies this paradoxical cycle: its confluence of musical and sartorial fashions demonstrating the persistence of luxury branding from its ironic embrace by hip-hop culture in the 1980s to its contemporary democratization through rap video and reality television. The film’s intertwining of theft and fashion encapsulates an essential truth about capitalism: “each new idea becomes grist to the mill of profit.”96 Though set deliberately and identifiably in the contemporary moment of celebrity and branding, The Bling Ring offers a timeless insight into the cyclical nature of fashion understood in its broadest sense as a “culture industry”97 that spans clothing, design, music, and visual media. Lost in Translation equally balances the recreation of a distinct place and time, while conveying dislocation from both space and time. Coppola’s team employed guerilla filmmaking techniques—handheld cameras and natural lighting—to shoot in Tokyo and Kyoto. Working without permits, the director and cinematographer Lance Acord filmed scenes, often at night, in city streets, on subway platforms, at a local hospital, an arcade, a karaoke bar, and other actual locales to capture contemporary realities of the urban landscape. Geoff King notes that their “flexible, mobile style” was not only a practical choice for

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a low-budget film but contributed meaningfully to “the fleeting impression created of the texture of the city.”98 Reflected images of lighted street signs against moving car windows or the surfaces of skyscrapers convey the hectic pace and commercial vibrancy of urban life in Japan, yet equally the characters’ dislocation by suggesting that it appears to them, seen at one remove, as a chaotic blur. As in all of Coppola’s films, the actual location serves thematic interests. It also anchors the film in the reigning fashions of its contemporary moment. As Bob Harris surveys the neon signs and billboards crowding the commercial cityscape of the Shinjuku area along Yasukuni Don (Yasukuni Avenue), the camera focuses on a black-and-white ad with Harris (Bill Murray) pictured in profile holding a glass of whiskey (Figure 2.11). The shot introduces the character’s purpose for his visit—to film a commercial for the manufacturer Suntory—but also conveys the vogue for Japanese whiskey. The sole elements of color in the ad are the amber of the whiskey in the glass and in the bottle that appears in the lower right. Simultaneously, the ad alludes to the late-1990s’ practice of using American stars as celebrity endorsers. While the inspiration for Bob Harris’s commercial in the film may well have been an ad for Suntory featuring Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa (see Chapter 4), it also reflects thencontemporary Japanese practice. While 20 percent of US television advertising

Figure 2.11 A Suntory whiskey ad with Bob Harris (Bill Murray). Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

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at the time featured celebrity endorsers, in Japan the figure neared 50 percent.99 Other instances of verité-style shooting highlight other contemporary trends associated with 1990s’ “Japanese cool” or “J-cool,” including video-game arcades and karaoke bars.100 As a result, the film has, as one critic put it, “a good feel for the pop commercial currents of modern Tokyo.”101 In pointed contrast to the exterior Japanese locations are the generic spaces of the Park Hyatt Tokyo. Production designers used the existing public spaces (lobby, hallways, elevators, bar, pool), but Anne Ross designed the hotel rooms occupied by the characters. The public spaces stress the generic sameness of branded American hotel interiors, conveying Bob and Charlotte’s ambiguous position as Americans cossetted in recognizable US commercial spaces apart from Japanese culture. They are filmed from locked-down camera positions or more stable dollies to contrast with the moving, handheld sequences of Tokyo and Kyoto exteriors to map the thematic divide. What Geoff King terms the “lifeless and imprisoning nature of the hotel” represents the characters’ subjective sense of entrapment in unhappy marriages as well as the stagnant state of their careers, while the hectic motion of the Japanese streetscape and its denizens extends the alternative of freedom and escape.102 Ross’s self-referential allusions to interior design introduce additional layers of complexity. In his room, Bob receives messages from his State-side wife via the telephone, fax machine, and FedEx packages. She hectors him remotely to choose the shelves and carpet colors for his office, relegating their interchanges to unromantic task talk. She repeatedly expresses her resentment that she is occupied by construction while he is having “fun,” despite his protestations that he is, in fact, working. In Bob’s case, décor acts as the contested ground in his marriage: distant domestic choices intrude on the neutral space of his generic suite. By contrast, Charlotte domesticates her room, cluttering it with her belongings—books, magazines, clothing. She seeks to recreate a private space out of a public one, to fashion a temporary home to root her preoccupied husband and leave signs of her presence. The decorative pink paper cherry blossoms she hangs from the ceiling and on table lamps are signs of her openness to Japanese culture, reinforced in the film by her attempt at flower arranging and trips to Kyoto temples (Figure 2.12).103 Sound and music design equally serve the film’s thematic focus on disconnection and dislocation. Sound designer Richard Beggs recorded

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Figure 2.12  Charlotte decorates her hotel room with pink paper cherry blossoms. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

elevator and hallway sounds to ground visual representations of the hotel’s public spaces, as well as the chaotic mix of video-game effects and street sounds to capture the vibrancy of life beyond the hotel’s doors. Music director Brian Reitzell, who played drums with Air, recruited Kevin Shields to create instrumental accompaniments that would evoke “a sense of disassociation, of being in an unfamiliar, alienating world.”104 By contrast to the specific sounds of the interior and exterior spaces, the electronic music contributed by Shields, as well as Reitzell working with Roger J. Manning, Jr., is not identifiably Eastern or Western.105 It is detached from specific cultures, creating an ambient mood reflecting the characters’ unmoored psychological state. A few identifiable popular songs appear diegetically, performed by characters in the film.106 Markedly different from the ambient score, these performances call attention not only to lyrics directly relevant to the narrative but to its thematic concern with the performative nature of identity. In keeping with other divisions established visually and aurally in the film, the musical performances can be separated into two groups: those occurring in the hotel lounge, and those taking place in the karaoke bar. In the lounge, a redhaired female singer (the hotel’s resident performer Catherine Lambert) sings “Midnight at the Oasis” and “Scarborough Fair,” easy-listening American hits from the 1960 and 1970s that provide innocuous background noise to soothe

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jet-lagged travelers and drunken businessmen. Rather than performing for a disinterested audience, Bob and Charlotte sing their karaoke songs directly to each other, the lyrics articulating unspoken thoughts. As noted in Chapter 1, Charlotte chooses The Pretenders’ “I’m Special,” while Bob selects Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” Together, the songs reinforce their connection: Charlotte seeks affirmation that she is “special,” singing, “I gotta have some of your attention, give it to me.” He assures her that “there’s nothing more than this,” nothing more than their closeness in the present moment. Despite the overt theatrics of their karaoke performances, they are earnest. This point is reinforced by the obvious theatricality of the actress Kelly (Anna Faris), who drunkenly sings “Nobody Does It Better” to a disengaged audience of male businessmen in the hotel lounge. The nearest, passed out on the bar, visually punctuates the absurdity of her off-key rendition. The hollow theatricality of musical performance is underscored by costume. The lounge singer dresses in eye-popping red that matches her hair. Kelly also wears red during her improvised song and at the press conference featured earlier in the film.107 Bright colors and lighting signal artificiality in these scenes and others in the video arcade and on the set of the talk show, whose manic host, sporting dyed blonde hair and a garishly striped suit, tries to convince a befuddled Bob to dance (Figure 2.13). Shot from an oblique angle that shows the wings as well as the cameras filming the show, the scene emphasizes the manufactured nature of their encounter. The host’s costume, echoed by the busily striped set dominated by bright yellows and pinks, brings Bob’s dark suit and white shirt into stark relief. The neon-pink wig Charlotte wears during her karaoke performance stands out for inverse reasons as an obvious marker of masquerade against the sincerity of the lyrics she sings.108 Recall that she turns Bob’s orange camo shirt inside out, muting its brightness, which she takes as a sign of his mid-life crisis, his desperation to appear to younger than he is. Theatrical dress is synonymous with celebrity, music, and fashion itself in the film. As we have seen, Charlotte’s husband has come to Tokyo to photograph a band, and while he speaks dismissively at one point of the stylist’s intent to make them appear “more rock’n’roll,” more Keith Richards-like than the skinny nerds they are, his color-blocked shirts and sunglasses ally him with the celebrities and the Japanese “fashion guys” who form his social circle. Charlie,

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Figure 2.13  The Japanese talk-show host’s clothes match his colorful set. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

the Hawaiian-shirted local who escorts Charlotte and Bob to the karaoke bar, is one of them—and is played by Fumihiro “Charlie Brown” Hayashi, the publisher of Dune, the influential magazine documenting youth culture in the 1990s. Others featured in the film include the senior creative director Mago (Kazuyoshi Minamimagoe) of BEAMS, an American lifestyle shop that carried Coppola’s MilkFed line, and Nobu Kitamura of Hysteric Glamour, a popular line of streetwear.109 With their casting the film establishes its Japanese fashion bona fides, while ironically highlighting the in-group’s investment in ephemeral trends and theatricality. Charlotte’s and Bob’s costumes reject color in favor of shades of black and white, including the hotel robes and pajamas that symbolize their connection. Rather than standing out, their muted clothing relegates them to the margins or background, symbolic of their positioning in Japanese culture. However, their choices are not resistant to fashion. Bob wears suits designed by Helmut Lang; Charlotte’s clothing comes from well-known labels, including A.P.C., Agnés B., and MilkFed.110 Rather than trendy, however, their clothing is timeless, composed of enduring staples in menswear (suits, tuxedos, tailored shirts) and womenswear (knee-length skirts, collared shirts, sweater vests, pea coats). Costume designer Nancy Steiner described Charlotte’s look as “classic, not showy.” It was meant to appear “effortless,” in other words, natural

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and uncalculated, the inverse of a costume.111 The pieces that bind Bob and Charlotte—their robes, pajamas, and his suit jacket—convey the authenticity of the connection they forge. The film thus alludes to enduring paradoxes of fashion: fashions change and, as a result, popular trends in clothing, music, and design are timebound, marking identifiable eras, but trends recur and some visual and musical forms attain the timeless appeal that elevates them to the status of “classics.” Somewhere explores the same dynamics, again in a narrative about celebrity set in a hotel. In this instance, however, the hotel is not generic but a character in its own right, replete with pre-existing narratives about the storied celebrities who have stayed there. Coppola’s chosen location, the Chateau Marmont, like Versailles represents fashionable life. Described as an “ode” to the hotel,112 the film evokes its history as the anchor of Sunset Boulevard and the embodiment of Hollywood glamour. Designed to resemble a Loire castle and christened with a name that sounded French, the hotel announced its stylish pretensions. From its opening in 1929, the site has hosted luminaries spanning decades of popular culture in fashion, music, and cinema. In The Castle on Sunset, author Shawn Levy claims the story of the Chateau Marmont “parallels the story of Hollywood so thoroughly as to be inseparable from it.”113 The long list of notable actors who have stayed in its sixty-three rooms includes Greta Garbo, Errol Flynn, Myrna Loy, Montgomery Clift, Jean Harlow, Glenn Ford, William Holden, Paul Newman, Bette Davis, Robert DeNiro, Warren Beatty, and Lindsay Lohan. Comedian John Belushi overdosed in Bungalow 3 and Jim Morrison injured himself in a fall from the roof. Other iconic musicians made it home in the 1960s and 1970s: Gram Parsons, David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Robert Plant. Following its restoration in the 1980s, it became essentially a “private club for celebrities,” who stayed there, took meetings poolside, or hosted parties. Actors like George Clooney and Julia Roberts mixed with musicians like Bono, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé, as well as reality-TV stars like Paris Hilton. The fashion industry’s history at the hotel runs deep: photographer Helmut Newton lived and died there, and countless magazine shoots have used its spaces as a backdrop (associations that are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3). It is simultaneously as wedded to individual moments of cultural fashions and as “transhistorical” as the locations of Coppola’s more identifiable costume dramas.

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However, in keeping with the film’s narrative focus, its references are oblique rather than grounded, reflecting Johnny Marco’s rootlessness. Set deliberately “somewhere”—in a recognizable LA landmark—it nonetheless appears to be “nowhere” specific. His is an actual room: Room 59. But, as Backman Rogers notes, the hotel is a liminal space, “designed for the sole function of transition,” and many scenes occur in the liminal spaces within it, in hallways, elevators, doorways, and the communal lounge.114 Both the place and its temporary denizen appear unmoored from fixed time. As in Lost in Translation, sound and music design heighten the effect. In fact, we experience the same contrast between a spare score that “creates a moody, subtle backdrop,” and source music originating in character performances.115 Vincent LoBrutto and Harriet Morrison note that sound design merges with location: “Richard Beggs creates a sound mix that makes Los Angeles recognizable. The musical score created by Thomas Mars and Phoenix subtly supports the story and combines with the other aural elements.”116 Prime among these is the noise of the Ferrari’s engine during Johnny’s repetitive circuits in the desert and his seemingly aimless drives through LA. In its scarce appearances, popular music is diegetic, emerging from the twin pole dancers’ portable boombox or the speakers at the ice rink as Cleo practices. The two pole dances Johnny watches in his hotel room parody performance and, in keeping with the rest of the film, undercut the glamour of celebrity aurally and visually. In the first performance the twins dance, in the hypersexualized exaggerated costume of candy stripers in red stilettos, to “My Hero” (2010) by Foo Fighters. As noted in Chapter 1, the scene emphasizes the paradox of the film star watching an amateur performance, with reaction shots stressing his dwindling interest. He falls asleep at the climax of the dance, as they descend the poles slowly headfirst, exposing their lace panties, with their stilettos disappearing from view behind the footboard of his bed (Figure 2.14). This visual image of deflation matches the song’s lyrics: “There goes my hero / Watch him as he goes / There goes my hero / He’s ordinary.” The star is, in other words, as ordinary as the dancers, a point emphasized by showing the women disassembling their poles and packing up their props. He is more appreciative of and attentive to their second dance, to Amerie’s “1 Thing” (2009), where the twins are dressed as sexy tennis players in laced-up high heels. Their

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Figure 2.14  The twin pole dancers perform to “My Hero” in underwear and stilettos. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

performance arouses rather than deflates him, and ends in sex with one twin. In this instance, the dance highlights Johnny’s relationships. The childish playfulness of the dancer, who blows a bubble-gum bubble as a prelude to sex, transitions jarringly and awkwardly in a cut to the following morning: a female hand draws a heart on the cast on Johnny’s wrist. As she writes “Cleo,” we realize the hand belongs to his daughter. Like the dancer, she has blonde hair, which heightens the parallel, as does the ice-skating performance that follows. Like the pole dancers, Cloe performs for an audience of one, to another tune by a female singer, Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” (2005). She, too, wears a costume, which, though feminine, is not sexualized (Figure 2.15). Her hair pulled back into a tight chignon, she skates skillfully and gracefully. The camera shoots her from a respectful distance and a position not clearly aligned with Johnny’s point of view, as in the scenes with the pole dancers, allowing space for viewers to look along with him. Reaction shots of Johnny initially show him distracted by his phone but gradually drawn in, with evident awe at her ability. His comment that her performance was “really good” is sincere, by contrast to the canned “amazing” he offers the dancers. That he does not realize Cloe’s performance was two years in the making reveals his inattentiveness as a father and, by juxtaposition to the twinned dance scenes, how his narcissism has prevented him from establishing meaningful connections. The twin dancers

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Figure 2.15 Cleo skating to “Cool.” Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

are so interchangeable to him that he can’t remember the name of the one he’s sleeping with. When he reaches for one, she dismisses him: “I’m Cindy, you moron.” “I’m the other one,” her twin says. The physical resemblance of both to his daughter further implies that he desperately clings to his youth, rather than choosing to “grow up and be a person,” in the words of his co-star. Twinned scenes with guitars reinforce a similar point. Johnny plays a fake guitar, barely besting his daughter in the video game Guitar Hero. (That they are playing to “So Lonely” by The Police adds an additional layer of despair.) “Stick to movies,” his friend heckles from the couch. Johnny’s performance is both amateur and artificial. In the hotel lounge, waiter Romulo Laki serenades Johnny and Cleo with “Teddy Bear.” His performance is the antithesis of Johnny’s: sincere and authentic. Romulo is not playing a role, but himself.117 Leaning her head against Johnny’s shoulder, Cleo replicates Charlotte’s position next to Bob after karaoke. The films make the same point about meaningful human connection through genuine, rather than staged, musical performance. Like Lost in Translation, Somewhere also associates costume with artifice and overtly fashionable clothing with an inauthentic celebrity existence. Designer Stacey Battat stresses realism in her choices for Cloe and Johnny. She wears typical teenage garb—T-shirts, jeans, high tops, cotton sundresses—while he tends toward deliberate anti-fashion: nondescript T-shirts and jeans, topped by

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cotton or flannel checked shirts. The material of his garments, as discussed in Chapter 1, owing to their stark simplicity and allusions to Gandhi’s revolution, grants them associations with self-reliance, marking Johnny’s transition toward a more purposeful existence by the film’s end. However, in concert with the film’s location, his T-shirt, jeans, and boots acquire additional associations with fashion and celebrity. The look was popularized in the 1950s by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), indelibly associating it with rebellious masculinity. (Nicolas Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause, rehearsed scenes in Bungalow 2.) Thus Johnny borrows a classic look created by Hollywood: while the character may be indifferent to both celebrity and style, the film’s costume designer associates him with an enduring popular fashion, visually linking him to a timeless cinematic style. But that style equally symbolizes his unmoored existence. He wears high work boots, vintage Red Wing boots from the 1940s, one casually untied with his pant leg tucked in (Figure 2.16). Superficially they appear, like his T-shirt and old Levi’s, to be part of his resistance to Hollywood glamour, allying him with working men rather than celebrities. But such boots have a long history linking them, like jeans, with itinerant labor;118 thus they reinforce Johnny’s rootless state. Todd Kennedy has positioned Coppola’s film in the tradition of the hobo hero, arguing that it raises “one of the central questions of modernity

Figure 2.16  Johnny’s boots, like his car, symbolize his itinerant existence. Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

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… the ability (or inability) of individuals to ‘make a place for themselves in the modern world, a place where they can feel at home.’”119 Johnny’s boots link him visually to the narrative tradition Kennedy notes, and enmesh him in its paradoxes of stasis and movement: the hobo is free to move, unlike individuals tied to place by work, family, and community, but at the expense of belonging and purpose. The film, Kennedy argues, makes “visible the temptation of surfaces and speed and demonstrate[s] how it destroys the individual as her protagonist speeds by every opportunity to know himself or make meaningful connections with those around him—even his own daughter.”120 Johnny Marco’s commitment to vehicular speed allies him with Johnny Strabler, the motorcyclist played by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, who famously explains, “you don’t go any one special place. That’s cornball style. You just go.” Sporting the same name and the same rebel style—jeans and boots—the characters equate resistance with unstructured mobility. In both films, females represent stasis and connection. Johnny Strabler’s love interest, Kathie, works at her family’s café; Cleo anchors Johnny Marco’s temporary home, preparing meals in its small kitchen. Her influence appears in another scene at the pool. Earlier in the film, without her stabilizing presence, Johnny drifted on the mobile pool surface by himself. With Cleo (and wearing matching sunglasses), the two sun themselves together on the fixed surfaces of lounge chairs on the stable pool deck. The endings of both films show the male characters drawn to but still resisting stability and stasis. Johnny Strabler returns to the café to leave his motorcycle trophy, a piece of himself, on the counter before riding off. He ultimately denies Kathie’s desire: “I wish I was going someplace. I wish you were going someplace. We could go together.” In Coppola’s film, it is Cleo who leaves, riding off in a taxi, though with the promise of returning in two weeks from camp. Before leaving, she tearfully tells Johnny Marco, “you’re always gone.” Unlike Strabler, at the end Coppola’s Johnny apologizes for not being “around.” In the final scene he abandons his vehicle, walking, still dressed as a rebel but seemingly with purpose, somewhere (see Figure 1.10). Though still alone, he faces the camera, connecting with the viewer, with someone. Multilayered production, costume, and sound design converge to reinforce the conflict in Somewhere between mobility and stasis, between malleable and fixed identities, between transitory and lasting connections. The film’s location

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and costumes are historically grounded yet timeless, fixed but transportable from one era to another, “somewhere” but “nowhere.”

Fabrications “To be sensuous, i.e., to be real, is to be an object of sense, a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sense perceptions.” Karl Marx, Early Writings121 As this chapter demonstrates, Coppola’s films embody her capacious knowledge of fashion understood in an expanded sense to refer to currents in design in all its material forms, from architecture and interior decoration to clothing and popular music. These visual and aural dimensions fuse in the creation of filmed worlds that are authentic to the fashions of their era while also situating themselves “transhistorically,” connecting contemporary viewers to the distant past or exposing resonances of past fashions in the present. Though aesthetically stunning and richly textured, the films are not superficial experiments—merely surface. Instead, their considered attention to the materials of culture is itself meaningful. Vivian Sobchack would argue that, though fictional representations, the films foster “interobjectivity,” a “deep and passionate recognition of ourselves and the objective world filled with ‘things’ and ‘others’ as immanently together in the flesh—that is, as both materially and transcendently real and mattering.”122 The depths of Coppola’s films do not lie beneath the surface but in the surface itself: they demonstrate a thoroughgoing investment in and understanding of human interaction with the spaces we inhabit, the goods we consume, the clothing we wear, the music we listen to and perform. The next chapter considers cinematic fabrication, the visual art of representing the material world. Coppola has fashioned not only film worlds but a distinctive film style. As we will see, a “classic” Sofia Coppola work is grounded in a deep knowledge and understanding of visual representations of fashion.

3 Film Style

“I guess every girl goes through a photography phase.” LOST IN TRANSLATION Coppola’s films share a distinctive cinematic aesthetic, with heightened attention to the complex perspective of the observer. If she does think “in terms of images,” as her sound designer Richard Beggs has said, they derive from an identifiable fine-arts tradition.1 This chapter demonstrates that Coppola’s film style, with its languid pacing and extensive use of static shots, draws on the rich history of fashion representation in visual media (painting as well as photography). Her films engage directly with specific artworks and artists, and borrow more broadly from the aesthetic conventions typical in capturing fashionable clothing and stylish lives. Operating at the intersection of spatial- and time-based arts, still and moving images, art and commerce, her films simultaneously reproduce and critique the imagery and industry of fashion. Viewers occupy the place of the magazine reader or fashion-show audience, scrutinizing and judging the characters on screen, reinforcing the films’ thematic interests, which center on surveillance, gossip, celebrity, and the tensions between interior and exterior subjective states, as described in Chapter 1. The parallels between Coppola’s cinematic style and fashion representation are unsurprising given her well-documented training in the fine arts. She initially studied painting in 1991 at the California Institute of the Arts. “I wanted to be a painter,” she has said. “They told me I wasn’t.” So she switched to photography, studying at the Art Center College of Design with Professor Paul (Jazz) Jasmin, who praised her for her distinctive point of view.2 While

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there, she was given a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides, which intrigued her by its striking cover image of blonde hair.3 Her directorial process has retained vestiges of her photographic training, for she employs still images to design the shots for her films. Each film begins with a collection of images in a book, like the “look book” employed by fashion designers, or on a mood board.4 Her own snapshots of Tokyo formed the basis of the film images in Lost in Translation, a practice she initiated while “doing little fashion jobs” there for a friend’s magazine, Dune, and for Light, the magazine founded by BEAMS, the American lifestyle shop based in Tokyo.5 (And she met the film’s cinematographer, Lance Acord, on a shoot with fashion photographer Bruce Weber.6) Her engagement with the fine arts, particularly photography, is ongoing: she published her own photos in Vogue and Allure in 2005, and curated an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images in 2011.7 An avid collector, she owns works by William Eggleston, Tina Barney, Lee Friedlander, Larry Sulton, Richard Prince, and Helmut Newton, among others, as well as a polaroid taken by Andy Warhol.8 She has also contributed to books about the artist Rachel Feinstein, photographers Paul Jasmin and Bill Owens, and the fashion brands Fiorucci, BEAMS, and Marc Jacobs.9 Coppola’s relationship with photography is grounded in fashion. It originated in the 1980s, with her looking at fashion magazines, and she has said repeatedly that she wanted to be a fashion editor like Diana Vreeland (instead, she has settled for serving as guest editor for French Vogue in 2004 and 2014 and W in 2014).10 Her early attraction to fashion photography coincided with the growing pre-eminence of the field and its practitioners. Long considered an inferior artistic practice because of its commercial affiliations, fashion photography achieved cultural prominence in the late twentieth century due to a confluence of international events in art, film, and photography.11 Films glamorized the fashion photographer’s role: in Funny Face (1957) Fred Astaire played a fictionalized version of Richard Avedon; Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) was based loosely on British photographer David Bailey; and in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) the photographer protagonist adopts a style modeled on Helmut Newton’s. By the 1970s practitioners such as Francesco Scavullo attained the status of celebrities. Many photographers Coppola either encountered in life or referenced in her work—Warhol, Mapplethorpe,

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Newton, Weber, Steven Meisel, and Guy Bourdin—benefitted from the increasing globalization of media outlets in the 1980s. Simultaneously, museums mounted the first exhibitions devoted to the history of fashion photography: Fashion Photography: Six Decades (1975) at the Emily Lowe Gallery at Hofstra University and The History of Fashion Photography, a traveling exhibition organized in 1977 for the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which eventually resulted in a book published in 1979. By the 1980s the StaleyWise Gallery in New York had begun to specialize in fashion photography, mounting exhibitions of works by Horst P. Horst, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Herb Ritts.12 Coppola began her cinematic work during the era that “filmic techniques were incorporated into fashion photography” and clothes became incidental, rather than central, props in visual narratives about fashionable lives.13 What wonder, then, that Coppola’s films adopt the visual language of fashion photography? But the correspondences are thorough and studied, not unintended, as this chapter demonstrates.

Coppola’s Signature Style “Instead of unfolding in precise pleats, her movies unfurl like bolts of silk.” Stephanie Zacharek14 Coppola’s signature cinematic style bears the imprint of her artistic allegiances. Her aesthetic is universally recognized as distinctive: “Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker with an eye all her own,” as critic David Ansen put it.15 Scholars, journalists, and the amateur authors of YouTube videos agree that her visual style consists of four identifiable elements. ●●

Lighting. Coppola prefers shooting with natural, available light whenever possible—a choice “shaped by her training at Art Center.”16 But this effect is heightened by her preferred medium—film, rather than digital— and cinematographic choices. In Lost in Translation, for instance, cinematographer Lance Acord used 35 mm film stock of higher-than-usual speed to achieve “the soft and slightly desaturated look of the images.”17

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Color. Acord’s choice in Lost in Translation also enhanced the pastel tones so characteristic of Coppola’s films. The words “muted,” “neutral,” and “subdued” crop up over and over again in descriptions of her films. Her admirers are adamant that her colors are not brilliant or glossy, even in Marie Antoinette, with its palette based on the pastels of Ladurée macarons, so much so that Fandor produced a video titled “Color by the Numbers: The Films of Sofia Coppola,” complete with labeled color swatches as confirmation.18

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Pacing. “Slow,” “languid,” “gliding,” “unhurried,” “impressively hypnotizing”—these are some of the descriptors applied to the deliberate pacing of Coppola’s films.19 When the average shot length of a film in English is under 5.0 seconds, Coppola’s clock in at 5.40 (Marie Antoinette), 6.35 (Lost in Translation), and 14.10 (Somewhere).20 Some individual shots are far longer, such as Marie Antoinette’s final scene on the balcony (15 seconds), Johnny under the make-up mold in Somewhere (92 seconds), or the exterior of Audrina Patridge’s house in The Bling Ring (105 seconds). Combined with locked-down camera positions and a paucity of camera movement (such as nearly imperceptible slow dollies in), at times the images appear virtually indistinguishable from still photos.21

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Mise-en-scène. Coppola is “unanimously acknowledged as a master of the mise-en-scène.”22 Working with her director of photography, she meticulously organizes elements in the visual frame, employing shallow planes of focus captured through long lenses. Specific compositional decisions mark each film. For instance, Edward Lachman shot The Virgin Suicides in full frame to look more like photos from a scrapbook.23 In The Beguiled she chose a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, as opposed to the conventional 1.85:1 or widescreen 2.35:1, to enhance the film’s claustrophobic feel. This meticulous attention to the frame and the composition of elements within it makes “her films appear designed as much as directed,”24 as we saw in Chapter 2.

These distinctive qualities derive from photographic practice—particularly Coppola’s fixed camera positions, near-static pacing, and careful composition. Naturally, all movies shot on film are composed of still images projected at

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twenty-four frames per second to give the illusion of motion. As Laura Mulvey argues, the moving image retains “a residual trace of stillness,”25 evident whenever applying the term “director of photography” to the cinematographer. But rather than obfuscate or suppress this photographic legacy, Coppola heightens it, employing three strategies. First, she stages filmed recreations of famous photographic works, often in her opening sequences. These overt homages place her film text in dialogue with photographic history, particularly the history of fashion photography. If the moving images of film are based in still photography, still photography has incorporated movement, capturing humans and objects in motion. This is especially true of fashion photography. Jean Morel’s shot of Lillian Farley “on the move and on the street” in 1932 is generally credited with introducing models and clothing in action, and in 1933 Martin Munkácsi began doing the same at Harper’s Bazaar, shooting outdoor action fashion spreads.26 Richard Avedon’s works have been described as introducing a “filmic approach.”27 He transformed statically posed models into actual beings engaged in dynamic activities of daily life—walking, smoking, dancing—in staged street scenes or against stark backdrops, often retaining the blur of their motion. This same tension between stillness and motion characterizes Coppola’s filmed recreations and showcases her use of point of view. Second, her influences derive primarily from the 1970s and later, when fashion photography began adopting a more “psychological approach,” constructing “narratives that explore subjects such as sexuality, voyeurism, and female power.”28 Coppola’s visual storytelling demonstrates parallels with the fashion stories unfurled in the pages of magazines, and increasingly in short commercial films for fashion houses and brands. Third, Coppola’s directorial style exhibits more general correspondences with photographic conventions, particularly those associated with fashion photography—from her preference for arranging characters in carefully composed tableaux to replicating the classic strides of the catwalk. Montages of fashionable clothing and objects foster the illusion of skimming through print magazines or scrolling through images online or on portable devices. Allusions to the characteristic aesthetics of individual eras—from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first—call attention to fashions in the representation of fashion, including in advertising.

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Such deliberate foregrounding of representation creates a heightened viewing experience for audiences, often demanding their careful attention. As I argued in Chapter 1, Coppola’s characters are either observing, observed, or both simultaneously. This persistent focus on looking transcends the filmed world and implicates viewers. What Sharon Lin Tay describes as “an aesthetic of objective scrutiny”29 refers not only to the films but to the experience of watching them. The reflective process initiated by Coppola’s narratives continues in augmented form through the films’ complex cinematographic engagement with its photographic heritage, often inviting critique of the forms and the fashion industry they support.

Stillness and Motion “My filmmaking begins with images from photography.” Sofia Coppola30 In Coppola’s first full-length film, The Virgin Suicides, still photographs ground the boys’ narrative of the Lisbon sisters, which they conjure out of the snapshots and other relics retrieved from the girls’ family home. In addition to this narrative motivation, supplied by Eugenides’s novel, Anna Backman Rogers points to others inherent in the medium itself. She cites Susan Sontag’s claim that photography “turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”31 By retaining the photos, the boys hold fast to the girls, plucked out of time and motion, their lives arrested before their suicides. But Sontag further claimed that “photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” As Backman Rogers explains, By capturing a moment that is already gone even at the moment of its registration, the photograph is also able to conjure up a palpable sense of an inaccessible past, of everything that is displaced and lost to what Sontag calls “time’s relentless melt” (1979: 15). So while photographs “actively promote nostalgia” (Sontag 1979: 15), they are also “incitements to reverie” (Sontag 1979: 16).32

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Photographs, then, are material manifestations of the boys’ retrospective efforts to reanimate the girls and the past, and also inspire their fantasies about the girls’ thoughts and lives. Coppola creates equivalents of the boys’ treasured still images at individual moments within the film, but, throughout, Lachman’s cinematography presents the memories and fantasies that shape the narrative as filtered through 1970s’ photography. Partly, Coppola and Lachman achieve this by invoking the soft lighting and muted color palette common to the era, as though filming through vintage apparatuses and lenses as well as the hazy filter of remembrance and longing. But the film alludes frequently to specific still photographs to recreate the visual aesthetics of its 1970s’ setting. The first artwork Coppola purchased at an art fair—Bill Owens’s picture of an eighth-grade graduation dance33— inspired the scene at the homecoming dance (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Owens’s journalistic purpose—to record community events for the local newspaper— assists Coppola’s meticulous recreation of period details.34 In references to the image in interviews, Coppola isolates the “little tinfoil stars hanging over [the kids]” as a significant detail, one she retains in the filmed version.35 While in color and set in motion, the filmed sequence similarly depicts the central couple under the stars, isolated in the center of the frame and surrounded by others. Owens strived to capture “a soft, natural lighting effect,” as does Coppola. Significantly, while in Owens’s photo the central girl’s partner is obscured, in the filmed version Trip Fontaine eclipses Lux, owing in part to his physical height but primarily because his burgundy velvet suit sets him apart from the soft pastels of the surrounding girls’ dresses, particularly Lux’s. His dark hair, dark suit, and separateness prefigure his abandonment of Lux after sex on the football field. The scene on the field similarly recreates a 1970s’ photo: William Eggleston’s dye-transfer color image of Marcia Hare reclining on the grass after ingesting Quaaludes (Figure 3.3).36 Eggleston’s use of color may well have influenced Coppola’s palette, as some have suggested, and the image of Hare has a more direct correspondence to the filmmaker’s later commercial and film work (see below). Here, however, the connections between the two artists are more complex and meaningful. Hare’s floral print dress, with its small pink flowers against an off-white background, resembles the “identical sacks” worn by Lux and her sisters (see Figure 1.14). But, as in the case of Owens’s photo,

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Figure 3.1  Bill Owens’s picture of an eighth-grade graduation dance with tinfoil stars, 1973. BillOwens.com.

Figure 3.2  Coppola’s recreation in The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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Figure 3.3 William Eggleston’s photo of Marcia Hare, c. 1975 © Eggleston Art Foundation. Courtesy David Zwirner.

the film’s allusion to Eggleston’s image does more than lend authenticity to its recreation of the period—it augments the scene’s significance. Eggleston’s image captures its central female in bright sunlight, with her arms spread wide, her blonde head tilted to the left with her eyes closed. She is in a vulnerable position, but seemingly unaware of being exposed. By contrast, in Coppola’s film Lux reclines on the grass, not in bright sunlight but shot through a blue filter (Figure 3.4). A close-up shows her head and shoulders, eyes closed. She reclines on her left arm, awaking to discover herself alone. The film cuts to a long, wide shot of Lux, small and isolated in the bottom of the screen, before she awkwardly comes to her feet and walks toward the bottom of the screen and then entirely out of the frame. Like Eggleston’s figure, she is vulnerable and exposed, though not blissfully but knowingly aware. By contrast, the reproduction of Eggleston’s image in Marie Antoinette, though historically more distant in setting from the 1970s, augments its subject’s bliss (Figure 3.5). After finally consummating her marriage to Louis, Marie is captured in an aerial shot, falling back on the grass with arms extended.

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Figure 3.4  Lux on the football field. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

Figure 3.5  Marie Antoinette after consummating her marriage. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

While corseted and formal, her delicately flowered gown repeats the pattern of the dress in Eggleston’s image. But while Hare’s closed eyes are turned away from the camera, Marie smiles directly toward it, straightforwardly conveying a combination of relief, freedom from continued censure, and sexual release.

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Figure 3.6  Marie Antoinette with her daughter. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

A subsequent sequence with Dunst posed reclining on her side mirrors her position on the football field in The Virgin Suicides (Figure 3.6). The allusion underscores Marie’s maternal happiness: the scene is bathed in sunlight, rather than shot through a blue filter, and rather than being alone, she is accompanied by her daughter, who toddles past her. Another Eggleston print—of two girls talking intently and intimately on a couch—was on Coppola’s mood board for The Beguiled (Figure 3.7). She showed it to Philippe Le Sourd to design a shot, saying, “This is what I had in mind for that.”37 Certainly she did not mean the period details of the girls’ 1970s’ dresses, or their bright blues and reds. The faded brocade of the sofa might have influenced the dusty, worn fabrics of the furniture in the film’s plantation set (especially given that Eggleston shot his photo in Memphis, Tennessee). But the photo’s composition is most meaningfully referenced in the film. As she told W magazine, “I had it in mind when shooting some of the girls in the film together,” and, during an interview at Lincoln Center, pointed to a specific scene featuring Amy (Oona Laurence), Alicia (Elle Fanning), and Emily (Emma Howard).38 In Eggleston’s image, two girls appear in profile. One leans over the other, who is reclining with her gaze directed downward. Her friend appears to be intently, imploringly speaking to her, grasping the folds of

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Figure 3.7  William Eggleston’s print of two girls talking intently and intimately on a couch, 1973 © Eggleston Art Foundation. Courtesy David Zwirner.

her blue dress in one hand. The photo’s composition is echoed in The Beguiled: the dark-haired Amy reclines in the same attitude as Eggleston’s girl in blue, as Alicia, with her blonde tendrils, comforts her (Figure 3.8). In Coppola and Le Sourd’s recreation, another of the girls hovers at Alicia’s side—an addition that retains Eggleston’s framing but conveys the intimate group dynamics of the girls at the Farnsworth school, who live and work in close proximity. The influence of Eggleston’s photo recurs elsewhere with the reclining figure pictured as male: scenes of McBurney in the same attitude as Eggleston’s girl in blue can be found in the first section of the film, with Martha seated by him, holding not his clothing but his hand, particularly in the scene when she bathes the unconscious soldier (Figure 3.9).39 Nicole Kidman’s blonde tendrils echo the blonde curls of the girl offering comfort in Eggleston’s photo, and the parallels convey Martha’s desire for intimate connection. As with Eggleston’s colors, some photographic influences are more general. In addition to citing his graduation-dance photo, Coppola credited Owens’s photos from Suburbia (1973) in more broadly shaping her portrait of suburban living in

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Figure 3.8  Amy, Alicia, and Emily on a couch. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

Figure 3.9  Martha bathing an unconscious McBurney. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

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The Virgin Suicides.40 It is hard not to take a caption as relevant to her work, such as one included below an image of a couple against a painting of a cartoon male with cut-out clothing: “You assume the mask of suburbia for outward appearances and yet no one knows what you really do.”41 The interior shots of suburban homes in The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, set in Calabasas, California, allude to Tina Barney’s images in Theater of Manners and equally convey the deceptive sameness of family living, which veils the Lisbon sisters’ suicidal impulses as well as the teenaged burglars’ crimes. An image from The Bling Ring of Chloe’s family having breakfast before the police arrest her (Figure 3.10) bears striking allegiances to an image by Barney (Figure 3.11) in terms of color, composition, and narrative. While Coppola’s palette is more muted, intentionally conveying the bland sameness of Calabasas architecture, she retains key details: windows, topped by flowered valances, serve as sources of natural light but also mark the boundary between the private family space and the external community. The family figures are carefully arranged in the frame, yet give the illusion of being absorbed in individual actions—eating, cleaning, grooming—oblivious to the camera and viewer. A maid toils unacknowledged by the family. In Barney’s image the maid appears in the foreground, restoring the disordered bedclothes, as the woman assumed responsible is pointedly turned away from her, looking at herself in the mirror, while the figure by her dressing table leans against the

Figure 3.10  A Calabasas kitchen in The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

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Figure 3.11  Tina Barney, Beverly, Jill and Polly, 1982, chromogenic color print, 48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm) © Tina Barney. Image courtesy Kasmin.

window sill, her gaze directed downward. The divide between the maid and her employers, marked as well by the wall line in the center of the frame, conveys Barney’s critique of upper-class obliviousness. Coppola’s image does the same: she marginalizes the housemaid, tucking her in the background in the far right of the frame. It is she with her back to the family. The father in Coppola’s suburban family assumes the posture of Barney’s maid, shown in profile turned away from his wife and daughter. The daughter occupies the middle of the frame, ignoring her mother, father, and the maid, her eyes locked on her phone. In keeping with the setting and import of the film, the girl’s upper-class narcissism is expressed not by her reflection in a mirror but in the social-media universe of selfies and self-promotion. By placing her character, rather than the maid, in the center and the foreground of the image, Coppola singles her out for criticism and culpability. In photographic as well as narrative terms, the film indicts its characters for their reckless materialism and misplaced pursuit of celebrity.42

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These examples—specific and general—demonstrate Coppola’s engagement with photography as an artform, though not specifically with fashion as its subject. However, the most arresting of her cinematic translations do. For instance, the opening title sequence of Lost in Translation discussed in Chapter 1 is an homage to a 1977 photorealist painting, Maude, by John Kacere (Figures 3.12 and 3.13).43 The thirty-four-second shot, from a fixed camera, appears for the first twelve seconds indistinguishable from a still image, until the movement of Charlotte’s legs reveals that it is—and has been—a moving image. Kacere’s painting employs a common strategy of fashion imagery, isolating the figure’s lingerie by truncating the woman’s body and centering her sheer panties mid-frame. Details of the ruffled trim on her negligée spill into the foreground. The unadorned backdrop and bright lighting heighten attention to the lingerie. Coppola’s image, as we’ve seen, substitutes pink cotton panties and, in place of the white satin negligée, a wool sweater pulled up to reveal a line of the white cotton shirt beneath it. Soft, natural lighting, combined with the drawn drapes serving as the backdrop, lend a degree of naturalism to the image, providing hints of context that ground the clothing

Figure 3.12  John Kacere, Maude, 1977 © John Kacere. Image courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

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Figure 3.13  The opening shot of Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

and figure. In other words, she animates both the image and the clothing: the static image moves and the clothing is no longer abstracted from its human wearer. In the film, the sweater and panties reappear—on Charlotte as she moves in her hotel room, standing on the bed to hang a cluster of pink paper cherry blossoms as decoration (see Figure 2.12). We again see the sweater and panties from behind, as in the title sequence, but from a distance, as part of her entire body, not in a close-up of her truncated torso and legs. The camera, though fixed, does not linger on her scantily clad behind. Instead, Charlotte moves across the frame. In the filmed world of her Tokyo hotel room she has no audience, just like the figure in Kacere’s painting. Both, however, are posed for a camera and an audience: while viewers of Kacere’s painting occupy the position of voyeurs—able to regard the figure’s scantily clad derrière without her knowledge—the film viewers’ gaze is directed by the figure’s motion for the duration of the scene. It ends, as Charlotte steps from the bed and stubs her toe, by deflating any transitory experience of voyeuristic pleasure.44 Moments later we see Charlotte, shot from behind and from the waist down, a vertical match of the opening image, as she passes by her husband, stepping over his cameras and lenses. Talking animatedly, he is oblivious to her presence directly before him. The implication is obvious: she is pointedly neither the object of the photographer nor the photographic apparatus she passes over.

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This is evidence of how Coppola translates her photographic skill with point of view to film to introduce greater complexity. Hers are not slavish recreations of still images.45 They are reproductions in the broadest sense of the term, simulations that place her images in dialogue with their original source, invite reflection on the differences between still and moving images, and often, as in this instance, offer a critique of photographic conventions, here the objectification of the female form in the service of foregrounding fashion and voyeuristic pleasure. Other sequences in Lost in Translation, like its opening, appear nearly indistinguishable from still photos and equally capture Coppola’s complex use of point of view. Acord described the shots in the hotel as “like a stills shoot.”46 A brief handheld sequence, for example, captures Charlotte folded up on the window sill, looking out over Tokyo (Figure 3.14). Her gaze is directed away from the camera, so we look with her, rather than at her, as Todd Kennedy notes.47 The image’s composition is more revealing. Charlotte is posed in the center of three adjoining windows, between the frames separating the panes of glass. At a glance, the mise-en-scène conveys her alienation from the foreign city and her sense of confinement, emotionally as well as geographically given that she is trapped in an unhappy marriage. The hotel room symbolizes both:

Figure 3.14  Charlotte, folded up on the window sill, gazing out over Tokyo. Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

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her husband (unseen in the shot) sleeps while she cannot; he has an occupation that takes him out of the room and into the city, while she does not. Alone, doubly contained by the film frame and the window frame, she gazes at the city but at one remove through the intervening glass. Our gaze following hers, we feel her alienation. Contrast these general allusions to still photography to the opening of Marie Antoinette, which was inspired directly by a commercial fashion image, a 1977 advertisement for Charles Jourdan taken by Guy Bourdin (Figures 3.15 and 3.16). Coppola adapts the same pose of a reclining female, assisted into her stylish shoes by a maid. The framing is similar, with the reclining figure on the left, legs outstretched, with her feet in the hands of the maid, who appears on the right. But the differences are telling. Bourdin’s maid faces the camera, crouching down to buckle the strap of her mistress’s shoe. As a commercial photo designed to feature the product, the shoes attract attention, as the object of the maid’s actions and through stark lighting, focused from the lower right on to the shoes and illuminating the maid’s downturned face, creating deep, contrasting shadows on the white wall behind the figures. While shot in color, all elements in the frame are in shades of black and white: the maid’s classic uniform, her mistress’s black lace-trimmed sheath dress, the white silk sheets on which she reclines. The sole exceptions are the women’s bright red lipstick and the gold details on the straps and heels of the shoes. Together, these choices invest the photo with the glamour of classic black-and-white fashion images and film noir, inciting speculation about its characters, particularly since the main figure, shown in profile, appears oblivious to the viewer’s presence.48 By contrast, in Coppola’s recreation, sandwiched between the opening credits and title card, the maid crouches to tend her mistress with her back to the camera, partially blocking our view of Marie Antoinette’s dainty pink slipper. The white silk of Bourdin’s original becomes the queen’s dress, but apart from the women’s attire, the image enhances rather than mutes color in the pastel blue-and-white walls and chaise, and the pink-andwhite pastries in both background and foreground of the image. The lighting is equally delicate, emanating from a natural source on the left and gently reflecting off the queen’s gown to illuminate her as the central object, rather than her shoes. Unlike the homage to Kacere in Lost in Translation, this scene

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Figure 3.15  Advertisement for Charles Jourdan by Guy Bourdin, 1977 © The Guy Bourdin Estate, 2020/Reproduced by permission of Art + Commerce. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.16  The opening image from Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

stresses movement. While Marie Antoinette’s posture initially replicates the woman’s in Bourdin’s image—in profile, with eyes closed—she lazily turns her head as she reaches out to dip her finger in icing before directing her

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gaze pointedly at the camera and audience. With an additional turn to face fully front, she conveys her awareness of our gaze and her indifference, as she returns to her position of imperial repose. Again, Coppola’s alternations to point of view, more than the addition of movement, are significant: she retains the postures and material tokens of wealth (including servants), but focuses attention not on the objects but on their owner, the historical personage who is the glamorous and mysterious subject of the film. With Dunst’s forthright acknowledgment of the camera and audience, Coppola further introduces the film’s preoccupation with surveillance and the self-reflective engagement that extends through all her films with the processes of looking. Dunst’s gaze toward the viewer breaks the fourth wall to draw attention to the process of filming, but in her allusion to Bourdin’s image, Coppola does more: in her reduplication of his photograph, she foregrounds the artifice of visual media, whether still or moving.

Fashion Photographers and Photography “She has a fashion photographer’s eye for composition and suggestion.” Jesse Fox Mayshark49 Coppola’s films acknowledge that our perceptions are not natural but shaped, particularly through a history of fine art that has conditioned our views of clothed bodies. In Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander argues that “the perception of clothing at any epoch is accomplished not so much directly as through a filter of artistic convention. People dress and observe other dressed people with a set of pictures in mind—pictures in a particular style.”50 The artistic conventions of fashion photography have influenced contemporary visual perceptions, a fact demonstrated in Coppola’s films. A more pervasive debt to the stylistic devices common to representations of fashion extends through her works. Somewhere, despite its protagonist’s apparent disregard for personal style, abounds with allusions to fashion photography’s role in shaping Hollywood style. Shot at the famous Hollywood hotel the Chateau Marmont, the film is rife with references to the fashion world. Some are obvious: models stalk the

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hallway. Others require insider knowledge: Coppola launched her fashion line MilkFed with a photo shoot there, and it was the site of fashion photographer Helmut Newton’s death in 2004—a fact alluded to by an unmotivated shot of a car having crashed into a wall, as Newton’s did. An equally unmotivated and brief glimpse of a topless model getting a haircut in a doorway is an homage to one of Newton’s images. But Newton’s emphasis is more diffused in the film and elsewhere in Coppola’s work. Coppola met him in an elevator at the Chateau Marmont on the morning he died, giving her the opportunity to thank him for his photograph of Charlotte Rampling naked on a table. She prizes it as an example of “photos that have a story to them,” claiming his “could almost be a still from a film.”51 Newton’s visual trademark—blackand-white, stylized, often hypersexualized images—bears little resemblance to Coppola’s. Instead, like Newton and other fashion photographers, she relies on images to convey a narrative wordlessly, an achievement illustrated in Somewhere with its notoriously spare use of dialogue. While some directors, most notably Hitchcock, employ detailed storyboards to plot their narratives, camera and lighting positions, shot selection, camera angles, edits, and other production details, Coppola describes her visual mapping as a collage, a collection of still images that has greater affinity with the storytelling in fashion magazines.52 Her “favorite fashion story,” which appeared in British Vogue in January 1974, embodies this intersection of photography, fashion, and film. Styled by Grace Coddington and shot by David Bailey—with some images in black and white, others in full color—it featured actress Anjelica Huston and Manolo Blahnik (who would later design the shoes for Marie Antoinette). The spread traced a road trip through the South of France and Corsica, capturing beachside adventures. The introductory image, with Blahnik buried in the sand up to his neck, references Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou: so a silent, Surrealist film from the 1920s influenced the photo spread in Vogue, which in turn shaped Coppola’s perception of European elegance and then her own films, several of which inspired shoots in Vogue (as Chapter 4 details). One often-reproduced image, referenced by Coppola, pictures Anjelica Huston posed in a doorway wearing a daisy-print wrap dress by Sheridan Barnett. To the left of the doorway Newton sits with Blahnik holding a drink in one hand and the camera’s remote shutter release in the

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other suspended over his head.53 Like Coppola’s films, the image foregrounds the photographic artifice in capturing the studied pose, while simultaneously introducing further dramatic speculation. The trio of recognizable public personalities bring with them individual narratives of romance and celebrity that, combined with the exotic locale and stylish props—berets, sunglasses, director’s chairs—augment the “Star-Crossed France” story unfolding in the magazine’s pages. This is but one example of the complex interplay of photography, cinema, and narrative possible in fashion publications and evident in Coppola’s films. Consider, for instance, Somewhere’s reliance on historical references to Hollywood glamour, especially since its Chateau Marmont setting carries builtin narratives of celebrity, as discussed in Chapter 2. Coppola references them visually. In addition to the stories associated with Newton, shots of Johnny in bed allude to iconic images of celebrities in similar poses, such  as Bruce Weber’s portrait of Matt Dillon (Figure 3.17) and the 1958 John R. Hamilton

Figure 3.17  Bruce Weber’s portrait of Matt Dillon. Bruce Weber/Trunk Archives.

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portrait of Clint Eastwood that inspired it.54 Both seemingly capture the stars in spontaneous, off-screen moments of private repose. In her film Coppola employs the portrait mode, nodding to her fictional star’s place among male Hollywood celebrities, but widens the context, as we saw in Chapter 1, to problematize Johnny’s position. Scenes of him in bed reveal him to be watching others—the twin strippers who perform for him live, or the recorded images of Gandhi on television (see Figure 1.9). He may be the focus of the film’s camera, but no photographer stages the scene to glamorize his deshabillé masculinity. Instead, we watch him watching others. Natural or low-key lighting (as from the television) instead of key lighting actually deflates his star image, as Backman Rogers argues, and in scenes on the couch “he appears as one object amongst a world of objects or as part of a still-life portrait—it is only his slight movements that distinguish him from the inanimate world around him”55— just like Charlotte at the opening of Lost in Translation. Filming in color further strips the image of the glamour inherent in blackand-white portraits.56 Edward Steichen’s portraits of Hollywood stars, such as his iconic 1928 photo of Greta Garbo, indelibly associated the glamour shot with dark shadows and rich contrasts. Coppola’s familiarity with these conventions is evident from her first short film, Lick the Star (1998), shot by Acord in black and white that suggests “glossy fashion photography rather than low-budget filmmaking.”57 In the opening sequence its protagonist, Chloe (Audrey Kelly), sashays along the corridor of her junior high-school domain. A slow-motion close-up of her face establishes her pre-eminence by employing tropes of celebrity portraiture (Figure 3.18): her dark hair, smoky eyes, and deeply shaded lips contrast with her pale skin, white shirt, and the white exterior walls and columns framing her face. Her tiara, pendant earrings, and bejeweled necklace, glittering details that contrast with the matte black of her hair, eyes, and lips, cement her status as teen queen. Cuts to static close-ups of her lips and eyes during the title sequence further allude to stylized still fashion images isolating the same details, such as the iconic photos of Irving Penn. The film makes other references to fashion imagery—still and moving— that recur in Coppola’s later films. As Chloe enters, she glides confidently along the corridor, her slow-motion walk toward the camera contrasting with the frantic action of the students behind her scrambling to get to class

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Figure 3.18  A portrait-style close-up of Chloe in Lick the Star © Sofia Coppola 1998.

before the bell. Shown in full length, Chloe appears model-like, nonchalantly carrying a leopard-print bag in one hand while holding a cigarette in the other. The catty whispers of her classmates—“she’s never going to be a model”—are superfluous, for her fashionable pretensions have already been established visually. Contrast this scene to the quick shot of three actual models prowling a corridor in the Chateau Marmont in Somewhere (Figure 3.19). Detached from the plot, the scene specifically references Helmut Newton. In Lick the Star, the iconography and gestures of the catwalk are linked directly to the film’s story (as is Trip’s entrance to school in the Virgin Suicides, discussed in Chapter 1). The same coupling of narrative and image occurs in The Bling Ring. The five teens walk along Rodeo Drive, clutching bags (Figure 3.20). The framing duplicates that of Chloe’s entrance in Lick the Star, with white storefronts in place of the school walls and trees substituting for pillars. (It further echoes a later group walk by Chloe joined by two members of her clique along the same corridor.) Rather than the contrasts of light and dark, shiny and matte surfaces in the black-and-white images of Lick the Star, the Bling Ring shot includes contemporary markers of celebrity: sunglasses instead of tiaras and

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Figure 3.19  Models stalking the hallway in Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

Figure 3.20  The Bling Ring walking, Entourage-style, along Rodeo Drive. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

Starbucks cups in place of cigarettes. Rather than striding singly in a line as on a runway, they flank each other Entourage-style, layering references to filmed fashion, video footage of fashion shows, and reality television.58 Wordlessly, the sequence conveys the group’s aspirations for fame. Taken together, these catwalk scenes lend credence to Irving Penn’s insight that as a photographer for Vogue he was “selling dreams, not clothes.”59

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Groupings of characters also allude to another staple of fashion photography: the tableau. These appear in all of Coppola’s films but can be divided into two types. The first are formally composed assemblages of characters directly engaging with the camera and viewer, akin to the groupings common to celebrate models in Vogue and stars in Vanity Fair (Figure 3.21). In the second type, characters are equally framed with meticulous care but appear informally gathered and unaware of the camera, as in the apparently spontaneous assemblies in fashion stories (Figure 3.22). As examples of the first type, consider The Beguiled, which abounds with the women artfully and overtly posed as a group—around the dinner table, at prayer, in musical performance, seated on the couch, and gathered together on the porch. In the scene of their musical performance, the girls are filmed from a fixed camera position arrayed around the piano, with Martha to their right (Figure 3.23). The younger girls’ downcast eyes imply their shyness, while Alicia’s direct gaze indicates the opposite. As in photographic tableaux, the

Figure 3.21  “The Twelve Most Photographed Models,” 1947. Irving Penn, Vogue © Condé Nast.

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Figure 3.22  Nine models wearing Charles James gowns, 1948. Cecil Beaton, Condé Nast Collection/Getty Images.

Figure 3.23  A tableau of ladies posed around the piano in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

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girls reveal their awareness of posing for another, here not simply the camera but also McBurney, who in reaction shots is revealed to be their audience. The staging of the image is equally emblematic, however, of their sheltered existence, gathered together as they are against the external threat of war and the men who wage it: enemy soldiers such as McBurney, but also their own. (Their performance is interrupted by a knock on the door announcing two passing Confederate soldiers, kept in check from acting on the “temptation” posed by the girls by Martha brandishing a gun.) Martha’s and Edwina’s stiff postures convey their efforts to sustain prim standards of decorum and modesty. Their positioning on either side of the girls in the frame suggests their protective efforts. Alicia’s position in the foreground—on the opposite side of the piano from the younger girls, closest to McBurney—prefigures her violation of feminine decorum. Other sequences with the women grouped statically together, shot from an angle rather than head on, eliminate the performative dimension of the classic fashion tableau to convey the women’s vulnerability to McBurney’s later rage and drunkenness as they cower together on the couch or against the kitchen wall (Figure 3.24). This slight alteration in point of view and angle becomes

Figure 3.24 A tableau of the ladies confronting the chandelier shattered by McBurney’s pistol. The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2016.

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more meaningful when viewed as tweaking photographic convention: they no longer control his gaze and longing. Objects only of the viewers’ gaze, they appear powerless. The concluding tableau of the women on the porch looking toward the camera and through the bars at McBurney’s shrouded corpse represents their reassertion of power over him, as well as Martha’s over Edwina, Alicia, and the other girls. Instead of these stylized tableaux with formal postures, films featuring contemporary girl groups—the clique in Lick the Star and the sisters in The Virgin Suicides—stage the seemingly informal tableaux common to the fashion story. In Lick the Star, an aerial view captures four girls as they lounge on the grass, heads together in a star pattern, listening to one girl’s story of alien abduction. While their positioning may be explained as making listening easier, the formal composition overrides logistical concerns. The geometric patterning of the four girls recurs in subsequent tableau images as repeated ensembles of four. The four remaining Lisbon sisters gather in the girls’ bathroom at school or in their cluttered bedroom. Marie Antoinette finds herself with three other women, whether in her private rooms or on the lawn. The scene of the Lisbon girls wordlessly huddled together in their bedroom following Cecilia’s suicide manifests their shared grief (Figure 3.25). But point of view introduces additional narrative threads. The onlooker is not simply the audience but the visiting priest, a grey-haired male figure (Scott Glenn) clad in black and white intruding on their multihued space of feminine intimacy. Shots of nightgowns and stockings tossed casually on the stair railing bookend his appearance, and the girls wear only pajamas and nightgowns. Like the neighborhood boys, the priest tries but fails to penetrate their insular world. Their seemingly nonchalant lounging in the public bathroom might at a glance express their disenchantment with school, but its placement prior to an assembly about the epidemic of suicide injects it with greater melancholy. Film editing augments the narrative potential inherent in the tableau. Parallel tableaux of four boys signal their central position in the film narrative but also point of view. In an early near-static shot, for instance, the boys are seated on the curb as though posed solely for the camera (Figure 3.26). A cut reveals their gaze is pointed to the Lisbon home and the voice-over emphasizes that the film’s

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Figure 3.25  The Lisbon sisters in their bedroom following Cecilia’s suicide. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

Figure 3.26  Neighborhood boys watching the Lisbon home. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

images derive from their memories twenty-five years after the fact. The effect in each instance is to foreground the artifice of the image and the distance— temporal and psychological—between the viewer and the subject.

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As Backman Rogers notes: The boys take up the position of the cinematic viewer on the pavement opposite the Lisbon family home; the girls are depicted discretely via slow motion, freeze frame and close-up, and each girl’s face is accompanied by a childish font that announces her name to the viewer. In essence, these highly cinematic and reflexive mechanisms afford the boys and, by extension, the viewer a proximity to the girls that is in actual fact impossible given the  boys’ distance from the action. This sequence serves to foreground from the outset the highly artificial and manufactured nature of the boys’ narrative that is structured around the Lisbon girls—namely that they are creating a narrative film in their minds.60 As a cinematic replication—of the tableau and the viewers’ position—the sequence also simultaneously and self-reflexively announces its own artifice. Similar allusions to the crafted and constructed nature of the image occur in Marie Antoinette’s staging of tableaux. Given that the historic setting of the film predates both fashion photography and modern fashion shows, its references to fashion illustration derive from painting, as discussed below. Still, the film’s representation of the young queen hinges on how her life resonates with contemporary women, particularly as she rebels against Versailles fashions in clothing and conduct, and does so by invoking anachronistic visual as well as behavioral conventions, as in the scene where she lounges with her friends discussing tabloid accounts of her extravagances—sexual and material (Figure 3.27). As in the opening allusion to Guy Bourdin, a maid, with her back turned to the camera, tends to Marie’s nails as she lazes in a dressing gown—her dress and posture similar to that of the Lisbon sisters in their bedroom. Two friends, though formally dressed, appear equally contemporary in their casual postures, particularly the Duchesse de Polignac (Rose Byrne), who occupies the center of the frame, stretched out on her belly, propping herself up on her elbows to read from the paper. A scene of Marie reading from Rousseau on the lawn at Le Petit Trianon is multilayered: the formal and stylized arrangement of its stylishly dressed subjects, who sit without moving while listening, duplicates the still photo compositions of fashion tableaux (Figure 3.28).61 Simultaneously, the natural setting, in concert with Dunst’s voice-over recitation about the “state of nature” and her more modern attire—

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Figure 3.27  The queen lounges with her friends. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

Figure 3.28  Marie Antoinette reading to friends on the lawn at Le Petit Trianon. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

her simple dress and hatless head—nod to the sun-dappled scenes in natural settings common to the late 1960s and 1970s, including but not limited to Eggleston’s image of Hare. The film is “like Vogue come to life,” according to Samiha Matin, who argues that “Marie Antoinette draws upon the fashion magazine for a visual lexicon of femininity.”62 While it does so in part through tableaux, it does so less by

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creating moving substitutes for individual still photo styles than by replicating the experience of reading the magazine as a whole, particularly in the sequence dramatizing the women’s consumption, which quickly intercuts close-up shots of material goods. Heidi Brevik-Zender has described it as “part music video and part fashion show.”63 She is clearly right on the first count, as discussed in Chapter 2, but the sequence bears little resemblance to a moving parade of models along a runway. Instead, movement in the sequence derives not from the characters’ motions but through its rapid cutting between brief shots, captured in a dizzying mix of styles and angles, some moving (through pans and dollies), but the majority from a static camera capturing motion in the frame. Of the seventy-seven individual shots composing the sequence, only ten employ a moving camera, as in the initiating pan across a line of shoes, and these appear near the start and end of the sequence. The rest are shot from a static camera, in close-up to focus on the objects. Champagne pours from bottles into individual glasses or from above into towers of them. Hands, ankles, mouths frequently appear in the shots, but only partly revealing the human agent of the object’s motion. Hands reach for gambling chips or shoes and lift pastries to mouths and necklaces to throats. Ankles agitate feet in shoes. Cakes and shoes gradually disappear from their assembled arrays seemingly with no human input. The rapidity of the cuts—all within just under three minutes—sets a pace akin to that of flipping through a magazine’s pages, with images featuring products of multiple types, alone or in combination, captured from a variety of angles (from overhead, from the side, from below), with brief intervening images of human agents, as in the few shots revealing Marie Antoinette and her attending ladies scrutinizing fabrics, or the seamstress trimming her gown or the coiffeur creating her pouf. In short, the sequence employs the same “visual lexicon” as the magazine, animating its still images by showing motion within static shots and cutting these together with extraordinary speed. Coppola’s transposition of this visual lexicon into cinematic form further calls attention to its process of fetishization. Pointed elision of human agency endows the material objects represented on screen with “mystery, … magic and necromancy,” properties which Karl Marx argued that commodities acquire under capitalism. He believed that commodities are fetishes, objects valued not as products of human labor but for intangible properties attributed to them

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through societal exchange. In the anthropological sense, fetishes are objects granted mystical properties of protection or presumed to be embodied by spirits. Marx argued that commodities undergo a similar transformation and likened the process to religion, where “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.” His example was a wooden table: it “continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing,” but as a commodity “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”64 To the consumer, the table—like all other commodities exchanged in a capitalist economy—appears to have an independent, enchanted existence. Coppola’s film pictures shoes moving through space, out of boxes or across the floor. They incorporate, however, reminders of human propulsion—hands remove them, ankles agitate them. Subtly, the shots incorporate the work behind the glamour: the hand that pours the champagne or stitches the trim. That the workers are reduced to parts and to the edges of the frame equally exposes their position in relation to their employers: largely unseen and relegated to the margins (just like the maid in The Bling Ring). Those who would argue that the sequence—and the film itself—promotes consumption ignore such details, as well as a later sequence incorporating the objects featured in the montage: after showing maids removing plates of half-eaten pastries, it pans across empty champagne bottles and discarded glasses before settling on the hung-over queen reclining fully clothed on a chaise. In direction—from left to right—the shot reverses the pan of shoes—from right to left—that opens the montage, in essence erasing any vestiges of glamour. A parallel pattern of reproduction and critique occurs in The Bling Ring, where the viewing experience has also been described as “skimming,” “as though one were flipping casually through the pages of a magazine.”65 While the film does foreground electronic media, vestiges of fashion’s print legacy remain in the collages of magazine photos on the walls of the girls’ bedrooms, shots of the characters flipping through magazine pages, and in its title sequence, which like the montage in Marie Antoinette borrows the visual lexicon of “well-lit ‘glamour’ photography,” with overhead or head-on shots of commodities, as one might

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find in a “high-end commercial or magazine fashion spread.”66 Duplicating the introduction to the montage in the earlier film, the sequence opens with a pan across rows of color-coordinated shoes, then cuts to close-ups of individual sets of pairs. It intersperses overhead shots, all panning across objects—jewels, shoes, cosmetics, branded luggage—in a variety of directions (up, down, left, right). Unlike in Marie Antoinette, these invocations of still photography are not cut together but disrupted by a variety of images—still and moving—to form an “electronic collage”67 that includes footage of the film’s characters pilfering pills and cash, and giving interviews before the courthouse; still shots of Facebook pages and individual image posts; and television footage of celebrities posing for the cameras and evading paparazzi. The effect is not, as in Marie Antoinette, to duplicate glamorizing photography but deliberately to undercut it. Fetishized commodities, shown alongside the celebrities who own and promote them, are endowed with an additional talismanic significance: the added “magic” of association with the original owner. The teens acquired doubly fetishized goods: first by their associations with luxury brands, such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton, whose logos appear in the montage, and additionally by their connection to the celebrity consumers. Their criminality derives from this nexus, as intercut footage of their crimes indicates and as their reproduction of celebrity poses in their posting of themselves with the goods on Facebook affirms. The final image

Figure 3.29  An evidence bag and list amid the bling. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

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of the sequence caps the visual argument: the camera pans across a table of jewels, as in the previous sequences, but within the glittering array is an evidence bag and list (Figure 3.29). A flash, as from a camera documenting the evidence, transforms a glamour shot into a crime photo. As Maryn Wilkinson cannily notes, “The aesthetic surface strategy of skimming is intricately interlaced with the criminal skimming of ‘surplus,’ excess(-ive) goods in the story of the film.”68

The Fashions of Fashion Photography “Representational artists, great or popular or both at once, continue to offer images of clothed truth so persuasive that they govern the perception of dress in a whole generation.” Anne Hollander69 Coppola’s films do not only capture the fashions of the eras they dramatize through costume, production design, and music, as discussed in Chapter 2, but also the shifting aesthetics of fashion representations. Representations, like fashions themselves, have their own distinct style, as histories document. Some photographic modes, such as the portrait, tableau, and catwalk discussed above, are timeless, but other elements change, including lighting, color, composition, and poses. Coppola’s films reflect these shifting styles, but also, more importantly, how representational styles affect perception and memory. They dramatize how “self-imagination has been influenced by, entangled with, the resources, methods and vision of the fashion industry.”70 For instance, The Bling Ring both employs the aesthetics of contemporary surveillance and reality-television culture and dramatizes its influences on consumers. As we’ve seen, Harry Savides’s cinematography replicates the proliferation of visual media forms. Wilkinson offers a useful summary of them: As characters discuss their vision boards during their home-school sessions, or try on a range of items in a shopping sequence, or flip through the pages of a fashion magazine, or browse the gossip pages online on screen, the film itself takes on those formats, simulating fashion vlogs, music videos, advertisements, and/or in its references to other teen films and teen TV.

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The film inserts shots of (real) TMZ-footage, black-and-white Skype-style images from laptop camera’s [sic], flashing red carpet slide shows, news footage and security cameras, phone-camera footage, and full screen stills of social media pages—transforming the surface of the film itself into a television, phone or computer screen.71 Despite its emphasis on the gaudy accumulation of fashionable objects, the film reflects none of the aesthetics associated with professional print fashion imagery. Instead it does pointedly the opposite, highlighting that the prevailing aesthetic relies on an artifice of documentary or candid styles. Shot on digital, not film (which retains its photographic legacy), The Bling Ring emphasizes the contemporary mediation of portable video and cellphone cameras. A barrage of thirty-eight images in a montage just over a minute long illustrates the accelerated “skimming” that results. All but one image in the montage—a brief shot of a model posing with Orlando Bloom—are still images captured from moving sources, such as footage from a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, video of reality-television stars at red-carpet events, and street-style images captured by paparazzi, from a mélange of angles and perspectives, including close-ups of fashionable accessories (sunglasses, handbags, jewelry, shoes). The shots are edited together using a transition replicating the effect of swiping, with such rapidity that individual images barely register. (Some occupy no more than an individual frame length, exactly duplicating one still image on film.) The pinball-like soundtrack augments the impression of being immersed in an overwhelming visual and aural landscape, the experience common in this accelerated digital age. The Bling Ring also replicates the pervasive influence of this fashion imagery in shots of the teens taking photographs of themselves and each other for posting on Facebook (Figure 3.30). These scenes showcase the cellphone as usurping the place of professional cameras: now anyone can be a photographer (just as anyone can, putatively, be a celebrity). For their cellphones and in front of computer cameras, they assume the poses they recognize from the images they consume, artificial stances that foreground the material objects they covet. Rather than photograph the isolated objects themselves, as commercial fashion advertising would, the teens feature them on their bodies, mimicking the paparazzi style of “captured” glamour.72 They

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Figure 3.30  Teens taking photographs of each other for posting on Facebook. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

post images of themselves with handbags, jewelry, and other accessories (assuming a role now occupied by “influencers” on YouTube and Instagram). Their images, naturally, are no less manufactured than the “real” images shaping their imaginations. Invoking the representational aesthetics of the 1970s, The Virgin Suicides perhaps more potently demonstrates the shaping influence of commercial images. Coppola has said, “The film is a memory, recreated in faded snapshots.”73 In the context of the film, these photographic recreations emerge from the boys’ imaginations and are filtered through memory. Both are shaped by 1970s’ style. For instance, a portrait shot of Lux bears identifying markers of the era’s photography: soft focus, natural light, overexposed, unaffected posture (Figure 3.31). Context initially reveals Lux looking over her shoulder at Trip, and the doctored sparkle that appears in her left eye confirms she is presented from his perspective: she bewitches him. But a cut reveals Trip twenty-five years later, recalling the image. As he confesses, “I’ll never forget the first time I saw her,” the film cuts to a close-up of her left eye and pans down to her lips, employing a strategy common to advertising and soft-core pornography to seduce viewers. Trip, like the other boys, initially imagined the Lisbon sisters through a filter of fantasies shaped by shampoo advertisements and Sam Haskins’s photos in Playboy magazine, united in visual terms by the

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Figure 3.31  Trip’s memory of Lux replicates 1970s’ photographic style. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

Figure 3.32  Gauzy fantasies of the Lisbon sisters employ 1970s’ advertising style. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

“back-lit hair [of] the girl in nature.”74 The montage of images inspired by reading Cecilia’s diary replicates this style, with gauzy images of the sisters sitting in fields, plucking petals from daisies, and drawing figures with sparklers against the sky (Figure 3.32). In lighting, color, and composition

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Figure 3.33  One of the boys’ invented candid “travel” snapshots. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

they mimic advertising aesthetics of the 1970s, including the era’s penchant for hazy dissolves, superimpositions, and split screen. (So enduring is this visual lexicon of the fantasy girl that it shapes Marc’s memory in The Bling Ring of initially meeting Rebecca: he pictures her walking, in slow motion, in a diaphanous sundress with her hair back-lit by the California sunshine.) Given that the boy’s fantasy images, drawn from commercial photography, predominate, it is no wonder that “some male viewers felt as if they were being forced … to flip through a fashion magazine.”75 The snapshots included in The Virgin Suicides equally come from the boys’ perspective, inspired by news that the girls’ only connection to the outside comes in the form of catalogues and holiday brochures. As they imagine the girls taking adventurous foreign vacations, we see a montage of holiday snapshots, projected on the film screen in a 4:3 aspect ratio as though from a slide projector, complete with an intervening flash of blank illumination (Figure 3.33). Superimposed images of the boys assuming candid poses alongside the girls broadcast their fictional status. These fantasy snapshots contrast markedly with an actual snapshot staged in the film. The sisters pose for their father in their homecoming dresses, as he struggles to operate his flash camera (see Figure 1.14). At the flash, Lux is

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distractedly looking up at a leak in the ceiling, so the captured pose is far from glamorous. The boys’ idealized snapshots retain a power lacking in the real photo. The narrator explains in voice-over, “the only way we could feel close to the girls was through these impossible excursions which have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives.” Filtered through desire and imagination, their fictional photos established narratives of romance impossible to achieve in reality.76 Fittingly, in Marie Antoinette the representational mode affecting perception is not photography but painting. While as a contemporary filmed artwork it invokes modern media, its protagonist’s perceptions are shaped by the fashion

Figure 3.34  Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801.

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illustration of her era. Visually, the film evokes eighteenth-century images of fashionable dress and décor found in paintings, engravings, and fashion plates. Production designer K. K. Barrett described Marie Antoinette as “both a painting and a photograph,” while Jacki Wilson more simply sees it as a “cinematic painting.”77 Their observations are especially true of scenes that appear as filmed recreations of painted records of monarchical events, such as the wedding, where the film camera reproduces its grandeur through wide shots incorporating the assembled courtiers, as well as depth-of-field shots that mimic oil painting.78 The costumers and set designers, as discussed in Chapter 2, consulted fine-art depictions of the era to reproduce its fashions. But Marie Antoinette’s visions

Figure 3.35  Marie Antoinette’s fantasy of Count Fersen. Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

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do not reflect the baroque Versailles style that dominates in the first section of the film, when she is oppressed by its formalism of dress and manners. Instead, her fantasies mimic the Revolutionary styles of fine art created in reaction to eighteenth-century opulence. For instance, when she, like Trip in The Virgin Suicides, daydreams about the object of her sexual desire, Count Fersen, she pictures him in martial attire on a rearing white horse, a moving reproduction of Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (1801) (Figures 3.34 and 3.35). Fersen, like Napoleon, sports a black tricorn hat, trimmed in gold, and a black coat over a white shirt and breeches, topped by a red cloak floating in the breeze. In place of the stark gaze of ambition Napoleon directs toward the viewer of the painting, Fersen turns towards the camera, looking at Marie with longing, just as she desires. A backdrop of flames and glowing smoke from unseen explosions reinforces the scene’s passionate subtext. The allusion’s significance is complex: contemporary viewers unfamiliar with French history will appreciate the film’s clever period twist on the staple knight-in-shiningarmor of romance. Those who recognize the Napoleonic associations can detect bold irony and subtle foreshadowing, for his rise was effected by her fall and the painter “was an ardent champion of the Revolution who, as a member of the National Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI and made a sketch, Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine (1793).”79 Taken either way, the film critiques Marie’s naïvely romantic fantasies. By contrast, as she sits on the lawn surrounded by her ladies reading Rousseau (see Figure 3.28), the image references Impressionist paintings, a style which embraced Rousseau’s call for a return to nature. Kennedy identifies Claude Monet as an inspiration, but in composition this scene bears greater resemblance to his contemporary Berthe Morisot’s L’Ombrelle Verte (1873) (Figure 3.36). Morisot was reportedly influenced by the emerging art of photography and by advertising, capturing fashionable women in fulllength portraits dressed for the theater or a day of sightseeing. As in Morisot’s paintings, the scene in Coppola’s film centers attention on the fashionably dressed Marie, isolated visually from her companions by the act of reading and by the contrast of her simple white dress to the formal pastel-colored silk gowns of her companions. The montage of images that accompanies her reading reflects Rousseau’s words heard in voice-over: “If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state, the

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Figure 3.36  Berthe Morisot, L’Ombrelle Verte, 1873.

state of nature from which he has been removed? Imagine wandering up and down the forest without industry, with speech, and without home.” Coppola’s avowed inspiration for the nature montage was Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), and it borrows the film’s dusky sunlight, unhurried pacing, ambient sound, lingering close-ups of hands brushing grasses, and natural inserts (feathers blowing in the breeze, fields of wildflowers, sunlight filtered through trees).80 But shots of Marie and her daughter languidly exploring flowers and grasses borrow equally from the tradition of painting en plein air practiced by Morisot, Monet, Manet, and other French Impressionists. Echoes can be found of Monet’s La Femme à l’ombrelle—Madame Monet et son fils (1875) in images of Marie moving through fields shot from the same angle, or of his Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (1875) in scenes of Marie with her daughter in the garden. In this context, the images reflect Marie’s desire to translate Rousseau’s principles into dress and architecture. The equivalence of her imagined visions of herself in the manufactured “natural” hamlet she created at the Petit Trianon with the historical vogue in the nineteenth century for building informal gardens with artificial “ruins” acknowledges her role in advancing Romantic ideals, as well as in setting the style for simpler Empire dresses in the early nineteenth century.81

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Fashion “Films” “What makes a good fashion film is exactly what makes a good film: direction, lighting, acting, script, sound.” Diane Pernet82 Given the influence of fashion imagery on Coppola’s film aesthetic, it appears natural, perhaps even inevitable, that she would transform her cinematic art into commercial projects for the fashion industry. She is far from being the first successful director to create filmed advertisements. Jean-Luc Godard, during his Marxist phase, directed ads for Schick aftershave, as well as for jeans and cigarettes, and the list of contemporary directors is endless: Martin Scorsese for Dolce & Gabbana, Ridley Scott for Apple and Chanel No 5, David Fincher and Spike Lee for Nike, Joe Wright for Chanel, Wes Anderson for American Express and Stella Artois, Spike Jonze for Kenzo and Ikea (and cannabis), Wong Kar-wai for Christian Dior and Lancôme, and even David Lynch for home pregnancy tests.83 Coppola’s commercial work, however, has exclusively served fashion brands: Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, H&M, Gap, Cartier, Chanel, and Dior. Hers are “fashion films,” in industry parlance a term referring to “digital video content and branded entertainment commissioned by designer labels and fashion houses as a promotional tool.” Hybrid productions, they interweave “short-form commercial film with narrative feature film.”84 The benefits are reciprocal: her work elevates the brands by their association with a prestigious filmmaker, and the association also enhances Coppola’s visibility as a director and augments marketing, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. Here, however, I am concerned with the inherent circularity of fashion imagery: Coppola’s distinctive film style, influenced by fashion photography to advance a cinematic narrative, is subsequently deployed to create a fashion story. Fashion imagery influenced her film style; now her film style influences “fashion film.” The most overt example of this reciprocal aesthetic relationship occurs in the commercials she has created to promote perfume, an intangible, invisible product. In place of images of material goods—clothing, shoes, jewelry— perfume commercials evoke a mood equivalent to the scent—sultry or sunny, light or earthy, fresh or exotic—or construct visual narratives about

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the adventure and romance associated with the scent’s wearer. In other words, these are ideal projects for a filmmaker who eschews dialogue in favor of atmosphere and gravitates toward visual storytelling. Working with cinematographer Harry Savides, who would later shoot Somewhere and The Bling Ring, Coppola directed two commercials that demonstrate the complex synergy between cinema and advertising. The first, for Miss Dior Chérie in 2008, features a young blonde (Maryna Linchuck) cavorting around Paris in a pale pink dress as “Moi Je Joue” by Brigitte Bardot plays on the soundtrack. The lyrics, combined with her actions, emphasize youthful leisure and play. She walks across a bridge over the Seine and through leafy parks, visits a florist and a dressmaker for a fitting, rides her bicycle through boulevards, admires pastries, and wanders through her hotel room, before eventually kissing a boy and magically floating over the Parisian cityscape suspended by balloons. While the narrative owes nothing to Coppola’s films, the aesthetics do. The commercial opens with a short version of her signature shot: a girl rides through the streets in a car, head out the window. A cut reveals her vision of a girl walking her dog before a fountain. The hotel-room shots recall Lost in Translation, though the sun filtering through the curtains, combined with the girl’s playful fall backwards on to the bed, tilts the mood toward the airy lightness conveyed by quick shots of balloons against the sky. The natural light, soft lenses, and muted color palette are common to all Coppola films, but the pans along pastries and solid pink of the girl’s gown allude directly to Marie Antoinette, as do the French setting and song. The girl, with her blonde tresses blown by the breeze and shimmering in the sunlight, is indistinguishable from the dream girls concocted out of the boys’ imaginations in The Virgin Suicides, particularly as she is pictured in fantasy images swinging in her pink gown through space and ascending to the sky by balloon power. Simultaneously, Coppola stamps the commercial with her directorial signature and gestures toward the visual lexicon of 1970s’ advertising that influenced her first film. The same can be said of her advertising for Marc Jacobs’s Daisy perfume line, which, as Justin Wyatt argues, “fits directly into the VS world.” The one he references, for a trio of Daisy perfumes (Daisy, Daisy Eau So Fresh, and Daisy Dream), substitutes the commercial’s blonde quartet for the Lisbon sisters.85 Wyatt identifies as a “specific visual link” the boys’ invented memory of “Cecilia

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writing in her diary in the field of flowers.”86 But shots of the girls listening as one reads from a pale pink book equally recall the scene of Marie Antoinette reading from Rousseau. As in that film’s nature sequence, the commercial invokes 1970s’ style with figures back-lit by sunshine that sparks lens flares. Close-ups of hands plucking daisy petals or picking wildflowers from tall grasses equally retain Coppola’s allusions to Terrence Malick. A companion spot for Daisy Dream replicates fantasy shots of Lux’s visage filtered through images of clouds suspended against a blue sky and her sister using a sparkler to draw shapes in the air. Rather than a group, the commercial features a lone figure, dressed, like Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon, in a simple white dress, and captured in images that allude directly to Coppola’s film: she reclines in a field of daisies and, in a long shot angled from below, takes a solitary walk up a grassy hill. The ads for Dior and Marc Jacobs marshal Coppola’s film aesthetic and its ties to a nostalgic, romanticized image of youthful femininity created by marketers in the 1970s to sell perfume to young women. The product names— Miss Dior and Daisy—broadcast their demographic, making their allusions to The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, with their girls-in-transition protagonists, apt. In these cases Coppola’s film aesthetic is pre-eminent, with its invocations of commercial imagery secondary. By contrast, Coppola’s later commercials for Miss Dior (2010, 2013) and H&M’s Marni Collection (2012) target a similarly youthful demographic but employ conventional fashion advertising techniques. They craft wordless narratives of seduction and exotic foreign adventures, with only tangential ties to Coppola’s film narratives. “City of Light” (2010) alludes to her first Miss Dior ad in retaining the color palette and hotel-room set, but features a more knowing, experienced heroine, dressed not in girlish pink but womanly black, engaged in reveries of her flirtation with a tuxedo-clad young man, even experimenting with blindfolding his eyes with his tie. The song—“Je t’aime … moi non plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin—underscores the seductive give-and-take between Natalie Portman and Alden Ehrenreich. The concluding shot shows Portman reclining on her side and removing his tie from around her neck while gazing directly at the camera, as Marie Antoinette does in that film’s opening. An aerial shot of Portman in a white tub covered

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in bubbles and wearing dark glasses nods cleverly to the scene of Dunst in the tub speaking the apocryphal line, “Let them eat cake.” The references to Coppola’s narrative interest in celebrity are clear visually in the connection, but also in Portman’s casting and a shot of a white swan (she appeared in Black Swan the same year). Its format—a visual narrative of romantic adventure with song lyrics substituting for dialogue—allies the commercial with others by identifiable directors, such as David Lynch for Opium and Joe Wright for Coco by Chanel. To claim that her commercial for H&M’s Marni Collection transports the boys’ fantasy road trip from The Virgin Suicides to Marrakesh, as Wyatt does, is straining to find a link to Coppola’s film world.87 Like “City of Light,” the commercial showcases Coppola’s mastery of the fashion story put to music, in this case Bryan Ferry’s “Avalon.” Starring another identifiable actress, Imogen Poots, the film similarly features a young woman engaged in reveries about a boy and ends with a kiss. Those intent on finding Coppolisms will cite a shot of a girl against an open car window or groupings poolside (as in Somewhere), as well as use of natural light sources. But it employs a deeper, darker palette to convey the exoticism of its Moroccan setting and accentuate the bold prints characteristic of the Marni line. With its lingering close-ups of bracelets and full-length images of women in sundresses and separates, the film shows Coppola’s facility with the visual lexicon of fashion advertising. It is, in effect, like other fashion films, “a moving-image adjunct to fashion photography,” “a type of motion editorial.”88 In her 2017 campaign for Calvin Klein underwear, Coppola directly references fashion photography rather than her own films. Shot in classic black and white, the seven individual spots feature well-known actresses, including stars Kirsten Dunst, Rashida Jones, and Lauren Hutton, an obvious nod to Hollywood glamour photos, underscored by the use of close-up portrait shots of the women recounting memorable romantic events—first kisses, crushes, pickup lines—in keeping with the titillating tag-line that ends each spot: “Calvin Klein or nothing at all.” Coppola cites “the old Avedon commercials with Andie MacDowell [and] the ’90s images of Kate Moss” as her inspiration, as well as Sam Haskins’s work in books such as Five Girls.89 Her spots replicate Avedon’s format: a static close-up of the star recounting her memory with brief cuts to images of her posing in the product. Avedon’s black-and-white images of Kate

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Moss for CK Be perfume resonate as well, but not as much as the filmmaker’s 2003 music video for the White Stripes cover of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Shot in black-andwhite, the video shows Kate Moss in black lingerie dancing seductively to the music, first on a box (Figure 3.37) and then a pole. The light rhythmically dims to black, alternating between the light playing on her blonde hair and pale skin and then plunging her into darkness and away from view. A director’s cut of footage from the individual Calvin Klein spots splices together footage of the stars posing—sometimes playfully, sometimes seductively—on couches, chairs, and beds, against a metal staircase, and before klieg lights. The opening sequence of Natalie Love, in black bra and tights on a white box, directly mimics Moss’s performance in the White Stripes video. Shot against a shifting array of plain backdrops of white, black, and grey, the sequence appears less darkly alluring than the video, yet retains the seductive appeal expected of the brand, notorious for its ads by Avedon featuring a teenage Brooke Shields saying, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” In place of dialogue, the director’s cut featured Phoenix’s “Fior di Latte,” with its repeated lyric of “we’re meant to get it on,” strengthening the ad’s ties to music video. It adds a further layer of marketing for Phoenix, the band fronted by Coppola’s

Figure 3.37  Kate Moss performs to the White Stripes cover of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” directed by Sofia Coppola © 2003.

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husband Thomas Mars, which was at the time about to release its album Ti Amo. Coppola’s work for Calvin Klein draws less on her feature films’ visual aesthetic and more on the commercial legacy that informs it, as well as her facility for fusing music and image. Since the dynamic fashion image has an “intermedial relationship with music and photography,” her film embodies the form.90 The same might be said of Coppola’s recent work for Cartier’s reissue of its 1980s’ Panthère watch (2017). Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” establishes the era aurally and visually. Coppola “thought of [Lauren] Hutton and that era of sophisticated and glamorous women in the late ’70s/early ’80s, around the time the watch first came out.”91 Hutton’s role in American Gigolo (1980) inspired the commercial’s opening shot (Figures 3.38 and 3.39) and also provided the outlines of its fashion story. However, as Wyatt has noted, the plot is inverted to focus on the woman’s point of view, not the gigolo’s (just as, I would add, Coppola’s The Beguiled emphasizes the female, rather than male, point of view of Don Siegel’s 1971 version).92 In the commercial, Australian actress Courtney Eaton is in the driver’s seat—literally, as she drives a vintage Mercedes convertible down a palm-lined Los Angeles street, and figuratively as she initiates a sexual dalliance poolside. Her drive invokes a famous fashion image by Arthur Elgort of Lisa Taylor also driving a Mercedes convertible across the George Washington Bridge (Figures 3.40 and 3.41). Coppola’s filmed recreation retains the sense of a purposeful woman on the move, as in Elgort’s 1976 still photo. In Elgort’s image the product—a make-up base from Germaine Mitchell—is essentially invisible, yet invested with meaning by association: the make-up, like Taylor’s separates, her car, and her watch, is an essential tool for a working woman. By contrast, Coppola repeatedly isolates Cartier’s watch, employing close-ups as commercial fashion photography does to emphasize products. “Mimicking the pointing finger,” as Mary Ann Doane has argued, the cinematic close-up “transforms whatever it films into a quasi-tangible thing, producing an intense phenomenological experience of presence.”93 Cinema and commerce converge as Coppola cuts to a close-up of Eaton’s hand on the steering wheel. She does the same following the opening recreation of the American Gigolo scene, zooming in to allow viewers to see the watch on Eaton’s wrist, before cutting to a close-up of the star, gazing directly into the camera. As she approaches her lover poolside, the watch is visible but

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Figure 3.38 Lauren Hutton in American Gigolo, directed by Paul Schrader © Paramount Pictures 1980.

Figure 3.39 Courtney Eaton in Coppola’s ad for Cartier’s reissue of its 1980s’ Panthère watch, 2017.

he is not, as her arm and hair block him from view. Close-ups also reveal the watch on her wrist in bed during sex and then afterwards, while dancing at a club with her friends (Donna Summer’s daughters). As the sexual aggressor and dressed in a white shirt and dark jacket—more like Richard Gere than Lauren Hutton—Eaton assumes the gigolo’s position of stylish mastery.

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Figure 3.40  Courtney Eaton driving a vintage Mercedes convertible down a palmlined Los Angeles street.

Figure 3.41  Arthur Elgort, “Lisa Taylor, George Washington Bridge, New York,” 1976, inkjet print, 12 1/16 x 17 15/16 in. (30.6 x 45.6 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Arthur Elgort.

Gere’s character in the film also pilots a Mercedes, a black 450SL, and, like his Armani suits and Hutton’s Bottega Veneta clutch, it stands in as a token of 1980s’ material success. While the Panthère’s original 1983 launch date may have led Coppola to American Gigolo, it is also regularly invoked as a fashion

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film (understood in the more expansive sense of a film that foregrounds clothing and style). Coppola’s commercial mines American Gigolo for stylish references as a shorthand way of establishing that material goods then, as now, represent opulence. Not only did Cartier re-release its Panthère watch in 2017, but Bottega Veneta revived the clutch Hutton carried in American Gigolo, “exclusively available in the Gigolo Red color featuring a special engraved tag ‘The Lauren 1980’ in honor of Lauren Hutton and the year of the movie.”94 A highly complex reciprocal relationship between fashion and film is evident here: both still fashion photography and cinematic images inspire Coppola’s explicitly commercial work, which employs a movie star to unfold a wordless narrative derived from a film and shaped by still photography’s potential to conjure a story out of clothing and accessories. But films—Coppola’s short commercial and the full-length American Gigolo—also directly influence consumption of fashion accessories.

Filming Fashion, Fashioning Film In this chapter, I argue that Coppola’s films—whether feature-length or short— exhibit a cinematic aesthetic, a film style, originating in visual forms related to fashion representations. Her acclaimed privileging of image over dialogue is grounded in her early exposure to fashion magazines, her academic training in photography, her brief professional experience as a fashion photographer, and her abiding interest in the fine arts as a viewer and collector. The moving images of her films engage with the still images of painting and photography, as well as moving images of fashion, on multiple levels, from recreations of individual examples to more general invocations of visual tropes associated with fashion representations, such as glamour portraits and tableaux. Additionally, Coppola’s films dramatize how the power of visual representations shapes perception, memory, and imagination. Print fashion advertisements and fashion films—both short commercial works and feature films—configure how we look as well as “the look.” If fashion has shaped the visual aesthetic of Coppola’s films, it has also shaped fashion, with her style employed by luxury brands to promote consumer products.

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Coppola’s films have been described as contemporary “art cinema,” allied with the tradition of European cinema and against more commercial Hollywood products.95 Some of the qualities characteristic of what Jeffrey Sconce has termed “smart cinema,” the new art cinema emerging in the 1990s, surely describe Coppola’s style: “frequent (even dominant) use of long-shots, static composition and sparse cutting,” and “a preference for static mise-en-scène and longer shot lengths.”96 But, as this analysis demonstrates, these qualities in her work derive from the fine arts as much as the art house, from fashion houses as much as cinematic traditions. And her feature films, as well as her fashion films, are also commercial products. Her work, like fashion photography, fuses art and commerce. As Fiona Handyside has argued, her films “occupy a very particular position within the ecology of American cinema, associated with prestige and art rather than the mass-appeal and entertainment end of the market,” and this distinct positioning has enabled her to craft “a very personal aesthetic that is also associated with the romantic figure of the auteur.” Her auteur status, however, also positions the director and her films at the intersection of art and commerce in another sense: as Handyside puts it, “fashion takes Coppola’s auteur identity beyond the film text.”97 This extra-cinematic dimension—how Coppola’s films and her image, as a style icon and auteur, are enmeshed in fashion culture—is the subject of the next chapter.

4 The Fashion–Fame–Film Industrial Complex

“I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.” CHARLIE CHAPLIN1 “Fashion speaks capitalism … It manufactures dreams and images as well as things, and fashion is as much a part of the dream world of capitalism as of its economy.” ELIZABETH WILSON2 Film and fashion simultaneously fuse art and commerce. We refer to both enterprises as “industries,” for instance. Hybrid forms, they have engaged in cross-pollination from cinema’s birth, a “vital synergy” that is “as old as film itself,” as Adrienne Munich describes it.3 She cites the Oscar’s annual red-carpet fashion show as but one example. However, just as the red-carpet pageant has become a staple outside Hollywood, at music and television award shows and in sports arenas, so fashion has become entangled in a global economic web linking music, athletics, television, cinema, advertising, and social media that New York Times fashion reporter Vanessa Friedman has termed “the fashionfame industrial complex.”4 The hyphenated term captures the expanded definition of celebrity that has accompanied and sometimes driven fashion’s cultural prominence: contemporary Hollywood stars no longer dominate the popular culture hierarchy, but jostle for position alongside professional

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athletes and musicians, tech entrepreneurs and politicians, reality-TV and social media celebrities. Not only do Sofia Coppola’s films reflect this altered landscape, she has been caught up in it, as the daughter of a prominent filmmaker, a clothing designer, a style icon, and a director-celebrity. As this chapter explores, she has cannily exploited the contemporary media landscape encircling fashion to promote her films, hone a branded cinematic style in commercial and Hollywood film, and even spark fashion trends.

The Fashion–Fame–Film Industrial Complex “Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” Coco Chanel5 Coppola’s emergence as a filmmaker coincided with the origins of the “fashion– fame industrial complex,” with a growing confluence of fashion and stardom. Two cultural trends converged in the 1990s: the growth of independent cinema and the reemergence of celebrities as fashion arbiters. Ivan Shaw argues, for instance, that Grace Coddington and Camilla Nickerson at Vogue “began working with the portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz on fashion-focused portfolios that were enormous in scope and put into question the distinction between portraiture and fashion.”6 Film stars, rather than models, graced magazine covers and participated in campaigns for fashion brands. Vogue put actresses Sandra Bullock, Claire Danes, Sarah Jessica Parker, Renée Zellweger, and more on its covers during the era. This marked the “the reemergence of the celebrity cover and Hollywood’s reengagement with fashion.”7 Arguably, Edward Steichen’s portraits of Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, and other stars for Condé Nast in the 1920s and 1930s were the first to unite fashion photography and celebrity for advertising purposes.8 Charles Eckert claims that from cinema’s first decade films “functioned as living display windows for all that they contained,” presenting “innumerable opportunities for

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product and brand name tie-ins.”9 By the 1930s movie stars modeled clothing in photographs distributed to newspapers and magazines, while Hollywood studios and department stores created formal arrangements to reproduce and sell the styles worn by specific actresses in particular films in Cinema Fashions shops. For instance, “The dress that the MGM costume designer Adrian created for Joan Crawford to wear in the 1932 film Letty Lynton was so popular that Macy’s was said to have sold more than fifty thousand copies.”10 And the stars did not only serve as direct conduits. As Pamela Church Gibson notes, celebrities’ on-screen attire inspired more general trends: Katherine Hepburn’s trousers appeared in stores; Betty Grable’s legs made shorts fashionable; Lana Turner popularized sweaters and Audrey Hepburn the black turtleneck.11 The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of this symbiotic relationship between fashion and celebrity, with a few notable differences. As Hilary Radner has argued, films like The Devil Wears Prada and the television series Sex and the City reversed the commercial trajectory of the classical Hollywood studios: rather than translating haute-couture designs into approachable style, the films “cultivated a viewer sensibility receptive to and interested in films that featured designer clothing.” Simultaneously, the fashion press incorporated the same clothing into its coverage, “cultivating awareness of the film before its release.”12 And Church Gibson has noted that while during the heyday of Hollywood there was interest in what stars wore on screen, since the mid-1990s “it is far more likely to be their off-screen attire that is admired and copied.” Some stars function “as fashion icons quite independently of their on-screen roles.”13 But even this extension of the “celebrity–industrial”14 complex has undergone redefinition, becoming more dispersed and diffused than when journalist Maureen Orth coined the term in 2004. Definitions of “celebrity” have expanded beyond film and television stars to incorporate not only figures notable for their achievements in sports, music, politics, literature, business, philanthropy, and more, but users adept in amassing followers on social media to promote themselves while pitching products. “The fashion order is shifting” as well, as Friedman wrote fifteen years after Orth. Rather than being equated with clothing, accessories, cosmetics, and other tangible goods, fashion is “not necessarily about any product at all. It is about an idea of what a product stands

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for; about a creative form that connects to music and film and written words and action and layers it all together into community.”15 Friedman dubs it “Fashioncapital-F” to distinguish it from narrower definitions; likewise we could refer to the more encompassing definition of celebrity as “Fame-capital-F.” Coppola’s films and the director herself occupy a distinct position within their nexus— what we might call the “Fashion–Fame–Film industrial complex.” Her 2019 promotional film for Chanel encapsulates the multifaceted dimensions of cinema, celebrity, and fashion characteristic of contemporary commerce, as well as her unique personal and professional status. An electronic message Vogue Runway sent to subscribers offered “exclusive” access to the “movie.”16 Teasing readers with the headline, “Glamorous but with a Wink,” the message featured a black-and-white portrait of Coppola in a Chanel skirt suit, associating her style—as a fashion icon and a celebrity director—with the film’s style and, simultaneously, with the luxury brand’s contemporary refashioning. Coppola, who had interned with Karl Lagerfeld in Paris as a fifteen-year-old, has personal associations with the fashion house; however, it is her personal style that is appropriated here to define the brand as timeless haute couture (“glamorous”) but contemporary (“with a wink”), piggybacking on Coppola’s “easy-chic” image. The copy quotes Coppola, who cites her father’s friend Carole Bouquet as introducing her to the brand, adding additional layers of celebrity cachet, linking Sofia’s directorial lineage to Francis’s and Chanel’s image with the French actress. Both the magazine copy and the film reference Catherine Deneuve, whom Coppola describes as “so glamorous but with a wink.” The associations are dizzying, aligning Chanel with Coppola and Deneuve, and Coppola’s film style with the brand and its previous advertising history. Created for the opening of Chanel’s Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo, the film subtly alludes to Lost in Translation’s setting, as does the song, “Oblivion.” Its Canadian singer Grimes cites Japan as her “spiritual homeland,” and appeared at Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2013 runway show in Paris dressed like a haute-couture Harajuku girl.17 However, in the video collage allusions to Coppola’s signature style are fleeting (in contrast to the “fashion films” discussed in Chapter 3). Handheld shots of a cream-colored door labeled Mademoiselle Privé use the soft, filtered light she prefers, and flashes of color

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behind the Chanel label allude to her palette. However, as an “homage” to Mademoiselle—simultaneously the designer Gabrielle Chanel and the brand— the film includes a kaleidoscopic mix of historic images edited together by Chad Sipkin in a rapid-fire pace at odds with Coppola’s own languid style. Her cinematic brand may be subsumed by Chanel’s pre-existing visual legacy, yet Coppola’s status as a celebrity director burnishes it. The film self-reflexively highlights the symbiotic relationship between stars and the brand, employing still and moving images that showcase it. The opening clip, taken from a 1976 Helmut Newton ad for Chanel No 5, initiates this doubled effect: by inserting an ad within her own, Coppola foregrounds her position as a commercial director who, like her precursor, leverages star power to sell Chanel products. She incorporates pre-existing photographs and newsreel footage of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis alongside images of contemporary stars Tilda Swinton, Kristin Stewart, Julianne Moore, Margot Robbie, and others. Thus she is acknowledging the historic “celebrity–industrial” complex while updating it through expanded references to the contemporary “fame–fashion industrial complex” by including Chanel’s “brand ambassadors,” the musician Pharrell and model Lily Rose Depp. Still and moving images of Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld grant the designers celebrity status by association. Black-andwhite portraits of stars taken from Lagerfeld’s The Little Black Jacket book nod knowingly to the deliberateness of the alliances between brand and celebrity— and to Coppola’s place alongside them, for she is included in its pages (though not in the film). Interspersed among the stars’ images are shots of Chanel products featured in the exhibition, from its classic No 5 perfume bottle to pieces from the “Bijoux de Diamants” collection designed by Coco Chanel in 1932. Images of the iconic Chanel bouclé jacket dominate, on models and stars, but also isolated, as in one picture revealing its “secret” lining and another showing a towering seventy-five-foot replica as the centerpiece of the house’s 2008 runway show. Disembodied, the products are accorded the same star treatment as the celebrities—an effect underscored by close-ups of the seamstresses’ hands laboring to create these rarefied goods.

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Coppola also nods to her position within a fashionable line of European cinema, incorporating footage of Romy Schneider wearing Chanel in Luchino Visconti’s Boccaccio ’70 (1962). In so doing, she highlights the practice of product placement in cinema and alludes indirectly to her own complicity with the practice. As the costume designer for Life Without Zoë, her father’s segment in New York Stories (1989), she dressed both mother and daughter in head-to-toe Chanel, from headbands and hats to jackets and jewelry, belts and bags, even shoes. The set included a bottle of No 5 and a poster advertising the perfume featuring Bouquet, who appears as Princess Soraya in the film.18 This personal allusion gestures toward others, including Coppola’s own attachment to the brand. Not only is she featured in Lagerfeld’s book, but she was a regular at his shows and appeared in the 7 Days Out episode documenting the house’s Spring–Summer 2018 haute-couture show.19 She wore a black tweed skirt suit from the Paris Cosmopolite 2016/17 Métiers d’Art collection to present The Beguiled at the Cannes Film Festival, as Chanel reported on its website. It appears, in fact, indistinguishable from the suit she wears in the promotional photo for her short film. Paparazzi photos have captured her in Chanel jackets with jeans and accessorizing with Chanel bags, in other words the “easy-chic” image Vogue ascribed to her. Coppola’s short film acknowledges the role of Vogue, Elle, and other fashion magazines as arbiters of taste and drivers of consumer demand. A montage of covers featuring Chanel goods reminds viewers of the central function the fashion media play in shaping consumer desire and promoting luxury brands. In circular fashion, the press (not only Vogue but Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Wear Daily, and myriad online sites) promoted Coppola’s film for Chanel, in part advertising their own importance to the brand—and to the director. Coppola, who contributed photos to Vogue and Allure and served as guest editor for W and Vogue Paris, has graced covers of Vogue’s Australian and Italian magazines. Timed to coincide with the release of her films, Vogue produced fashion stories inspired by Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and The Beguiled and featured her films’ stars on its covers and in profiles. Thus the film recognizes that the promotional function of the fashion media extends beyond tangible objects. They sell films as well as fashionable goods and

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promote directorial as well as luxury brands, sometimes simultaneously, as in this instance. Vogue sells magazines and Chanel by capitalizing on Coppola’s fame; Coppola elevates her style—personal and cinematic—by association with Chanel’s storied legacy, which relies on association with film stars. The threads binding the fashion–fame–film industrial complex are multiple and overlapping. Coppola’s short film is entangled in it, as are her other commercial films and her features—and each exhibits a self-reflexive awareness of this fact. As even this short introductory analysis suggests, the commercial associations of film, fashion, and fame are dense and byzantine. In what follows, I untangle them temporarily at the risk of oversimplifying each, but in the hope of achieving greater appreciation and understanding of the extracinematic fabric encircling Coppola and her films.

Fame on Film “I think we just wanted to be part of the lifestyle. The lifestyle that everybody kinda wants.” Marc, The Bling Ring Coppola’s films self-reflexively focus on celebrity at the narrative level. Sara Pesce has argued that Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and The Bling Ring constitute a “trilogy on celebrity.”20 However, I would argue that all her feature films explore the dynamics of fame. Together, given the shared emphasis on seeing and being seen discussed in Chapter 1, they dramatize multiple versions of stardom. In its simplest definition, “anyone the public is interested in is a celebrity.”21 Thus the popular press’s interest in the French queen or the Bling Ring’s fascination with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Audrina Patridge is indistinguishable from the boys’ obsession with the Lisbon sisters or the ladies’ beguilement by McBurney. Lost in Translation, as much as Somewhere, dramatizes the public life of celebrity, as well as its constructed nature. “Stars, after all, are always inescapably people in public,” as Richard Dyer notes. In his seminal study Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Dyer notes a paradox: the public responsible for conferring stardom assume “people/stars are really themselves in private or perhaps in public but at any rate somewhere.”22 Coppola’s stories about Hollywood stars—

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Bob Harris and Johnny Marco—grant access to their private spaces, yet only to undercut the illusion that a real, authentic self exists behind the public face of celebrity. The same might be said of the Lisbon sisters and McBurney, as well as the actual celebrities featured in The Bling Ring. If, as Coppola’s films suggest, self-fashioning is an ongoing project and others fashion their own images of us independent of our intentions, they simultaneously stress the constructed nature of celebrity performance and cultural tendencies to ascribe value and meaning to others. In Dyer’s terms, stars “articulate the business of being an individual” but also embody “the social categories in which people are placed and through which they have to make sense of their lives, and indeed through which we make sense of our lives.”23 These fundamental insights into celebrity culture undergo further complication given that they emerge from cinematic narratives where the “stars” are played by stars. It is by now commonplace to distinguish between actors (or character actors), whom we perceive as indistinguishable from the characters they play, as inhabiting a role, and stars, who, owing to their visibility, we recognize as playing a role. When Scarlett Johansson played Charlotte in Lost in Translation, she was largely unknown; by contrast, Bill Murray had attained fame on S.N.L. and in films such as Caddyshack (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), and Groundhog Day (1993), to name but a few. Coppola wrote the part for him, thus the star he plays is in essence a version of his own star image, as an “ironic and cooly distant” comedian, a parallel promoted in the film where Bob Harris watches “himself ” (Bill Murray) in a televised rerun of S.N.L. As Murray noted in conversation with the director, “I know a little bit about being a movie star.”24 In a further instance of self-reflexivity, the scene depicting the whiskey commercial shoot pictures the director calling out male stars—Frank Sinatra, Roger Moore—to his own star to elicit the performance of Hollywood masculinity he desires. Bob counters with his own models: Dean Martin and Sean Connery, who actually appeared in a Suntory commercial in 1992. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, who plays Sean Connery as James Bond, an actor who, like Bob, is capitalizing on his image to promote a consumer product. Played for laughs, in keeping with Murray’s image, the scene neatly encapsulates a serious point about the constructed nature of selfhood projected on to film stars, and how these enduringly portable images serve commercial ends.

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By contrast, the lesser-known Stephen Dorff plays a generic Hollywood action star, while Paris Hilton plays herself (and merely in a brief cameo performance). The differences contribute meaningfully to each film’s take on fame. With Hilton playing herself, The Bling Ring mirrors the reality-TV celebrity culture it describes while shifting attention away from questions about authentic versus performing selves on to stars’ complicity in consumer culture and the socio-psychological motivations of their wanna-be emulators. While Hilton appears briefly, the other stars targeted by the teens do not, except refracted through the television footage and still photographs stitched into the film. As we’ve seen, these images reproduce the confluence of luxury fashion brands and celebrity image, with the stars posing with coveted accessories. Scenes filmed in Hilton’s mansion make the point starkly: her “Wall of Fame,” the staircase lined with framed images of the star, and the throw pillows stamped with her portrait represent how Hilton’s public face literally dominates her private space. By contrast, Somewhere shifts attention from the public dimension to the private, interrogating the possibility of crafting an identity and finding meaning independent of existence as a commodity or brand.25 Less overtly, The Virgin Suicides dramatizes the star–fan relationship through the boys’ idolization of the Lisbon sisters, who are introduced in a scene that replicates the film viewing experience: the boys are arrayed in a line, seated on the curb, watching the girls exit from the family station wagon (see Figure 3.26). Each sister is introduced in the style regularized by MTV, in a still image with her name hand lettered on the screen, as voiceover narration attests to their iconic status as unknowable figures whose impenetrable images retain pre-eminence in memory. Anna Backman Rogers argues that Lux (Kirsten Dunst) is “the blank screen onto which the boys project their phantasies,”26 but the same is true of the other Lisbon sisters. As lead, Lux acquires extra star status, a position augmented by Dunst’s preexisting reputation for appearances in Little Women (1994) and Interview with a Vampire (1994), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination, but augmented by the staged celebrity granted in her role within Coppola’s film. Her appearances in subsequent Coppola films—Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled—carry with them the aura of fame granted by the boys within The Virgin Suicides, as well as the notice her leading role garnered from audiences

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and accumulated in performances that followed, from the Spider-Man trilogy (2002–2007) to Melancholia (2011), which earned her the best actress award at Cannes. Her turn in Marie Antoinette, a historical figure invoked as the original celebrity,27 is simultaneously a form of metacommentary on her own position as a famous young woman and an interrogation of the problematic divide between private and public life dramatized within the film. By contrast, audience associations of Dunst with Lux and Marie Antoinette (in addition to other roles) deflect attention away from the parallels between the actress and the stars she has embodied on screen to her dramatic skills in The Beguiled, where she deliberately plays against her established Coppola type to inhabit her role as the mousy, sexually repressed Edwina. Nonetheless, the contrast in roles heightens the effect: fans, in particular, derive additional pleasure in watching her play against type. In addition, The Beguiled capitalizes on established stars appearing for the first time in a Coppola film: Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. Kidman’s imperious posture and long legacy as an actress augment her status as the school’s headmistress, but her off-screen glamour enhances the seductive subtext in her scenes with Colonel McBurney.28 McBurney’s beguiling speech and appearance rest, in part, on Farrell’s wide-ranging experience as an actor, having starred in dramas and comedies representing a mix of genres: from action thrillers like Tigerland (2000), Minority Report (2002), and Alexander (2004) to family films such as Saving Mr. Banks (2013) and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), blockbusters like Miami Vice (2006), and independents such as In Bruges (2008) and The Lobster (2015). But his off-screen reputation as a ladies’ man with a taste for drink and a fondness for jokes contributes perhaps more to scenes such as the one of a sweat-drenched McBurney toiling under the women’s gaze in the garden (see Figure 1.4). It adds greater potency to the obvious reversal of sexual politics to objectify both the character and the actor, rather than his potential conquests.29 McBurney’s shift from beguiler to beguiled also capitalizes on Farrell’s screen history, according to Backman Rogers, “since Farrell’s consistent failure to live up to (or embody unequivocally) the charming yet roguish ‘heart throb’ roles of his youth lends each subsequent role he plays an air of deflated expectation, impotence and disappointment. As such, Farrell is uniquely suited to manifesting masculinity in crisis.”30

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The ensemble cast of celebrity worshippers and wanna-bes in The Bling Ring represents an opposing strategy: largely unknown at the time of their casting, the actors obfuscate the reality of performance to appear to audiences as “real” teens. Katie Chang, who plays the ringleader Rebecca, had no acting experience before filming, and those with experience—Emma Watson and Taissa Farmiga—were cast as characters actively pursuing acting careers, in essence nods to their own developing celebrity. For instance, Watson, known for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, plays Nicki, who is “loosely based on the pole-dancing yoga instructor Alexis Neiers who was the centerpiece of the Vanity Fair article and the E! reality TV show Pretty Wild.”31 The film makes a complex point about celebrity in the age of reality television and social media: broadcasting their crimes on Facebook in images picturing themselves with stolen goods, photographic replicas of the branding strategies employed by their celebrity idols, led to their arrests, but that negative attention only enhanced the teens’ celebrity. They became notorious in the same media-verse as their victims, featured first in televised coverage of their court appearances and then in interviews, including one published by Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair that served as the basis for Coppola’s screenplay. The Bling Ring, now played by actors in the film, comes full circle: as they had mimicked celebrity performances, actors now mimic them. The final scene of the film stages this neatly, as Nicki (Emma Watson) turns directly to the camera and says, “you can follow me at nickimooreforever.com.”32 The self-conscious depiction and deployment of celebrity in Coppola’s films has been attributed, far too simplistically in my view, to her own biography. Daughter of a famous Hollywood director, she is inescapably a celebrity herself, with her first name gracing bottles and cans of her father’s sparkling wine and her family name bolstering her reputation as a director. Her personal circumstances have been invoked repeatedly as explanations for her films. Her heroines are consigned to “gilded cages” that replicate her own; the celebrities trapped in hotel rooms reflect her privileged access but also her personal sense of isolation. Journalist Agnès Poirier is simply dismissive: “Cinema is for Coppola a mirror in which she looks at herself, not a mirror she holds to the world.”33 Dana Stevens is only slightly less so:

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Coppola is a filmmaker of promise and … her path to success has been cushioned, not only by her place in the Coppola family, but by her own savvy image-management. She cultivates the persona of a shy, melancholy, and effortlessly glamorous girl wandering through a strange new world, bemused by the accolades heaped upon her—a persona that’s replicated in the dreamy, glazed female protagonists of … her movies.34 In short, Coppola’s fame as well as references to the celebrity in her films are accidents of birth. Such arguments are reductive at best. They vastly oversimplify celebrity itself, as well as the contemporary fashion–fame–film industrial complex, and, crucially, the participation of Coppola and her films within it. In fact, a single frame from The Bling Ring cannily offers the same critique: the title sequence, as film critics and scholars have noted,35 stops a pan of the jewel-strewn evidence table to focus on a necklace with the words “Rich Bitch” during the director credit (Figure 4.1). By strategically placing the words to divide “Written and Directed by” from “Sofia Coppola,” the filmmaker turns the pejorative modifier on to herself in a pre-emptive jab at her critics. In an insightful assessment in Slate, Nathan Heller identifies a more complicated nexus of film and fame at the heart of Coppola’s image:

Figure 4.1  The director calls out her “Rich Bitch” image. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

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From The Virgin Suicides to Somewhere, Coppola’s films are striking for their steadfast, targeted attack on the culture of Hollywood. And although this common thread at first looks incidental to her project, it runs to the heart of her divisive reputation. Coppola’s insider criticism of Hollywood, her disdain for the industry that her own career relies on, leads her into a strange territory between hypocrisy and candor, privileged lament and fearless protest. This indeterminacy gives her work the back-and-forth flicker—and intrigue—of a lure in water. But it also leads her to a site of unusual cultural tension. As both a beneficiary of creative privilege and a critic of it, Coppola has become a lightning rod for authenticity questions more broadly haunting American culture since the last boom era.36 Rather than one thread, however, Coppola fuses three together. If, as I argue above, fame, fashion, and film are interwoven threads, the threads themselves are composed of separate strands. Coppola’s fame consists of at least three: a personal image initially defined apart from her films and her family through fashion; an image as an auteur crafted at the nexus of film and fashion, understood in a broader sense (Fashion-capital-F); and a film brand (Coppolism) identifiable with Coppola as a celebrity and a celebrity director. In what follows, I consider each strand independently, even though in practice they overlap and intersect.

Fashioning Sofia “If I were a girl, I’d like to be Sofia.” Marc Jacobs37 Journalist Soraya Roberts has argued that Coppola “has always been defined by her style before anything else.”38 Scholars concur: Christina Lane and Nicole Richter claim that “Coppola has succeeded by fashioning herself as a celebrity; … she presents herself as an image.”39 Heidi Brevik-Zender adds that she “relies on fashion and its industry to engineer her own complicated role in the public spotlight.”40 The previous chapters touch on Coppola’s direct

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involvement in the fashion industry early in her career, from internships with Chanel to costume design and photography on both sides of the camera. The timeline at the back of this book details these early experiences, and shows that her experimentation with fashion coincided with fleeting appearances in film and music video. Much has been made of the harshly critical reviews of her performance in The Godfather III (1990), a role she assumed after Winona Ryder dropped out, claiming exhaustion, as being responsible for Coppola’s choice of directing over acting.41 She has disputed this narrative, but, more compellingly, even a glance at the timeline shifts the balance in favor of fashion over acting. In 1992, for instance, she appeared on the cover of Vogue Italia, photographed by Steven Meisel. Inside, seven fashion images shot in black and white or sepia tones cast Sofia as a Latin beauty akin to Maria Callas and Sophia Loren (una forza espressiva tra Callas e Loren, una bellezza latina già). However, the accompanying article uncouples her image from her performance on screen. While it acknowledges her role in The Godfather III, it discusses her life in California, including her art-school education, immersion in the LA music scene, and preparations for Hi-Octane, the short-lived video series she hosted with Zoe Cassavetes. It brands her a “daughter of art, Italian of America, girl of the Nineties” (iglia d’arte, italiana d’America, ragazza degli anni Novanta).42 By the mid-90s fashion and directing had emerged simultaneously as her métier: in 1994 she formed the clothing company MilkFed with her friend Stephanie Hayman, and in 1996 she co-directed Bed, Bath and Beyond (with Andrew Durham and Ione Skye) and the music video “This Here Giraffe” for the Flaming Lips. Within a space of three years she had directed her first solo project, the short film Lick the Star (1998), and The Virgin Suicides (1999), as well as appearing in an ad for Marc Jacobs perfume, photographed by Juergen Teller (2001), and on the cover of Vogue, photographed by Mario Testino. At the time she was completing Lost in Translation (2003), she told a journalist, “The clothing company does well enough that I don’t have to make money from movies.”43 While MilkFed became synonymous with LA chic in New York and London—and later Tokyo street culture (Urahara)—her personal style derived from Europe.44 As a fashion icon, Sofia’s image is defined by an understated elegance grounded in classic separates that are timeless rather than trendy. A Japanese book subtitled “Perfect Style of Sofia’s World” documents its

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components: a man’s shirt, paired with either jeans in her “Casual Style” or slacks in her “Elegant Style,” often topped by designer jackets and, for social appearances, one-piece dresses and ballet flats.45 In contrast to her signature cinematic palette, she gravitates toward black, white, and navy blue. (She has said, “My memoir will be called: Does This Come in Navy?”)46 In keeping with her classic style, Coppola has relied on traditional fashion media in conveying her image. The fashion press has praised her for her “pared-back polish” (Vogue) and “totally understated chic” (Glamour), equating her style with her person: “effortlessly elegant, just like her.”47 While Coppola does not maintain a social media presence, her followers do in their fashion blogs and on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, breathlessly breaking down her look and providing tips (and online links) on how to mimic it. As what Elle dubbed “the OG low-key, luxe muse,”48 she has inspired fashion designers from her friend Marc Jacobs to Julie de Libran. In addition to modeling for Jacobs’s perfume, Coppola has partnered with him to imprint his designs for Louis Vuitton with her own personal brand. She designed a coveted handbag, originally priced at $6,950, and created a window display at Le Bon Marché in 2013 featuring miniature versions of the bag, the same year she was featured as one of his timeless “muses” in a Tokyo exhibition.49 In 2012 she collaborated on Jacobs’s resort collection, and modeled for his 2015 Fall/ Winter collection. De Libran had also worked at Louis Vuitton, specializing in red-carpet gowns for celebrities, before becoming artistic director of Sonia Rykiel (2014–19). (She stepped down to establish her own line soon before the French house closed.) Her collection includes two versions of the “Sofia,” a tunic for day and a cocktail dress for evening, both in a style consistent with Coppola’s own preferred silhouette. De Libran describes them as “inspired by my friend Sofia who has a kind of effortless chic and also happens to be massively creative and has a huge heart.”50 As this brief overview suggests, Coppola’s personal style and celebrity emerged through her participation in an intimate network of what Pam Cook has called a “a new creative elite that crosses several areas of popular culture: music, fashion, art and film.”51 Her friends and collaborators are designers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists. But within her own person Sofia

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embodies facets of these distinct creative arenas, and this fusion has formed her image as a style icon. As Jacobs, a member of her “mob,” put it: “She loves fashion and music and art and film, and she is able to combine them in a way that all seems to be quite natural.”52 Jacobs’s use of “seems” is apt, for in her work Coppola combines these elements strategically, with care and deliberation.

Designing the Director “Film-making, then, as fashion, with Sofia as the queen of the catwalk.” Sean O’Hagan53 Following the success of Lost in Translation, film attained greater prominence in Coppola’s status as a fashion icon. Accepting the award for best original screenplay at the 2004 Academy Awards ceremony wearing a gown designed by Jacobs, she emerged as a celebrity director. Film scholars have charted the rise of the auteur as a “marketable commodity,” of the “director-as-star.”54 The phenomenon hinges on equating cinematic style with personal style, establishing an equivalence between the director and her films. The concept of the director as auteur is controversial to say the least, but Pam Cook and Caitlin Yunuen Lewis have mounted compelling cases for applying the designation to Coppola.55 Traditionally, auteurs were defined as pursuing themes reflecting a personal vision. However, as Dana Polan has argued, the classic definition has given way “to the study of poetics or stylistics, the material engagement with filmic form on the part of the director.”56 To some degree both definitions apply to Coppola, for, as we have seen, her personal preoccupations with fashion and self-fashioning suffuse her films, from narrative through to cinematic dimensions. As outlined in Chapter 3, she has an instantly recognizable film style which, while crafted through collaboration with her creative team, has been ascribed to Coppola simultaneously as a director and as a public persona. As Cook explains, “she insists on creative autonomy and emphasizes the personal nature of her films as part of her auteurist credentials.”57 Several critics have focused on her gender as definitive, linking her personal aesthetic to what Lewis describes as “cool post-feminism.”58 Hers is

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a brand of “feminine auteurship,” Todd Kennedy claims.59 This exemplifies the trend Cook describes as fabricating a brand by connecting the director’s life, persona, and films.60 Significantly, the critics defining Coppola’s brand as feminine do so based on her first three films, equating the female protagonists with Sofia’s personal experiences of girlhood. Based on the Lisbon sisters, Charlotte, and Marie Antoinette, they identify Coppola with whiteness, privilege, leisure, and female consumption,61 namely the “rich bitch” image she called out in the opening of The Bling Ring. They ascribe political purpose to sartorial choices, eliding crucial differences between representation and reality and ignoring temporal distinctions. For instance, as I argued earlier, establishing The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette as a trilogy about girlhood necessitates excising the male protagonists from the first two films and focusing on the middle third of the last. The films’ images of femininity derive from distinctly different eras as well: the 1970s, 1990s, and 1700s. As representations, as Chapter 2 delineates, each is filtered through multiple lenses: the boys’ memory and nostalgia in The Virgin Suicides is one, represented in its turn through cinematic recreations of the era which are themselves derived from visual representations in advertising and photographs. The boys’ and the film’s representations of femininity can hardly be described as “postfeminist.” Marie’s rebellious self-fashioning does repackage pre-Revolutionary history through postfeminist lenses, equating liberation with ostentatious color and consumption. However, these distinct representations of femininity differ not only among themselves but from Coppola’s personal style, which hews most closely to Charlotte’s. Their shared preferences for classics eschews contemporary incarnations of feminine dress and harkens instead to a distant model derived from fashion history of the postwar years and enshrined by fashion media as “timeless.” In short, equations of Coppola’s traditional feminine style with postfeminism are partial at best (and require overlooking her uniform of men’s shirts with jeans). Note that the critics’ branding and Coppola’s resistance raise questions of agency. The critics impose an image on the director, grafting their impressions of her films on to pre-existing public images and personal narratives. For instance, the same feminine style—ascribed to her characters and herself— results in an alternative construction. Cook identifies it as French, a more

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accurate reading of its fashion history, and that leads her to equate Coppola’s cinematic brand not with American postfeminism but European art-house traditions. She cites four parallels: ●●

“her reliance on the ambiguity of the image, which is deployed for its formal and affective qualities rather than as the repository of truth and meaning”;

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“her focus on ambivalent characters who are often morally flawed”;

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“her use of an equivocal style that refuses to allow the viewer a settled position from which to understand the film”;

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“Her work has an elusive quality that is also a feature of her directorial persona, which is perceived as low-key and relaxed.”62

Derived not from a biological given (Coppola’s sex) but instead from an aesthetic preference, Cook’s branding is more capacious. Rather than being restricted to a cluster of early films, it can be extended to all the existing six and potentially future films. Nonetheless, together these examples reveal branding as an interpretative activity imposed by critics and scholars, and derived as much from judgments of Sofia’s personal fashion decisions as from her film style. By contrast, one could argue that Coppola has crafted her director-star image just as she has her cinematic style. Prior to achieving prominence as a director, her celebrity image had been configured by others. Photographic images, editorial copy, and profile pieces constructed an image, shored up by assessments given by family and friends. Just as directing placed her on the opposite side of the camera, so did opportunities to guest edit for the same fashion media that had covered and enshrined her style. The same year she accepted the Oscar for best original screenplay, she guest edited the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Vogue Paris. The cover brands her as director (Figure 4.2): the black-and-white image, shot by Mario Testino, recalls the cover of Vogue Italia, but rather than adopting a traditional portrait pose, Coppola bends over in a Marc Jacobs dress, her hair spilling over the margin with her shoulder blocking the lower half of her face. Her eyes look directly at the viewer, emphasizing the importance of vision. The type enforces the image: “Mise-en-Scène: Sofia COPPOLA.” Film terminology announces her as director while placing her as the central object

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Figure 4.2  Sofia on the cover of Vogue Paris, December 2004/January 2005. Mario Testino.

of the frame. The capital letters pronounce the shift from Sofia the style icon to Coppola the director-star. Inside, editor Carine Roitfeld presents Coppola as the issue’s “guest star” (calling out the term in English), yet the accompanying photos present her at work on the issue. A four-page spread, “Les choix de Sofia” (“Sofia’s choices”), employs her photographs arranged in a collage, with product

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details and pricing handwritten on the lower white band of Polaroid shots or post-it notes. It replicates her photographic style for magazines such as Dune but also promotional materials for The Virgin Suicides, and alludes to the look books and mood boards she employs as inspiration for her films’ visual designs. Rather than posed formally, Coppola appears in several shots modeling shoes and clothing as though captured informally in personal snapshots, fusing her visual style with her personal off-screen image, as she does in a subsequent section “Snap-shots Personnel” (“Personal snapshots”). A single page of Polaroid shots features Sofia and a fashionable version of the Coppola “mob” modeling one of her wardrobe staples, a tailored jacket, whose lineage is traced to Dior in 1947. In so doing, she emphasizes her knowledge of fashion history and embrace of French tradition, while simultaneously updating the look as well as the cultural position of its contemporary wearers. Each woman is identified by name and profession (model, student, producer, television star) with Sofia, in the center, as “réalisatrice” (director). A section called “Les Bibles de Sofia” (“Sofia’s Bibles”) reinforces her professional expertise—as editor and director—by detailing the artistic influences on her visual style, including those directly tied to fashion (Helmut Newton and Fiorucci) but also those who are not (Richard Prince and Elizabeth Peyton). The traditional fashion spreads featuring the director-star—a section of black-and-white images taken by David Sims, a second spread by Testino, and another, in color, by Craig McDean—are inserted between the sections captured in Coppola’s photographic style. Call-out text even reinforces her director position: “Je sais aujourd’hui que je préfere être derrière plutôt que devant la camera” (“I know today that I prefer to be behind rather than in front of the camera”).63 An interview with her father and a concluding “Box Office” spread, where famous stars and directors (including Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodóvar) discuss their five favorite films, establish that her film connections and credentials equal or surpass her fashion bona fides. Subsequent press followed suit, foregrounding her director status while burnishing her reputation as a fashionista. Insights into her art collections, photographic work, cinematic practice, musical tastes, and residences establish  her as an artist and a cultured, well-traveled, and fashionable filmmaker. A New York Times article on “Sofia Coppola’s Paris” details her forays into chic neighborhoods to visit museums and parks, where the journalist and director “shopped as if we were engaged in a kind of

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sociological study of French customs and style,” with a long list of her favorite boutiques, bars, and restaurants appended.64 Coverage of her stylish network of designers, musicians, artists, chefs, film stars, and magazine editors positions her as part of a new creative elite, composed not only of artists working in traditional fine-art fields but also those with commercial ties. Later profiles of Coppola, timed to coincide with the release of her films in 2013 (The Bling Ring) and 2017 (The Beguiled), reveal a more concerted effort to configure the director as an artist. The Bling Ring’s pronounced interest in fashion prompted several articles detailing her fashion experiences and career ambitions to be a fashion editor.65 However, even the fashion press produced profiles branding her “The Visionary” (Stylist Magazine), and tantalized readers with “a look at the world through Coppola’s eyes” rather than details of her private life.66 By 2016 coverage appeared in the art press, providing access to her art collection, with carefully curated selections highlighting images that inspired the look of The Beguiled. Artspace enticed readers to “See Inside the ‘Virgin Suicides’ Auteur’s Dreamy Art Collection,” fusing her taste in art with her signature “dreamy” film style.67 Aperture quotes her complaint—“I felt frustrated at art school. I had so many interests—design, photography, music”—before identifying filmmaking as “the form that allowed Coppola to engage all her passions, especially photography, which has been central to shaping her cinematic language.”68 By describing her “directorial signature” as “visual calm and compositional clarity,” the editors associate her cinematic style with her photographic expertise, equating her filmmaking with the fine arts. With her guidance and assistance, they brand the director-star as artist.

Coppola as Capital “Coppola as a brand has become increasingly difficult to extricate from any consideration of the formal properties of her work.” Anna Backman Rogers69 The 2004/2005 Vogue Paris issue included an often-reproduced snapshot of Sofia snuggling in bed with Marc Jacobs, and his products appear on her person

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and among her “things.” Certainly, this is an example of the classic celebrity– industrial complex, with Coppola leveraging her fame to promote her designer friend’s goods. As her director brand developed, however, it encompassed a more complex synergy of fashion, fame, and film. As a director-star she is an artist, but also straddles two commercial enterprises: commodity fashion and cinema. Timothy Corrigan has identified a “commerce of auteurism” dating from the 1980s when the auteur was transformed into a star as part of “a commercial strategy for organizing audience reception, as a critical concept bound to distribution and marketing aims.”70 While Corrigan focused primarily on how auteur-stars promote their films and themselves as artists, subsequent critics have extended the phenomenon beyond the film business. Director-stars now promote their films as well as commodities, though less directly than Coppola’s father did in ads for Suntory whiskey or, as Coppola has done, by directing commercials. Promotion is more diffused: conventional marketing strategies now overlap with multiple campaigns waged simultaneously across diverse media platforms, all hinging on the Coppola brand that fuses her persona with her directing style. For this reason, Cook has called her a prime example of the “commodity auteur.”71 Two examples illustrate the contemporary commerce of Coppola’s auteurism. The August 2013 issue of Vogue Australia features Sofia on the cover, photographed by her former art-school photography professor Paul Jasmin, and styled by Stacey Battat, former designer for Louis Vuitton and the costume designer for the film the director is promoting, The Bling Ring.72 On the cover and in the profile inside the issue, “The Sofia Factor,” Coppola models pieces from Marc Jacobs’s Fall/Winter 2013 collection for Louis Vuitton. The cover image places Sofia at the center of a personal nexus of art, film, and fashion, promoting all the responsible personalities (Jasmin, Battat, Jacobs) through the vehicle of her director brand. The profile within peddles commodities, cinema, and Coppola simultaneously, opening with a brand-checking description of her clothing (Acme jeans, Céline sandals), including the bag she designed for Louis Vuitton. The accompanying photos, shot at the Chateau Marmont where she filmed Somewhere (which is named in the text along with her other films), feature her wearing Hermès, Rochas, and Armani, in addition to Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton, ornamented by jewelry from Tiffany & Co. A caption identifies her as wearing something we

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cannot see: Miss Dior perfume, for which she directed three commercials. Several images are stamped with comments about the director from her stars: Kirsten Dunst, Emma Watson, and Elle Fanning. Each is affixed with the actor’s signature to emphasize their personal, intimate nature. Collectively, they highlight Coppola’s position as director while praising her as a person. The effect is to elevate the director’s celebrity above theirs, which is leveraged to sell commodities, including her own film. Consider the difference from the classic Hollywood model, where film stars promoted goods featured on screen. Possibly a better example of contemporary auteur commerce is a May 2017 feature in W, “A Guided Tour to Sofia Coppola’s Inspirations by Sofia Coppola Herself.”73 Like the pieces in the art press, it details artworks that inspired the film she is promoting, The Beguiled, but also the advertisements she directed for Cartier and Calvin Klein. In so doing, the director makes no distinction between feature films and commercial work: both are artistic projects created for consumers. The opening image of the director on set in New Orleans does nothing to disguise commerce, but in fact does the reverse: the director is pictured not with her stars or members of her creative team, as is typical, but with her producer. In the caption Coppola promotes another designer friend: “I wanted a work uniform, so Julie de Libran at Sonia Rykiel made this jumpsuit for me.” Two images not directly tied to either The Beguiled or the advertisements can now be understood retrospectively as promotions for future work: she includes a graphic for Fiorucci that will appear with others “in a new book,” without mentioning that she contributed the foreword;74 and the image of Romy Schneider wearing Chanel in Visconti’s The Job (1962) will appear, in motion, in her “homage” to Mademoiselle. It would be tempting to describe this as stealth promotion of her work, if it were not hiding in plain sight.

Coppolism as Commerce “Run your hand through some necklaces like a Coppola heroine feeling the air out a car window.” Monica Heisey75

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The fashion–fame–film industrial complex does not require the director-star persona for its operation. Coppola’s films, on the basis of their distinctive visual artistry in fashioning worlds, have been appropriated to sell more than tickets, DVDs, digital copies, or streaming services. The products sell other products, from fashionable goods to fashion magazines. Her films do so, however, by eschewing conventional Hollywood strategies, such as product placement or tie-ins. In fact they undermine, if not overtly mock, the idea of cinema serving as “a shop window,” as Eckert described it. Savvy viewers might be able to identify pieces from A.P.C., Agnès B., or MilkFed in Charlotte’s wardrobe in Lost in Translation,76 but her wardrobe is so understated that the clothing hardly calls attention to itself. When goods are omnipresent, as in The Bling Ring, whose characters call out luxury brands by name, they appear in the context of critique. The promotional website for the film subverts any efforts by viewers to purchase the goods featured on the film.77 It features interactive photos of the cast wearing the stolen celebrity goods. As visitors scroll over the product image, a yellow box calls out the branded clothing. A click takes the would-be consumer to a mock product page, with a tongue-in-cheek description of the garment in relation to the film character modeling it. A luxury-level price appears as well, but if consumers click to buy, they discover it’s free. Falling for the lure of free goods (like the on-screen burglars) takes the buyer to a final screen containing a character’s quote from the film, each affirming their vacuous, superficial values, and this one, succinctly expressing the credo of contemporary success: “It’s not what you are that counts. It’s what they think you are.” Like the film itself, the webpage implicates visitors who actively engage in the same process of looking and consuming as The Bling Ring’s characters, while ingeniously confounding their expectations and inserting moments for reflection at each step. As we’ve seen, Lost in Translation stages the practice of celebrity product endorsement, highlighting its artifice. Nonetheless, Suntory whiskey is featured in two advertisements—in the filmed advertisement-in-process and the billboard the characters spot in the film (see Figure 2.11)—starring Bill Murray, an actual celebrity. It is an endorsement with a wink, an acknowledgment of film’s commercial motivations. When considered, as well, as an allusion to Suntory advertisements featuring Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa filmed in the 1980s, the filmmaker implicates herself. The ads opened by identifying

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each as a director, associating each with his most famous film (Apocalypse Now, Kagemusha).78 They are examples of auteur celebrity endorsements from a previous generation and, as such, Coppola’s film alludes, perhaps aspirationally, to her position as a director-star. Regardless, the staged ad encapsulates a more complex and contemporary synergy between cinema and consumer culture. If Coppola’s films critique blatant consumerism—promotion and consumption—they are a part of consumer culture nonetheless. Critics have taken the director to task for being insufficiently distanced or critical. Church Gibson charges that Coppola is “unable or unwilling to critique the wealthy celebrity-obsessed she depicts,” adding that “her own credentials within Hollywood and the fashion industry serve to shield her.”79 Delphine Letort claims that her critique is “subdued by her complicity with the luxury industry.”80 Their criticism misses the mark in several respects: it ignores the distinction between cinematic representation and the director’s personal life and attends insufficiently to the films’ critique. (Others, for instance, have argued that The Bling Ring offers a “critique of capitalism,” “a dystopic vision of democratized celebrity and accessible luxury,” and taken Lost in Translation as rejecting “the excessive nature of global capitalism.”81) More importantly, it rests on misguided assumptions about the relationship between art and commerce in cinema. While Coppola’s works have been classed as the products of an independent auteur, associated with art and prestige, they are also themselves products enmeshed in consumer culture. In Brand Hollywood, Paul Grainge comments on the tendency in film studies to either enforce or collapse the division: “While for some this apparent collapse in the boundary between art and commerce represents a deepening of the challenge to ingrained hierarchies of taste and aesthetic value … for others it heralds the ultimate victory of consumer capitalism.” He advises “resisting the tendency to moralize about the intrusions of commerce in cultural life,” in favor of acknowledging the complex interpenetrations of the two.82 Rather than judging Coppola’s “complicity with the luxury industry,” in what follows I focus instead on how her products—her films—interact with others in the contemporary marketplace, with varying degrees and varieties of purpose and intention. For instance, without Coppola’s direct involvement, her films have inspired the creation of fashionable commodities and trends, ranging from

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highly specific associations to vague homages. Berlin perfumer Mark Buxton created The Virgins, a scent in his Moth and Rabbit Parfums line, based on two individual scenes in The Virgin Suicides, time-stamped with exacting precision on the bottle for ease of reference: when Peter enters the sanctum of Cecilia’s bedroom to visit the bathroom (00:08:50–00:09:51) and when the boys enter the Lisbon home following the girls’ suicides (1:22:33–1:23:47). The fragrance’s allusions to the film are subtle, tied not simply to olfactory references, to the imagined scent emerging from the spray bottle Peter squeezes or the lipstick he sniffs. Instead, Buxton cites “voyeurism, softness and innocence” tied to objects: “Religious porcelain figurines forgotten by prayer. The rite of passage. Prom bouquets, 70’s red lipstick, glitter powder, and soft cotton panties. The sacramental flesh and dusty remains of an empty room.”83 Designed as part of a collaboration with Le Cinéma Olfactif, the scent accompanied screenings of the clips mounted at specialty shops, such as Fumerie Parfumerie in Portland, Oregon. Their description finds equivalences between the scent and the film’s style: it “perfectly captures the drowsy pacing of the film and the soft, powdery notes transport us right back to the 1970s … there is a haunting sense of emptiness that further ties the composition to the film.”84 Film setting, rather than style, inspired Grace Coddington’s fashion editorial in the April 2011 issue of Vogue. “Chateau California,” set at the Chateau Marmont, was, by her account, inspired by Somewhere.85 However, while it includes Elle Fanning among its featured “young Hollywood talents,” it does not allude to the film’s plot or visual style.86 Instead, it parallels the film by invoking its fashion–fame–film legacy. Photographed by Bruce Weber, the spread, like the film, acknowledges the hotel’s storied past and indelible associations with both fashion history and celebrity. As might be expected, the films in Coppola’s oeuvre that foreground clothing through costume—Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled—have inspired fashion spin-offs. John Galliano, whom Coppola had originally intended to design the gowns for Marie Antoinette, created a masquerade and bondage collection for Dior.87 As Diana Diamond describes, the collection featured “hoop-skirted Marie Antoinette gowns printed with tableaux of the queen’s life, such as her frolicking as a shepherdess and her being executed by guillotine. ‘Guillotine

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chic’ was the term given to one Galliano creation.”88 (It is also tempting to take Moschino’s Marie Antoinette-inspired Fall 2020 show, with a minidress designed as a multitiered cake, as realizing Coppola’s conflation of queen and confectionery.) As we saw in Chapter 2, the long calico gowns in The Beguiled were cited as a contributor to the “prairie dress” trend in 2018. One fashion commentator described Doen’s designs as “a Sofia Coppola adaptation of ‘O Pioneers!’”89 These incidental appropriations differ from more calculated commercial tie-ins. Consider, for instance, the difference between the prairie-dress trend and another launched by The Beguiled’s marketing team at Focus Features. They made McBurney’s curse, “vengeful bitches,” a tag-line for promotion on social media in advance of the film’s release, purportedly sending “Vengeful Bitches” T-shirts to Instagram celebrities and stars of The Real Housewives of New York.90 Deliberate marketing ploys like this, however, have been rare for Coppola’s films. Much scholarly attention has focused on the marketing of Marie Antoinette, the only one of Coppola’s films to date to be released by a major studio, Sony. A companion two-volume CD, Coppola’s published script, and a new cover for Antonia Fraser’s biography of the queen featuring Kirsten Dunst all accompanied or shortly followed the film’s release. As Cook has ably documented, the products borrowed more subtly from the film: a two-disc soundtrack CD that included a glossy booklet of images from the film and an album cover that copied its design. Other spin-offs, such as the DVD and the reissue of Fraser’s biography, were also produced using the movie’s trademark colors. An elegant and lavishly mounted book published by Rizzoli contained extracts from the script illustrated with production photographs, design sketches, and film stills. The shiny, pale blue jacket, which was shocking pink on the reverse, carried a title that imitated the film’s graphics. Marie Antoinette, its ancillary products, and commercial tie-ins had a unified design concept that relied on and strengthened Coppola’s profile.91 The film’s visual signature was employed to sell ancillary goods, even though the film itself, Cook stresses, showed “that the decadence of Marie Antoinette’s self-indulgent lifestyle led straight to the scaffold.”92 Anthony Lane saw its

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critique more starkly: despite appearing as if it were “made by Paris Hilton, … any decent French Marxist would be happy to deconstruct the film as a trashing of the idle rich.”93 If the film narrative, as they suggest, works at crosspurposes with its lavish visual display, then the products’ appeal derives not from their equivalence with the consumer goods featured in the film but with the director’s style. This is more evident in the fashion spread in Vogue’s September 2006 issue that coincided with the film’s release, edited by Coddington and shot by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz at the newly renovated Grand Trianon at the Château de Versailles and in the Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Hôtel de Soubise, where many of the film’s interiors were shot.94 In short, it effectively repurposed the film set for a fashion editorial. It also featured its cast. One shot captures the ensemble in their sumptuous costumes as though in a still taken on set (Figure 4.3). The majority of images, however, feature its star, Dunst, styled as a contemporary “teen queen” in eighteenth-century-inspired corseted gowns commissioned by the magazine

Figure 4.3  The cast of Marie Antoinette, Vogue, September 2006. Annie Leibovitz/ Trunk Archive.

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from Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Oscar de la Renta, Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga, Olivier Theyskens for Rochas, and John Galliano for Dior. Accompanying articles by Kennedy Fraser and Caroline Weber (based on her book Queen of Fashion) detail the life of Marie Antoinette and equate her reign with the birth of haute couture. The historic queen is eclipsed visually by Dunst in her role, just as the contemporary gowns, presented in concert with Canonero’s costumes, on the same sets as in the film and modeled on its star, become an extension of the cinematic queen’s world. Marie Antoinette, in essence, becomes Marie Antoinette, and the fashion houses as well as the magazine profit by capitalizing on Coppola’s distinctive refashioning of the queen. (It may be worth noting that, behind the scenes, the director guided the photographer to change one shoot to another “better” room, as Grace Coddington recalls in her interview with Coppola on Face to Grace.95) In fact, given that Vogue commissioned the gowns for the piece, which, regardless of Dunst’s contemporary hair and make-up, appear more akin to Canonero’s costumes than couture dresses, the magazine arguably reaped more benefits than the fashion houses by leveraging their designs and Coppola’s cinematic narrative and style to sell copies and advertising. Just over a decade later, Coddington and Leibovitz replicated their strategy for Vogue’s June 2017 issue, with Elle Fanning on its cover (Figure 4.4), in pale pink with an enormous rose headpiece that could be taken as a direct allusion to Dunst’s cover. This time they piggybacked on The Beguiled, shooting on the film set at Jennifer Coolidge’s house in Louisiana and styling Fanning in contemporary  versions of Civil War costumes. While the profile within considers the actress, rather than a historical fashion icon, it does stress her style, name-checking designer goods: she appears for her interview with Nathan Heller wearing “an elegant red Céline turtleneck top, black Balenciaga rockabilly denim, and Maison Margiela sneakers with sparkling buckles,” and a “tiny Gucci purse.” She loves Rodarte and Miu Miu, who are “like characters in a film.”96 In the accompanying images, she poses as her character in the film might: outdoors on a swing or perched in an oak tree, and indoors in the kitchen, living room, and against the door to the music room at the base of the stairs—all sites key to the film narrative. The gowns she wears—by Loewe, Gucci, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Valentino, and Givenchy—demonstrate a quote from the director included in

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Figure 4.4  Elle Fanning on the cover of Vogue, June 2017. Annie Leibovitz, Vogue © Condé Nast.

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Figure 4.5  Elle Fanning in Alexander McQueen, Vogue, June 2017. Annie Leibovitz/ Trunk Archive.

the text: “The silhouette looks like something you could wear now or in the seventies,” says Coppola. “These long floral dresses … It’s this kind of dustypastel world.” An image of Fanning sprawled in a pale Alexander McQueen gown with a delicate floral print (Figure 4.5) directly invokes the film’s costumes as well as the photographs that inspired Coppola’s composition, particularly the Eggleston images discussed in Chapter 3. In fact, Leibovitz’s photo appears an amalgam of the two images (see Figures 3.3 and 3.7). If, as the previous chapter argues, Coppola’s cinematography derives from photographic conventions, her films lend themselves to appropriation for fashion editorials. Her visual aesthetic was influenced by portraiture and tableaux, so, in a circular fashion, her cinematic style lends itself to print photography. Leibovitz’s shot of the Marie Antoinette cast (see Figure 4.3) illustrates the confluence perfectly. Posed in Canonero’s costumes as in the film, they assume a combination of the classic tableaux enshrined by Penn and Beaton (see Figures 3.23 and 3.24). Facing the camera, they assume the formal arrangement of Penn’s twelve models, but their informal postures, the

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pastel colors of the costumes, and the ornate set (designed by Jean Hughes de Chatillon) invoke Beaton’s image. The overlaid text affixes a narrative, implying filmic action: the king and his wife are gathered for “a late-night gambling party,” while her lover “watches longingly from afar.” The tableaux marshals Coppola’s cast and Canonero’s costumes for a plot of its own design. The magazine and Coppola’s films engage in an elaborate form of crosspollination between still and moving images, cinematic narrative and fashion story, costume and couture, film marketing and fashion advertising.

Branded by Brands “I don’t do fashion. I am fashion.” Coco Chanel97 Coppola’s brand—understood as an amalgam of the three dimensions outlined above (style icon, auteur-star, and Coppolism)—has both received commercial support from and supported other brands. Her films, beginning with Marie Antoinette, have had splashy premieres, sponsored exclusively by fashion brands: Louis Vuitton (Somewhere, The Bling Ring) and Marc Jacobs (The Beguiled). Each has featured a red-carpet photo opportunity, covered by the fashion/ celebrity press (Women’s Wear Daily, PopSugar.com, Vanity Fair, Vogue, etc.). Pictures of celebrities—the director and stars of the film, the fashion designer, as well as others attending the screening—are taken against a backdrop of logos that entwines the film, its marketing company, and the fashion house (even Vanity Fair in the case of The Bling Ring), a species of co-branding that benefits all participants in the fashion-fame-film industrial complex. The Chateau Marmont, indelibly associated with Somewhere, hosted the after-party for that film, but also for each film appearing since then: The Bling Ring and The Beguiled. Covered by newspapers and fashion media—print, digital sites, television shows—the events offer additional opportunities to promote the fashion brands. An article in The Telegraph about the Somewhere party elevates Louis Vuitton’s brand in coverage nearly indistinguishable from ad copy:

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Coppola, revered for her chic spin on laidback, androgynous style, sparkled in a simple, sequinned black dress by Vuitton. Models Erin Wasson and Angela Lindvall, who have cameo roles as Hollywood groupies in the film, took the opportunity to premiere looks from Jacobs’ oriental inspired spring/summer 2011 collection for Louis Vuitton. Up-and-coming actresses including Isabel Lucas, Lea Seydoux and Jessica Chastain all called upon the magic of Louis Vuitton to make an entrance at the party. Quite possibly the only guest not wearing Vuitton was 12 year-old Elle Fanning, the younger sister of fellow actress Dakota, who wore a black puffball dress by Valentino.98 The brand’s designs, on models and celebrities as well as the film’s star director, acquire cachet by association with their fame, as well as the hotel’s links to Hollywood and fashion history. Coppola’s film, of course, represents the same fashion–fame linkage at the same site. The setting appeared natural, if not inevitable, for Somewhere’s promotional event. However, as discussed previously, the Chateau Marmont is both setting and character in the film, and its starring role in Coppola’s film has granted it additional contemporary cachet, augmented by each subsequent association with Coppola, her films, and the celebrities who attend the luxury brand-sponsored events at the site. Even in the absence of a new film, Coppola’s film legacy attaches to the site and her stardom is leveraged for fashion promotion. A headline in the Hollywood Reporter—“Sofia Coppola, Kirsten Dunst Toast Sonia Rykiel in L.A.”—exposed Julie de Libran’s strategy for promoting the French fashion house in California: transform its Parisian chic into “a casual, Paris-to-L.A. aesthetic with rainbow stripes, high-waist denim and Chateau-ready party dresses” by exploiting Coppola’s capital. (The article suggested another related motive, as well: to appeal to the stylists dressing celebrities, such as Gal Gadot, for red-carpet events.)99 For the fashion houses, such events are extensions of runway shows, opportunities to present their designs in motion. Munich has noted that both red-carpet and runway events “are shows.”100 The theatrical metaphor is apt, and provides another avenue for linking film with fashion. Film, after all, is not merely a visual medium. Coppola’s visual aesthetics are augmented by sound and movement to create rich sensory worlds that provide immersive,

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affective experiences. This has provided another dimension of film–fashion collaboration, with luxury houses employing the director to create fashionshow experiences. This differs from her advertising work, where she employs the same media form to produce short commercial films. Instead, she transfers her directing skills to live performances. In 2016, after seeing Marie Antoinette, designer Valentino Garavani tapped Coppola to direct the Teatro dell’Opera Di Roma’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata. He wanted her to bring the same “modern vision” she had to the French queen’s history to the “very traditional” opera, and Coppola replicated her film strategy: “I wanted to bring out the personal side of the French-courtesan, the party girl used to the social scene.”101 But clearly Valentino’s intent was promotional. He designed the four dresses worn by Violetta, while Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccoli, then the creative directors of Maison Valentino, designed costumes for the rest of the cast. Sets were conceived by Nathan Crowley, who had worked on Batman films as well as fashion installations for museum exhibitions. “A vast marble staircase (which appeared to be a homage to the one in Valentino’s flagship Roman store) sliced across the stage, providing a vertiginous runway for Violetta,” whose “long turquoise gauze train” trailed behind her, one reviewer noted.102 Another more tepid review faulted both Valentino’s designs and Coppola’s “hands-off direction,” noting that only the combined fashion–fame clout of their brands would attract audiences: “it is the dual presence of Valentino and Coppola that will continue to draw the designer-clad crowds.”103 As I noted in the opening of this chapter, Chanel commissioned Coppola for a purpose similar to Valentino’s: to bring a “modern vision” to the fashion house. If Valentino wanted to update couture and opera simultaneously, Chanel focused on couture alone. In addition to creating the “In Homage to Mademoiselle” commercial, Coppola collaborated with Chanel’s new creative director to recreate Coco Chanel’s 31 rue Cambon apartment as the stage for its “Métiers d’Art” show at the Grand Palais in December 2019. Continuing the house’s tradition of “cinematic-style blockbuster runway shows,” the set included “everything from the legendary mirrored staircase and five-pointed flowers on the chandeliers down to the black lacquer Chinoiserie screens that separated seating areas … remade on a grand Hollywood scale.”104 The coverage touted the “Oscar winner” and listed the celebrities in attendance, including Rashida Jones, the star of Coppola’s On the Rocks, anticipated to

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appear on Apple TV+ in 2020. If the pattern outlined above holds true, we can expect the film’s premiere and after-party to be hosted by Chanel (and a cheeky marketing campaign to be launched by A24 in keeping with The Bling Ring’s). Coppola’s upcoming film introduces an additional commercial layer as one of the first films to be released on Apple’s streaming service. She was featured in the company of other established American directors, including Steven Spielberg, J. J. Abrams and Ron Howard, in a polished promotional film to announce the service’s launch.105 Titled “Storytellers,” the film conveys Apple’s seriousness of cinematic purpose, employing Academy Awardwinning cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki and filming in black and white to position itself not as a neophyte production company, but as one that respects film history. Coppola, like the other established, award-winning directors, augments Apple’s narrative by providing behind-the-scenes insights into the cinematic process. While the film promotes Coppola as a director-star, Apple elevates its own brand by her participation—and not simply through her reputation as an auteur. She also augments Apple’s own pretensions to becoming a luxury brand. Bloomberg’s Narae Kim and Kana Nishizawa said, “Apple’s pricey new phone means it looks a lot like Louis Vuitton.” But, as other have noted, price alone does not confer luxury status.106 Just as Apple poached Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to run its retail and online stores and partnered with Hermès for its foray into the watch market, it is counting on Coppola to legitimate its cinematic products—both its distribution service and its film production. The iconic tech brand’s move into streaming to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and other services represents the continued transformation of cinematic production and distribution, but also marketing. As we have seen, Sony, Focus Films, and A24 have promoted Coppola’s films and themselves simultaneously. The director and her films now promote a partnership between Apple and A24, “one of the hottest brands in the arthouse space,” according to Variety. Three brands—a global technology firm, an “edgy” film studio, and a director-star—converge to grant film an aura of cultural cool. This cultural convergence may transform Coppola’s auteur brand as well. A24’s partnership with Apple increases the potential reach of her films beyond existing distribution opportunities provided by theatrical release, DVD sales,

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streaming services, and the studio’s partnership with DirecTV.107 Apple is reportedly pursuing conventional cinematic strategies, releasing films in cinemas first as part of its plan to draw “big-name producers and directors.” But the tech company also has the ability to reach the owners of more than 1.4 billion active Apple devices worldwide.108 While Apple is banking on “the prestige and brand-building that can come with a glitzy theatrical release,” Coppola is planning on leveraging the larger commercial reach of Apple’s streaming service for her own directorial ends. In May 2020 it was announced that she would write and direct a limited series based on Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country.109 Freed from the temporal restrictions of feature film, Coppola will have the luxury of extending her adaptation over multiple episodes, an ideal match for her preferred languid pacing. She can tap into the popularity of streaming with audiences at liberty to binge watch the series as an extended cinematic experience or consume it gradually—choices that mirror those facing the readers of Wharton’s chapters. The proposed project can only reinforce Coppola’s reputation as a commodity auteur adept at capitalizing on opportunities that serve her artistic and commercial ends.

Visual Currency On the Rocks is not Coppola’s first foray into streaming, nor is the proposed Custom of the Country series her first experiment with content intended for television. She directed a Christmas special, A Very Murray Christmas (cowritten with Bill Murray and Mitch Glazer) released on Netflix on December 4, 2015. The short film and its pre-release promotion encapsulate the consumerist nexus engendered by the shift from the big to the small(er) screen. Announced in Variety a year in advance, its production coincided with Coppola’s holiday campaign for Gap. Following David Fincher, she directed four commercials for Gap’s “Dress Normal” campaign, each promoting individual self-expression through clothing at awkward family gatherings. The fashion–fame–film convergence is clearly at work here: the ads’ release teased audiences with news of her upcoming work, while Gap benefitted from Coppola’s fame as both an Oscar-winning filmmaker and a style icon. The company’s global

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chief marketing officer highlighted both in a statement: “Sofia has brilliantly translated Gap’s snapshots of these authentic family characters to the screen. Sofia is a great fashion icon and helped us bring our fashion themes to life alongside the storytelling of family fun for the festive season.”110 Her move from the big screen to the small screen coincided with a shift from luxury to mainstream fashion. Despite their traditional family settings—holiday gatherings at home—the ads employed a subversive, wry humor in line with Coppola’s reputation as an independent filmmaker and with Bill Murray’s comedic style. Shot in bright light from conventional angles, the commercials bear little resemblance in style to her director brand. Yet they display Coppola’s inventive use of music. Rather than featuring holiday classics, each is set to an unconventional choice: “Deep Down” by Hazel and the Jolly Boys, “I Got Stripes” by Johnny Cash, “I’m Not Ready for Love” by The Promise, and “Cry” by Johnnie Ray. Their short narratives touch on persistent themes in Coppola’s full-length films about fashion and self-fashioning, and feature characters out of step with their surroundings: “Gauntlet” follows a young girl who returns home to an effusive family, clearly chafing under their attentions and questioning, underscored by Cash singing, “I got my ball-and-chain.” In “Mistletoe,” a young man signals his desire to kiss an older woman while the lyrics “I’m not ready for love” combine with her discomfort to undercut his daring. Each spot concludes with a variation on the tag-line “You don’t have to get them to give them Gap,” affirming individuality and encouraging tolerance through consumption: mainstream clothing—sweaters, flannel shirts—enfolds all in one capacious holiday embrace. Coppola’s commercials have it both ways: promoting uniform, mainstream dress by gently mocking conventional behavior. This strategy is most evident in the longest of the four spots, “Crooner,” which features an earnest young boy belting his heart out as he lip synchs to “Cry” before an audience of indulgent adults. In miniature, it prefigures the Christmas special, with Bill Murray and assorted celebrity guests performing songs. Both the ad and the special dramatize performance, alluding knowingly to the artifice of showbusiness. A Very Murray Christmas makes this its raison d’être. Murray, Coppola, and Glazer showcase the artifice of the genre, where celebrities—from Bob Hope,

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Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, and Ed Sullivan to John Legend, Gwen Stefani, and Kacey Musgraves—host variety specials under the thinnest of fictional guises. A Very Murray Christmas cleverly exposes the artifice in a fictional narrative about the production and filming process. A blizzard has prevented a star-studded audience and cast from joining Murray at the Carlyle hotel in New York for the live taping of his show. His producers (Amy Poehler and Julie White) argue he’s contractually obligated to perform and propose using shots of celebrities taken from footage of the Golden Globes to stand in for the absent stars, claiming it’s “all just an illusion … a fantasy.” When a power outage plunges the set into darkness, the show is cancelled and the “show” begins, as the remainder of the film employs various devices that enable famous musicians (Jenny Lewis, Miley Cyrus, David Johansen, and Phoenix) to perform alongside actors (Chris Rock and George Clooney). When Murray passes out at the bar, a dream sequence plays out his fantasy of a Christmas show, with dancers, backing vocalists, and an orchestra sharing an enormous white stage decorated with twinkling trees. Clooney reminds us that the fantasy is a fantasy, set “on a soundstage in Queens.” The film plays with the idea of celebrity on multiple levels. A pan of the empty chairs in the Café Carlyle shows seats reserved with black-and-white cardboard posters representing Beyoncé and Jay-Z, but also Sir Paul McCartney and Pope Francis, mocking the pretensions of the star-studded special. Murray engages in a doubled performance: as himself and as himself playing himself, as the celebrity host of the special and its “improvised” alternative. Musical director Paul Shaffer also plays himself throughout, as the accompanist in staged and “unstaged” improvisations. Some celebrities—Rock and Clooney— appear as themselves, but others assume roles: Jenny Lewis is a waitress, David Johansen the bartender, Phoenix play the chefs. Michael Cera plays Murray’s wanna-be manager, Maya Rudolph a lounge singer, Rashida Jones a bride, and Jason Schwartzman the groom. Each plays a stock character, underscoring the artifice of the device, which is heightened since the audience recognizes the stars are playing at playing roles. Those playing themselves play instead with performance: Murray and Rock, wearing matching holiday sweaters, sing a stagey, amateurish version of “Do You Hear What I Hear,” while Clooney pops out from behind trees to assist Murray on “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’.”

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Opening and closing scenes remind viewers that Murray has played this role before: in Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The film begins and ends in Murray’s hotel room, with him standing before windows looking out on the New York cityscape. The scenes duplicate the hotel-room setting and visual composition of moments in Lost in Translation, with characters isolated from others behind glass. In the opening, Murray is shot from behind looking out over the snowy nighttime scene, wearing part of his tuxedo—shirt, pants, and suspenders—and a pair of reindeer antlers. He is Bob Harris the character and Bill Murray the comedian simultaneously. His incomplete costuming suggests the tuxedo jacket clipped at the back that Bob wears for his performance in the Suntory ad (see Figure 1.11). When Murray sings holiday classics into a microphone, it seems like Bob Harris doing karaoke crossed with Nick Winters, his lounge singer character, performing on S.N.L. The special, like Lost in Translation, offers behind-the-scenes access to celebrity life, promising insights into the reality of stardom, only to deny it: the actor’s off-screen existence is fictional as well. A consistent thread, then, through all of Coppola’s work—films long and short, for the big and small screen, feature films and commercials—is the inextricable confluence of fame and fashion. What Church Gibson has termed “the new visual currency” means that “images now ‘bleed’ right across the whole spectrum of the media through its formerly discrete strands, from cinema and television to fashion shoot and advertising.”111 Her choice of “currency” is apt, for it captures recency, the newness as essential to fashion as to visual technologies, and commerce simultaneously. If visual currency is the coin of the contemporary realm, then Coppola has proven herself its queen, adept at amassing and distributing it. If this new visual currency necessitates recognizing that images are diffused and media forms overlap, it also requires acknowledging that art and commerce are not discrete realms—in cinema or in fashion—as the epigraphs in this chapter emphasize. One image suggests that Coppola absorbed this lesson early. Her father reminisces that when the family lived at Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland hotel, “We’d be out somewhere, going to a party or something, and we’d come into the room and she’d be sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap, having some serious conversation with him at age 11.”112 In Warhol’s example, Church Gibson argues, we find “many features in common

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with the topography of visual culture today”: he famously pronounced “Good business is the best art,” and dubbed his studio “The Factory.” He employed a variety of media (print-making, painting, photography, film), even creating his own magazine, Interview. That publication, like his art, made celebrities its subject. Further parallels with Coppola are tantalizing: he, too, worked in fashion—as an illustrator—and carefully crafted a recognizable personal style, featured in commercials for Gap (“Andy Warhol wore chinos”). He created advertisements, such as his images for Absolut vodka, appeared on television, and made his own series. “He understood how fashion worked and how it could be deployed in other spheres,” Church Gibson writes. “Warhol, none more so, was aware of the movement of images across visual culture, something he actively encouraged within his own artistic practice.”113 It’s tempting to think that this was the subject of conversation when Sofia sat on Andy’s lap. What we do know is that art, like fashion, “manufactures dreams and images” and that Coppola comprehends this perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker.

Conclusion

“When you direct is the only time you get to have the world exactly as you want it.” SOFIA COPPOLA1 There is no greater testament to the depth of Coppola’s visual surfaces than the enduring interest in her films. In advance of the twentieth anniversary of her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999), the Criterion Collection selected the film for inclusion in its series of the “greatest films from around the world.” The special-edition DVD released in 2018 included a 4K digital restoration supervised by cinematographer Ed Lachman, as well as additional examples of her early work: the 1998 short Lick the Star and a music video of Air’s “Playground Love.” Focus Features celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of Lost in Translation (2003) with a special screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2017, soon after The Beguiled premiered at Cannes. The BBC named Lost in Translation one of the twenty-first century’s greatest films (number twenty-two out of 100) based on responses of 177 international film critics.2 Marie Antoinette’s tenth anniversary prompted rounds of reassessments of the film as well as its twodisc soundtrack. Netflix streamed The Bling Ring in January 2020, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the Vanity Fair story on which it was based, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins.” Somewhere (2010) was included on multiple bestof-the-decade lists appearing in 2019, including those from Associated Press, Time magazine, and The New Yorker.3 The Toronto International Film Festival mounted a retrospective, “Sofia Coppola: A Name of Her Own,” and film scholars in the UK devoted a day-long symposium to the director.4

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But the borders of “Sofia World,” as I have taken to calling it, extend far beyond her six feature films. The label riffs on the Japanese book Sofia Coppola: Perfect Style of Sofia’s World and encompasses her “perfect style” but is not limited to it. When I initiated this project after seeing The Beguiled in 2017, I was cognizant of scholarly work on individual films (having co-authored an essay on Marie Antoinette), and in my research I was encouraged to find an ever-growing body of academic studies devoted to the director. However, I had not anticipated that I would be, frankly, overwhelmed by Coppola’s commercial output, music videos, and cultural presence in the media. It became routine to pursue one thread only to find myself entangled in others: the mention of one photographic influence would unearth multiple other connections; a contemporary interview would shuttle me back to the past; a commercial contained musical or film references that would in their turn necessitate dives into advertising, fashion, or cultural history. I was plunged into the heady mix of cinema, art, photography, style, music, food, design, and travel that characterizes Coppola’s creative world. If, as I argue here, fashion writ large is her world’s axis, it spins outwards, necessitating forays into fields beyond film and fashion studies to account for its pervasive and expansive reach. Thematic concerns about fashioning a self and the limits of knowing others based on external appearance led to theories of identity formation and social surveillance. Individual components of the fashionable worlds created on screen required attention to scholarship on costuming, production design, and music, but also raised larger questions about materials and viewers’ phenomenological engagement with film. Visual inspirations from the fine arts and photography entailed research into individual artists, as well as particular media forms and their histories. The ties between Coppola’s cinematic style and fashion photography invoked theoretical studies of the relationship between still and moving images. Her films’ interrogations of fame, combined with her own personal status as a style icon and director-star, inevitably intersected with academic studies of celebrity. Yet the blurring of boundaries between the films and their press coverage, between cinematic art and commercial advertising, places Coppola’s work at the center of the altered and evolving media landscape being analyzed by journalists and scholars in art, fashion, communication, business, and

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technology. The breadth of intellectual inquiry called up by Coppola’s works as artistic and commercial products surely attests to their substance, as well as to the depths of her engagement with fashion. To plumb these depths, I have artificially divided an organically integrated, creative universe into four dimensions of film: narrative, production, cinematography, and promotion. As each chapter documents, any one approach can be employed to illuminate the film–fashion interface in individual works—by Coppola and other directors. However, only when taken together and employed in concert and to the entire body of her work and associated celebrity do they adequately convey how comprehensively complex the interchange between fashion and film can be—and is. As such, the model developed here offers additional possibilities for both film and fashion studies. While, as this book argues, fashion is a defining factor, if not the defining factor, of Coppola’s work, the four-dimensional approach taken here might be applied to other directors. Actress Greta Gerwig, for example, has embarked on a career as a writer-director that compares to Coppola’s: her first film, Lady Bird (2017), based on an original screenplay derived from her experiences in Sacramento, California, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including two for Gerwig as writer and director; her second film, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women (2019), was also nominated for five awards, earning a win for costume designer Jacqueline Durran. In both films, fashion is central to narratives about human relationships: the mother–daughter drama in Lady Bird plays out while shopping for a prom dress. In Little Women, Jo’s intellectual ambition manifests itself in her appropriation of a military jacket for writing, while Meg temporarily transforms herself into the debutante Daisy by donning a borrowed gown. Lady Bird’s costume designer, April Napier, recreated styles of the near past (2002), concerned less with historical fidelity than conveying the teenaged protagonist’s stabs at rebellion and self-definition through grunge and thrift-store chic.5 Napier’s character-defining designs recall Nancy Steiner’s in The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, while employing clothing as a sign of rebellious self-fashioning allies the film with Marie Antoinette. As Stacey Battat did for The Beguiled, Durran researched historical images of nineteenth-century dress for Little Women, but by making her designs appear well worn and used she imbued them with authenticity.6

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Like Nancy Steiner in The Virgin Suicides, Durran turned to old patterns published in ladies’ magazines of the period. As The Beguiled prompted a revival of prairie-style dresses, Little Women sparked contemporary desire for the sontag, “a crisscrossed scarf that wraps around the breasts and fastens at the waist, and that hasn’t been heard of much in the last hundred and fifty years.”7 Gerwig’s films, like Coppola’s, align contemporary transformations of historical dress to feminist politics, equating sartorial rebellion with liberation, independence, and agency. The director, her films, and her stars have been covered by the fashion press as well, with Gerwig on the cover of Vogue (December 2019) at the time of Little Women’s release and Florence Pugh (who plays Amy) two months later (February 2020), as the film competed on the award circuit. On the basis of two films it may be too early to detect a distinct cinematic style, but Gerwig, like Coppola, is already a director-star, with a reputation for “whimsy” and “quirky sophistication” established as an actress in “mumblecore” films Greenberg (2010) and Frances Ha (2012). Another emerging female director, Melina Matsoukas, may merit the same kind of analysis. She has already established a commercial reputation on the basis of her Grammy award-winning music videos for Rihanna (“We Found Love,” 2011) and Beyoncé (“Formation,” 2016). Like Coppola, she initially pursued photography before earning a graduate degree at the American Film Institute. She imposes stylistic control over all elements of production. “I’ll have an arts section for what I want my interiors to feel like. I’ll have a wardrobe section. I’ll have a lighting section. I care how a pillow is folded.”8 Her attention to visual aesthetics was on display in her first feature, Queen & Slim (2019), a languorously paced road movie, with a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde narrative about a black couple on the run after shooting a racist cop in selfdefense. The characters’ escape takes them on a journey south and into the past, as they disguise themselves to evade detection in designs inspired by earlier models of civil-rights rebellion. As in Coppola’s films, the costumes (designed by Shiona Turini) are transhistorical, contemporary versions of sixties’ style. Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) initially wears a turtleneck, inspired by Angela Davis, and a white pantsuit modeled on one worn by Diahann Carroll. Her evolving radicalism is signaled by exchanging her professional attire for an animal-print dress and Brother Vellies snakeskin go-go boots, and removing

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her braids to restore her natural hair. Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) borrows a maroon velour tracksuit from her Uncle Earl (Bokeem Woodbine), who himself wears a Gucci tracksuit designed by Dapper Dan to evoke his 1980s’ hip-hop swagger. Earl’s car—a vintage turquoise Pontiac—and the music they dance to at the roadhouse—by blues legend Freddie King—combine with their clothing to evoke resonant moments of African-American culture.9 Locations were equally selected for their historical relevance, from Cleveland, Ohio (the last stop on the Underground Railroad) to the Deep South, and Matsoukas chose to shoot on celluloid to capture the passing landscape more authentically. While, in echoes of criticism launched at Coppola, some slighted her debut as “more style than substance,” others recognized that in her “daring cinematic style, … beauty and politics are inextricably intertwined.”10 Matsoukas’s transhistorical aesthetics advance a serious point: the legacy of past racial oppression and violence is visible in contemporary America, as is protest against it. It seems likely that her next project, a series for Amazon based on Marlon James’s novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, set in Jamaica and New York from the 1970s to the 1990s, will sustain the director’s narrative interest in racial politics and her fastidious attention to costume and production design, although, as with Gerwig, it may be too soon to define a signature film style. By contrast, the visual style of established director Wes Anderson has been as meticulously documented as Coppola’s, complete with how-to video guides and color-palette swatches.11 More overtly than Coppola, Anderson foregrounds the photographic roots of his cinematic practice in rigidly symmetrical framing of characters, clothing, and objects. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who has collaborated with Anderson on seven films, enhances symmetrical framing through precise lateral camera movements, often panning from one studied tableau to another. Anderson’s production teams fabricate meticulously designed worlds that conjure past eras, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), or envision universes of his own invention, as in the stop-motion animated film Isle of Dogs (2018). But even these reflect art history. Anderson and art director Adam Stockhausen studied vintage images of hotels and European resorts, ultimately modeling the hotel’s exterior, created in miniature, on Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.  The model hotel was filmed against a backdrop inspired by the nineteenth-century

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German landscape artist Caspar David Friedrich.12 The film not only features a fictional painting inspired by Flemish exemplars but real paintings by Egon Shiele and Gustav Klimt. Although cinematically Isle of Dogs is modeled on classic Japanese films of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, it replicates Japanese ukiyo-e style woodblock prints and found inspiration for depicting Trash Island in Ed Burtynski’s and Chris Jordan’s large-scale photos of industrial waste. Anderson’s set decorator, Kim Moran, has described her work for his films as “like making a painting in 3D.”13 In Anderson’s films, clothing is as studiedly designed as the production and music. Think of the uniforms alone: the bellhop’s purple suits in The Grand Budapest Hotel or the campers’ classic Boy Scout styles in Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Isolated garments or accessories are grafted on to characters like fetishes in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which was co-written by Coppola’s brother Roman: Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) wears thick eyeliner, a baby-doll dress, and an oversized fur coat that convey her vulnerability; Ari (Ben Stiller) and his two sons sport identical red Adidas tracksuits as a sign of nuclearfamily solidarity; Richie (Luke Wilson), the former tennis player, retains his Fila headband, a sign of his unwillingness let go of the past. Matching red wool caps in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) manifest the crew’s demented solidarity. Like Coppola, Anderson employed Milena Canonero, who won her fourth Oscar for her work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. (A comparison of the confection-inspired palette of that film with Marie Antoinette’s appears inevitable.) Anderson’s “look”—both his cinematic and his personal style— have also influenced fashion and fashion representation, so much so that one critic noted it could lead to “lazy commercialisation.”14 Partnering with Fendi and Prada to create period-specific pieces for The Grand Budapest Hotel, as he had previously with Louis Vuitton to create the animal-print luggage for The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Anderson engaged in hide-and-seekstyle product placement. But he has also, like Coppola, been conscripted to create “fashion films.” Prada commissioned Anderson and Canonero to make the short film Castello Cavalcanti in 2013, which is an homage to Federico Fellini, but Anderson mimicked his own style to create a Darjeeling Limitedlike film featuring Adrian Brody to promote H&M knitwear in 2016.15 Just as luxury brands capitalized on Marie Antoinette-inspired lines, in 2015 Gucci,

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Lacoste, and Bally each produced designs modeled on costumes from The Royal Tenenbaums. Just as photography inspired Anderson’s symmetrical compositions, his compositions now affect photographic practice, whether by amateurs on Instagram or professionals, who have produced how-to guides to “Wes Anderson Photography” (rather than film).16 This approach could certainly be applied to directors working outside Hollywood as well. Giuliana Bruno has already provided a compelling analysis of the “fashioned world” of Wong Kar-wai, focusing on the director’s engagement with fashion as a narrative subject in The Hand (a segment of Eros, 2005), 2046 (2004), and In the Mood for Love (2000). More important, Bruno attends to materials, noting that “haptically threaded between bodies, clothes are, indeed, transitive matter, and fashion is a form of intimate contact.”17 She also argues, as I have of Coppola’s, that Wong’s cinematic style is distinctive and allied with the fine arts: “The artistic nature of his work urges us to consider style in cinema within the large and growing field of the intersection of art and fashion,” which, she adds, is an art form as well. Bruno’s analysis does not take up the director’s commercial work, which includes “fashion films” for Lacoste, Lâncome, and Dior perfumes, and Shu Uemura cosmetics, as well as actionstyle shorts for Motorola and BMW’s “The Hire” series.18 His short for Chivas Regal, shot in the style of a film trailer, for the distiller’s sponsorship of the sixty-fifth edition of the Cannes festival is ripe for analysis within the context of the fashion–fame–film industrial complex. Wong’s auteur-star status has already received some attention, but could be further explored within the same context.19 It would be valuable to consider whether the fashion–fame– film industrial complex is indeed global, and whether cinematic styles derived from fashion differ meaningfully depending on cultural origins or share qualities as a consequence of globalization. Bong Joon-ho does not have not as consistent a visual style as Anderson or Coppola—far from it. The South Korean director’s films appear united in defying stylistic definition or generic categorization: Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) is a social satire, Memories of Murder (2003) is a policier. The Host (2006) is a sci-fi action thriller, The Mother (2009) is a murder mystery. Okja (2017), which blends CGI and live action, has been described as the first “ecological action movie.”20 Snowpiercers (2013) is a dystopian fantasy,

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while Parasite (2019) defies pigeonholing, fusing elements of the thriller, dark comedy, and family melodrama. Despite their generic differences, Bong’s films share a thematic preoccupation with inequality that, I would argue, manifests itself in clothing and production design. In Snowpiercers the humans who have survived the climate-change experiment that has turned earth into a frozen wasteland occupy a segregated train: the lower-class passengers at the back appear as though having assembled their clothing out of cast-off utilitarian garments. Their dark colors, inspired by photos of train engineers from the early industrial era, further associate them with the working class. The dark, monochromatic color of their section of the train reinforces the dreariness of their existence. By contrast, the elite occupying the front section, particularly their leader Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), wear tailored colored garments made from fine materials, including fur. Costume designer Catherine George designed Mason’s Margaret Thatcher-like suit to look like “a typical conservative politician shape and style—the purple has the royal quality.”21 In Parasite, class divisions are equally stark but shift and alter with remarkable nuance in both costume and production design. Architecturally, the film alternates between the fashionably mid-century-modern three-story home of the Park family, isolated from urban Seoul by its Western design and the concrete walls that enclose a manicured lawn visible from inside the house through floor-to-ceiling windows. The contemporary monochromatic colors of their home are mirrored in the Parks’ tastefully understated clothing, including their matching silk pajamas. By contrast, the Kim family occupy a basement apartment in the heart of the city center, with a high, narrow window facing a crowded street. To gain access to the Park home, the Kim family engage in elaborate masquerades, refashioning themselves sartorially by donning uniforms appropriate to their positions (as tutors, chauffeur, housemaid). Yet these are identities belonging to others, including a couple who occupy the Parks’ basement. This doubling of spaces and identities unsettles simplistic class divisions, just as ongoing instances of role playing and disguise raise questions about assigning the term “parasite” exclusively to the underclass. Despite his films’ international success and his reputation as an auteur, Bong’s place in the fame–fashion–film industrial complex is unclear. He came of age as a student filmmaker during a time of protest against military rule, and has

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been criticized by conservative regimes for the perceived left-leaning ideology of his films.22 His multiple Oscar wins for Parasite may alter Bong’s place in commercial cinema and fashion—or not. The comprehensive nature of the approach to film and fashion pursued in this book points toward the larger significance of fashion itself. Throughout, I have been equally concerned with demonstrating how culturally rich it can be and has been, and what value comes from taking fashion seriously while accounting for its material and visual pleasures. Agnès Rocamara and Anneke Smelik’s book Thinking through Fashion illustrates how intellectually capacious the subject can be, and I concur with their expanded definition: “It is a commercial industry producing and selling material commodities; a sociocultural force bound up with the dynamics of modernity and post-modernity; and an intangible system of signification. It is thus made of things and signs, as well as individual and collective agents, which all coalesce through practices of production, consumption, distribution and representation.”23 More simply, fashion “occupies the centre ground in popular understandings of modern culture,” as Christopher Breward has claimed. If fashion is the axis around which Sofia World spins, others orbit around it. It is a “culture industry which incorporates a whole gamut of economic, sociological, psychological, and aesthetic experiences.”24 Breward neglected to mention politics. It is impossible to dismiss fashion as “frivolous fluff ” when confronted with the provocative flippancy of Melania Trump’s choices to wear stilettos while touring hurricane disaster zones, to don a Zara jacket emblazoned with “I Don’t Care Do You?” to visit migrant children held in a facility at the Texas border with Mexico, or to continue to select Dolce & Gabbana designs for public appearances despite repeated charges against the company for racist comments and designs. Boris Johnson’s rumpled hair and suits promote an image of genial buffoonery that mask his elite public-school education and strategic machinations. But in the changing fashion–fame landscape, politics is cultural as well. Singer Billy Eilish, performing in Gucci- or Chanel-branded baggy skater gear, makes a visual statement about body politics, rejecting the hypersexualized image of female pop stars, like Ariana Grande in a pink negligee and platform heels at the 2020 Grammy Awards or Jennifer Lopez at the Superbowl LIV halftime show, pole dancing in a skintight bodysuit to promote herself and her film Hustlers.

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Red-carpet appearances are occasions for less self-serving statements. Director Spike Lee transformed purple into a color of mourning, wearing a purple suit to the 2019 Oscars to honor musician Prince and another with “24” on the lapels to memorialize basketball star Kobe Bryant. (In doing so, he vividly embodied the confluence of fashion, film, athletics, and music.) By wearing black at the 2018 Golden Globes in solidarity with the Time’s Up movement, prominent celebrities called out sexual predators in the industry like Harvey Weinstein. Resistance to entrenched male dominance took another form at the 2020 Oscars when Natalie Portman topped her Dior dress with a cape embroidered in gold with the names of the female directors the Academy failed to nominate, including Gerwig and Matsoukas.25 Appearances by other stars in vintage couture or gowns worn previously underscored the imperative to “reduce, reuse, recycle” as the fashion industry faces global criticism for contributing to climate change. Together, film and fashion prompt reflection on change in another sense. Technological innovations of the twenty-first century have altered the media landscape, enhancing the cultural fusion of music, film, athletics, politics, and fashion, with both positive and negative consequences. Print magazines, whether dedicated to home décor, celebrity culture, or fashion, have been transformed, some ceasing publication entirely and others adapting to digital subscription models. Editorial gatekeepers find their power challenged by Instagram influencers. When a phone is a camera, everyone can take photographs or videos and bypass established channels to distribute them online. But pronouncements of the “death” of magazines, or photography, or film, or music, or fashion itself overlook the positive transformations afoot. The decline of mass print publication, for instance, has made way for boutique publications, expensively produced, expertly edited, and featuring work by professional artists—a phenomenon, perhaps, akin to the embrace of vinyl in an age of digital music. Studios’ grips on film and television production have been challenged, with streaming ushering in a new “golden age” of television. If the blockbuster franchises produced by “Hollywood Inc.” dominate traditional cinema screens, others forms—foreign, longform, documentary, experimental, etc.—flourish on an ever-growing array of streaming platforms, with technology companies such as Netflix and

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Apple providing an alternative system of financing as well as distribution. As screened content proliferates, live performances can, by contrast, acquire greater power. As Marc Jacobs proved with his rapturously received show at New York Fashion Week in February 2020, “the live experience of a collection can still trump a short film or social media any day.”26 Only, however, for those with the means and access to attend. Expensive travel and enormous costs—of attendance and the shows themselves—may mean that virtual experiences predominate. Alexandre de Betak, who has been credited with transforming shows from standard catwalk presentations into elaborate multisensory, multimedia events, predicts that fashion shows will be “produced as digital content, created expressly to be consumed by a digital public.”27 De Betak’s words may indeed have been prophetic: Chanel opted to produce a digital runway show for its Resort 2020/21 collection, not by choice but after the novel coronavirus outbreak halted international travel (especially by cruise ship, a potent irony) and disrupted production, distribution, and consumption worldwide. The Covid-19 pandemic profoundly altered social, cultural, and economic life globally. Broken supply chains demonstrate the truly global nature of contemporary commerce, as well as its collateral damage on local populations. For example, as haute-couture houses ceased production, artisan seamstresses and bead workers in Italian villages lost their livelihoods.28 The pandemic shuttered showrooms and cinemas, and ended large gatherings of people in groups for athletic events, fashion shows, theatrical performances, film festivals, and more. It was “the greatest economic calamity to ever hit Hollywood, Broadway and other entertainment business hubs, dwarfing the wreckage left by such recent catastrophes as 9/11 and the Great Recession,” Variety reported, felt “most acutely by production designers, camera operators, make-up artists, grips, stagehands, ticket takers, casting directors and character actors, whose names may not adorn cinema marquees but whose work forms the backbone of the business.”29 The pandemic’s lingering effects, including a profound economic downturn, will inescapably alter the shape of both fashion and film for at least the near future—if not beyond. Gucci, for instance, has already announced that it will reduce its runway shows from five to two per year.30

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However, despite the pandemic’s enormous costs—staggering losses of human life and profound economic hardship—it has offered the potential for reshaping cultural and corporate practices. Some adjustments facilitated by digital technology have already inspired change: working from home has reduced automotive and airline travel, with concomitant decreases in carbon emissions, and initiated discussions about righting the work–life balance. Temporary shifts of educational instruction online have inspired reflection on the costs of the traditional model of college education and the inequities of the digital divide, but also about the value of face-to-face interaction in student learning and the often-overlooked contributions of educators and childcare workers. The insatiable demand for streaming content has surely cemented the entertainment industry’s influence, and will lead to increased creation for digital platforms. But cinemagoers also flocked to the few remaining drivein theaters, proving the enduring importance of communal participation. Laments about cancelled concerts and athletic events also exposed an appetite for live performance, be it music, dance, or theater—or the three combined, as in fashion shows. Virtual tours have not found a way to replicate the multisensory, tactile pleasures of direct experiences of art at galleries and museums. All this means that fashion and film are evolving, individually and together, in unanticipated directions with unpredictable consequences. I am confident, however, that Sofia Coppola’s cinema will reflect the most meaningful among them. The sumptuous surfaces of her fashionable film worlds will continue to command our attention, not so much for themselves but to inspire thought, prompting us to reflect on the material and visual culture from which they are composed and that connects us to them.

Sofia Coppola: A Fashion and Film Timeline 1971

Born May 14

1972

Appears in christening scene in The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

1983

Acting debut in The Outsiders (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Small part in Rumblefish (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

1984

Plays child in street in The Cotton Club (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Appears in Frankenweenie (B&W short, dir. Tim Burton)

1986

Minor role in Peggy Sue Got Married (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Intern at Chanel in Paris (summer)

1987

Plays “Noodle” in Anna (dir. Yurek Bogayevicz) Intern at Chanel in Paris (summer)

1989

Shares writing credit with Francis Ford Coppola and designs costumes for “Life with Zoe” (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) in New York Stories

1990

Appears as Joan Crawford in Sonic Youth’s “Mildred Pierce” music video (dir. Dave Markey) Appears in The Godfather, Part III (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Designs costumes for The Spirit of ’76 (dir. Lucas Reiner)

1991

Takes classes at California Institute of the Arts and Art Center College of Design

1992

Appears as “Cindy” in the experimental film Inside Monkey Zetterland (dir. Jefery Levy) Appears in Madonna’s “Deeper And Deeper” music video (dir. Bobby Woods) Appears as “Times Square junkie” in The Black Crowes’ “Sometimes Salvation” music video (dir. Stéphane Sednaoui) Appears on the December cover of Vogue Italia (photographed by Steven Meisel)

Sofia Coppola: A Fashion and Film Timeline

207

1993

Collaborates with Spike Jones on Walt Mink’s “Shine” music video

1994

Launches MilkFed clothing line Hosts Hi Octane television series with Zoe Cassavetes Produces Ciao L.A. (dir. Spike Jonze) and appears as “Britney”

1996

Co-directs Bed, Bath and Beyond (with Andrew Durham and Ione Skye) Directs the Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe” music video

1997

Appears as “Janet” in The Chemical Brothers’ music video “Electrobank” (dir. Spike Jones)

1998

Directs Lick the Star

1999

Directs The Virgin Suicides Appears as “Saché” in Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (dir. George Lucas)

2000

Directs Air’s “Playground Love” music video Appears on the cover of Dune magazine Featured in March Vogue profile, “Being Sofia Coppola” (photographed by Mario Testino)

2001

Models for Marc Jacobs perfume ad (photographed by Juergen Teller) Appears as “Enzo’s Mistress” in CQ (dir. Roman Coppola)

2002

Appears in Phoenix’s “Funky Squaredance” music video (dir. Roman Coppola)

2003

Directs Lost in Translation Directs White Stripes’ “I Don’t Know What to Do with Myself ” music video (cinematography by Lance Acord) Directs Kevin Shields’ “City Girl” music video Creates Platinum television series (with John Ridley)

2004

Academy Award for best original screenplay for Lost in Translation (accepts wearing a dress designed by Marc Jacobs) Serves as guest editor for Vogue Paris (December 2004/January 2005) Appears on cover of Vogue Paris (December 2004/January 2005; photographed by Mario Testino)

2005

Publishes photographs in Vogue and Allure

2006

Directs Marie Antoinette

208

2008

Sofia Coppola: A Fashion and Film Timeline

Collaborates with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton on collection of shoes and handbags Directs “Moi Je Joue,” Miss Dior Chérie perfume commercial (premieres November 8 during Gossip Girl episode)

2010

Directs Somewhere Receives Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival Directs “City of Light,” Miss Dior Chérie perfume commercial Serves on jury for first Louis Vuitton Journeys awards competition for emerging filmmakers

2011

Presents Marc Jacobs with Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement award Collaborates with Marc Jacobs on Louis Vuitton’s 2012 resort collection Curates Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris

2012

Directs commercial for H&M’s Marni collection

2013

Directs The Bling Ring Appears as “Florist” (uncredited) in Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, interview with James Franco Directs Phoenix’s “Chloroform” music video Directs “La Vie en Rose,” Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet perfume commerical Directs commercial for Daisy by Marc Jacobs perfume Launch of a limited edition of her namesake Louis Vuitton SC bag at Parisian department store Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche (as Marc Jacobs resigns from the fashion house); designs window displays Featured as a “Timeless Muse” in Louis Vuitton exhibition, Tokyo July 2013 issue of Elle features Coppola’s photographs of Paris Hilton at Hilton’s Beverly Hills mansion Interviews Lee Radziwill for New York Times’s T magazine (and directs video) Featured on cover of August Vogue Australia (photographer Paul Jasmin; stylist Stacey Battat)

Sofia Coppola: A Fashion and Film Timeline

2014

209

Guest editor for W (April) and Vogue Paris (December) Directs a series of four holiday commercials for Gap Directs ads for Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume and another for his trio (Daisy, Daisy Eau So Fresh, and Daisy Dream) Photographs Fall 2014 look book for Calder (an LA-based fashion label created by her cousin-in-law, Amanda Blake) Appears in Marc Jacobs’s final ad campaign for Louis Vuitton (Spring/Summer 2014 collection, styled by Karl Templer, photographed by Steven Meisel) Featured on cover and in fashion editorial February Vogue Italia (photographed by Steven Meisel)

2015

Directs Netflix television special A Very Murray Christmas Models for Marc Jacobs’s Fall/Winter collection

2016

Directs Valentino’s production of La Traviata for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma Relaunch of the Sofia Coppola bag for Louis Vuitton

2017

Directs The Beguiled Receives award for best director at Cannes Directs campaign for Calvin Klein women’s underwear Directs commercial for Cartier Panthère watch

2018

Appears on Face to Grace with Grace Coddington, M2M: Made to Measure TV

2019

Begins production of On the Rocks, the first feature in A24’s partnership with Apple Julie de Libran designs “Sofia” tunic and cocktail dress Directs “In Homage to Mademoiselle” for Chanel’s “Mademoiselle Privé” exhibition in Tokyo, October 19–December 1 Recreates Coco Chanel’s 31 rue Cambon apartment as the stage for Chanel’s “Métiers d’Art” show at the Grand Palais in December

2020

Announces plan to write and direct an adaption of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country (1913) as a limited series for Apple TV+ With brother Roman, directs short film for the iconic Chanel 19 bag

Notes Introduction 1 Quoted in Lynn Hirschberg, “Girls on Film,” W, June 18, 2013, https://www. wmagazine.com/story/sofia-coppola-director-the-bling-ring-with-emma-watson. 2 J. Hoberman, “Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola Gotten the Respect an Auteur Deserves?” The New York Times, February 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/movies/ sofia-coppola-director-writer.html. 3 Anna Backman Rogers, “And That I See a Darkness: The Stardom of Kirsten Dunst in Collaboration with Sofia Coppola in Three Images,” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019): 114–36; Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017); A. O. Scott, “‘The Beguiled’: Sofia Coppola’s Civil War Cocoon,” The New York Times, June 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/movies/the-beguiledreview-sofia-coppola.html. Belinda Smaill argues her films “play on audience knowledge of what are considered female genres, such as the romantic comedy, the melodrama (Lost in Translation) and the costume drama (Marie Antoinette).” Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 156. 4 See, for instance, Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 7–11. 5 She is also only one of three women to have won the Independent Spirit Award for best director (out of twenty-two nominated). Ironically, even some critics noting her achievements have undermined them by perpetuating the same demeaning pattern of foregrounding Coppola’s relationship to her father. Hoberman, for instance, compares her supposed failings in Marie Antoinette’s structure to her “dad’s” in Apocalypse Now (“Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola”). After identifying Coppola as one of only five women who have been nominated for the Academy’s best director award, Naomi McDougall Jones notes that each of the three most recent (Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig) is “either the daughter or the current or former life partner of a man who had previously been nominated for or won an Oscar himself.” She concludes, “Here is what that means in the film industry today: in the last quarter century, if you are a woman, even a devastatingly talented, driven, capable woman, but you are not also white, able-bodied, cis, straight, and publicly connected to a male Oscar nominee/ winner (preferably a living icon), and ideally making films about men, it has been

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literally impossible for you to grasp the brass ring of a film directing career.” While the author’s intent is to show the misogyny and sexism in the contemporary film industry, the effect of taking correlation for causation is to diminish Coppola’s talents (as well as Gerwig’s and Bigelow’s). See Naomi McDougall Jones, The Wrong Kind of Women: Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2020), 83.   6 See for instance Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 151; Evgenia Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 352; Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Tay identifies an “exceptionally personal quality” in her films (126). Autobiographical readings of individual films include Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 3, who sees The Virgin Suicides as a reaction to the death of Sofia’s brother. On Lost in Translation, see Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2007), 175; on Marie Antoinette, see Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 2; on Somewhere, see Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 59. On the trilogy, see Gold, Great Filmmakers. Handyside cautions against reifying the films into one triology (Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 634).   7 Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 37–59; Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press), 138–67.   8 Caitlin Yunuen Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 180.   9 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 183. 10 Jones actually faults the film for featuring a male protagonist (The Wrong Kind of Women, 83). 11 Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos,” 31, fn. 43. 12 Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 5–6. 13 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 2nd edn (London: Polity, 2015), 1. 14 Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 3–34; Christopher Laverty, Fashion in Film (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016); Jay Jorgensen and Donald L. Scoggins, Creating the Illusion: A Fashionable History of Hollywood Costume Designers (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press Adult, 2015); Fashion and Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011). Several contributors to this edited volume offer useful analyses of couturiers and costumers: see Stella Bruzzi, “‘It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession’: Femininity, Desire, and the New Look in 1950s

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Hollywood Melodrama” (160–79); Drake Stutesman, “Costume Design, or, What Is Fashion in Film?” (17–39), and Jane M. Gaines, “Wanting to Wear Seeing: Gilbert Adrian at MGM” (135–59). 15 Dhani Mau, “How Nancy Steiner Became the Most Influential Costume Designer You Hadn’t Heard Of,” Fashionista.com, December 14, 2016, https://fashionista. com/2016/12/nancy-steiner-costume-designer. 16 Caroline Evans, “The Walkies: Early French Fashion Shows as a Cinema of Attractions,” in Fashion and Film, 110–34. 17 Charlotte Herzog, “‘Powder Puff ’ Promotion: The Fashion Show-in-the-Film,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 134–59. 18 Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema, xvi. 19 Jonathan Faiers, Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 20 Esther Leslie, “Dreams for Sale,” in Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa Uhlirova (London: Koenig Books, 2013), 32. 21 Marketa Uhlirova, “Introduction,” Birds of Paradise, 16. 22 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 21. 23 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 57. 24 Vanessa Friedman, “The Rebirth of New York Fashion,” The New York Times, September 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/style/marc-jacobs-newyork-fashion-week.html. 25 Adrienne Munich argues, “There may be no entirely satisfactory definition of fashion” and “no definition is uncontested in fashion studies” (“Introduction: Fashion Films,” in Fashion in Film, 5); Joanne Entwistle says, “there is no consensus on the definition and use of these words and no agreement on precisely what phenomena they describe” (Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, 41); Christopher Breward refers to fashion’s “copious meanings” in Fashion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17. 26 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 3. 27 BFI, “The BFI Guide to How to Make a Sofia Coppola Film,” YouTube, July 12, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Jqpxy0CNg&index=5&list=PL6iyk30XguJgNJh uXwdyMQTWkQ7rV0KF0; ScreenPrism, “You Know It’s a Sofia Coppola Film IF … ” YouTube, June 22, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryzgxwJpv1A&index=5&l ist=PL6iyk30XguJgNJhuXwdyMQTWkQ7rV0KF0&t=6. 28 Nathan Lee, “Pretty Vacant: The Radical Frivolity of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Film Comment, September–October 2006, 24–6.

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29 Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, xiv, xxii. 30 Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2. 31 Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head,” 38. 32 Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization,” 158. 33 Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (2006): 36–41. 34 Dana Polan, “Auteur Desire,” Screening the Past, March 2001, http://www. screeningthepast.com/2014/12/auteur-desire/. 35 A thorough discussion of the issues lies outside the bounds of this chapter. For a helpful review of the arguments, see Thomas Elsaesser, “A Retrospect: The Film Director as Auteur—Artist, Brand Name or Engineer?” (1995), http://www.thomaselsaesser.com/images/stories/pdf/elsaesser_the_author_a_retrospect.pdf. Patricia White has also noted that, in part through her participation at Cannes, Coppola has “garnered enough cultural capital to be admitted to the cinéma d’auteurs.” Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 22.

Chapter 1 1 Quoted in Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013, https://www. dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1302-Spring-2013/Sofia-Coppola.aspx. 2 The distinction between modern and postmodern conceptions of identity is so complex as to be beyond the scope of this discussion. But, in general, modern definitions of selfhood tend to stress a consistent and authentic identity, while postmodernism rejects a stable self. Anthony Giddens offers “late modern” as a compromise: while self-definition is fluid and changing, we nonetheless retain an ongoing narrative of our identity over time. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Zygmunt Bauman sees greater fluidity, preferring the term “liquid modernity” to capture the challenges of constructing a durable identity that coheres over time. Zygmunt Bauman and Rein Raud, Practices of Selfhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). 3 Rickey, “Lost and Found.” Belinda Smaill has identified a “specific architecture” consisting of three key elements in Coppola’s plots: “they are simple and uncluttered, the vehicles for carefully composed imagery and the subtle evocation of mood and affect. All of her films feature characters, both female and male, caught in moments of transition.” Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 149–50. 4 Quoted in Kristin Hohenadel, “French Royalty as Seen by Hollywood Royalty,” New York Times, September 10, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/movies/

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moviesspecial/french-royalty-as-seen-by-hollywood-royalty.html. See, for instance, Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015); Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).   5 Jacques Lacan has argued that, beginning in the mirror stage, we gain awareness of ourselves as selves through our difference from an Other. Employing “I” to refer to ourselves implies a distinction between “you” and “they.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977). Bauman similarly contends that the “production of self cannot be anything but a continuing, incessant, forever inconclusive and open-ended interaction between an ‘I’ and … either ‘thou’ or ‘it’” (Practices of Selfhood, 50). He adds, “If not for being social animals, we would probably never have come across the idea that we are or have ‘selves’” (Practices of Selfhood, 55).   6 Comedian Martin Mull is generally credited with the adage that “show business is high school with money.”   7 Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (2006): 36–41.   8 Quoted in Todd Gilchrist, “Interview: Sofia Coppola,” IGN, October 17, 2006, https:// www.ign.com/articles/2006/10/17/interview-sofia-coppola?page=1.   9 Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 7; Gold, Great Filmmakers, 57. 10 Quoted in Gilchrist, “Interview: Sofia Coppola.” 11 Hannah McGill and Isabel Stevens, “Hotel California,” Sight and Sound 21, no. 1 (2011): 19. 12 McGill and Stevens, “Hotel California,” 19. 13 Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 153. 14 Naturally, this is the very essence of cinema, and places Coppola in a long line of filmmakers beginning with Carl Theodor Dreyer, who more radically subordinated script to image to convey emotional states. Nonetheless, as Rosalind Galt has contended, film theory has followed Western philosophy in denigrating the image in relation to language: “The very language of Western aesthetics is not only logocentric, but also, as a corollary, iconophobic, and it finds the image to be secondary, irrational, and bound to the inadequate plane of the surface.” Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2. 15 Sofia Coppola, quoted in Mark Olsen, “Sofia Coppola: Cool and the Gang,” Sight and Sound 14, no. 1 (2004): 16. 16 McGill and Stevens, “Hotel California,” 19. 17 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 16.

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18 Dennis Lim, “It’s What She Knows: The Luxe Life,” New York Times, December 10, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/movies/12sofia.html?pagewanted=all. 19 Richard Brody, “The Beguiled: Sofia Coppola’s Dubiously Abstract Vision of the Civil War,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richardbrody/the-beguiled-sofia-coppolas-dubiously-abstract-vision-of-the-civil-war. 20 Richard Brody, “The Virgin Suicides,” The New Yorker, nd, https://www.newyorker. com/goings-on-about-town/movies/the-virgin-suicides. 21 Brody, “Beguiled.” 22 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 3. 23 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 34. 24 Brody, “Beguiled.” 25 Samiha Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 107. 26 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Random House, 1959), 72. 27 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 54. Anthony Paul Kerby argues that “human subjects develop (and inherit) the identity of a character in the gradually unfolding narrative that is lived time,” that “in order to be we must be as something or someone, and this someone that we take ourselves to be is the character delineated in our personal narratives.” Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 109. 28 Bauman and Raud, Practices of Selfhood, 55–6. 29 Bauman and Raud, Practices of Selfhood, 56. Kerby argues that “the human body is alive with expression, with signification” (Narrative and Self, 112). 30 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 56, 58. 31 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 100. 32 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 25. Llewellyn Negrin argues that “When we act in the world, we do not act just as bodies, but as clothed bodies.” Llewellyn Negrin, “Maurice MerleauPonty: The Corporeal Experience of Fashion,” in Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, ed. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), Kindle loc. 2760. 33 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 2nd edn (London: Polity, 2015), 35. 34 Joan Rivière, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–13.

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35 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 33. 36 Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 16. 37 She “meticulously crafted her own image on a par with Cleopatra.” Rebecca Kleinman, “Frida Kahlo Was a Painter, a Brand Builder, a Survivor, and So Much More,” The New York Times, January 31, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/arts/design/fridakahlo-booklyn-museum.html. 38 This is not to argue that a stable, authentic self exists or persists. As Kerby argues, fundamentally the self is “a fiction … a social and linguistic construct, a nexus of meaning rather than an unchanging entity” (Narrative and the Self, 34). 39 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 3114. 40 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, xi. 41 Quoted in Katharine K. Zarrella, “Costume Designer Nancy Steiner Talks Dressing the New Twin Peaks,” Fashion Unfiltered, November 23, 2016, https://fashionunfiltered. com/people/2016/twin-peaks-revival-costume-designer-nancy-steiner-interview/. 42 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 20. 43 Adrienne Munich, “Introduction: Fashion Films,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 2–3. Jonathan Faiers similarly distinguishes between clothing’s conventional function in character and plot development and “clothing-related moments” that “manifest an excess of meaning visually and textually.” Jonathan Faiers, Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 6. 44 Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), xvi. 45 Anthony Lane, “Lost in the Revolution,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/23/lost-in-the-revolution. 46 Christina Lane and Nicole Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 195. 47 Diana Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism,” in Fashion and Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 214. 48 Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 368. Bingham supports his assertion with this detailed calculation: in the 116-minute film, Louis is crowned at 67 minutes; the consummation of Louis and Marie’s marriage and birth of their daughter

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occurs by minute 77; her affair with Fersen occurs at 89 minutes; and the storming of Bastille (which takes place off screen) occurs at 106 minutes (367). Katarzyna Paszkiewicz offers a comprehensive assessment of the film in relation to the generic conventions of the biopic. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 173–208. 49 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 99. 50 Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette (New York: Rizzoli, 2006). 51 Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, 362. 52 Coppola, Marie Antoinette, n.p. 53 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 101–2. 54 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 102. 55 Anna Backman Rogers, “The Historical Threshold: Crisis, Ritual and Liminality in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006),” Relief 6, no. 1 (2012): 86. In Queen of Fashion (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), Caroline Weber describes “the collusion of the Austrian and French courts in cementing their alliance through—and on—her body. She notes that the French erasure of her Austrian connections and heritage began before she departed for France. A French dentist corrected her smile, a French hairstylist ‘tamed the Archduchess’s locks into a low, powdered upsweep studded with decorative gems’ (16), and French clothing draped her body. Nonetheless, at the handover she was ‘stripped naked in front of the entire Austrian delegation’ (27). Weber presents her as a ‘prisoner of the men’s appraising glances and the women’s officious ministrations’ (26). Her appearance in her wedding gown may have been more humiliating. The dressmakers had made the bodice too small, meaning that the stays and laces of her corset were visible at the back. Weber speculates that this ‘may have made the girl’s wedding toilette more upsetting even than the stripping at the border’ (42) and imagines ‘how unnerving it must have been for Marie Antoinette to see them reflected, a million times over, in the hall’s countless mirrors’ (43)” (Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 102). 56 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 102. 57 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 6. 58 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 103. 59 Pamela Flores, “Fashion and Otherness: The Passionate Journey of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette from a Semiotic Perspective,” Fashion Theory 17, no. 5 (2013): 611. 60 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 107. 61 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 106. Lane and Richter argue that the mother’s voice carries the most significant weight: “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola,” 195.

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Kohei Usada argues that Marianne Faithful’s voice-over fuses with the later shouts of the mob to suggest a more generalized threat from the outside world. Kohei Usada, “The Voice of Marianne Faithfull: On Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” CineAction 75 (Winter 2008): 57. 62 Backman Rogers comments on the cinematography employed to heighten the effect: “Indeed, it is as if the tracking motion of the camera, effected through the use of a telephoto lens that visually collapses background and foreground, pushes her back into the wall behind her. Visually, she is backed into a corner” (Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 2573). On the repetition of the patterns, see Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” 217; Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity,” 105; Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2016), 160; Jacki Wilson, Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 67. 63 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 100. 64 Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity,” 97. 65 Flores, “Fashion and Otherness,” 608. 66 Wilson describes her rebellion similarly as “rebellion against spectacle by way of spectacle” (Being Gorgeous, 67). 67 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 109. 68 Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity,” 107. 69 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 110; Weber, Queen of Fashion, 203. 70 Weber, Queen of Fashion, 286. 71 Weber, Queen of Fashion, 287. It is also worth noting that she appropriated the bleached white gown from West Indian style: “the distinctive brilliance of white cotton blued and bleached in Saint-Domingue caught the eye of Marie Antoinette in 1782 and helped to inaugurate the fashion for the robe en chemise.” Amelia Rauser, “Madras and Muslin Meet Europe: On Neoclassical Cultural Appropriation,” Lapham Quarterly, March 18, 2020, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/madras-and-muslinmeet-europe. 72 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 110. 73 Weber, Queen of Fashion, 115. 74 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 107. As we note, the necklace is presumably an allusion to the infamous 2,800-carat collar of the “Diamond Necklace affair.” Historians agree that this single incident, unfairly, solidified popular resentment against her. See Weber, Queen of Fashion, 166. The necklace, called “the Slave’s Collar,” symbolizes the shackles of public of opinion and foreshadows the guillotine, which “sliced its own bloody version of a necklace into the Queen’s throat” (Weber, Queen of Fashion, 8). 75 Ferriss and Young, “Marie Antoinette,” 100.

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76 Backman Rogers sees the film’s deliberate anachronisms as challenging clichéd historical accounts: “It is precisely this understanding of how historical narrative is fashioned around particular subjective and biased accounts of events that gains currency through the powers of image and propaganda that informs Coppola’s irreverent and subversive approach to French history. I contend that some critics lambasted the film precisely because it dares to dismantle the propaganda machine and the coterminous clichés that have served to hold in place certain detrimental images” (Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 2518). The deliberate nature of the anachronism is heightened, as I argue in Chapter 3, in its allusions to a 1977 ad for Charles Jourdan shoes photographed by Guy Bourdin. 77 See, for instance, her comments in Carrie Rickey, “The ‘Beguiled’ Test: Does the Director’s Gender Matter?” The New York Times, June 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/06/23/movies/the-beguiled-test-sofia-coppola.html. 78 The film was criticized for excising Hattie, the sole slave character in Cullinan’s novel and the 1971 film. See, for instance, Corey Atad, “Lost in Adaptation,” Slate, June 20, 2017, https://slate.com/culture/2017/06/sofia-coppolas-whitewashed-newmovie-the-beguiled.html. Amy tells Corporal McBurney simply, “the slaves left.” Coppola has explained in a response published in IndieWire, “I did not want to perpetuate an objectionable stereotype where facts and history supported my choice of setting the story of these white women in complete isolation, after the slaves had escaped. Moreover, I felt that to treat slavery as a side-plot would be insulting.” Sofia Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds to ‘The Beguiled’ Backlash,” IndieWire, July 15, 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/sofia-coppola-the-beguiled-backlashresponse-1201855684/. In my view, the caricatured Hattie in both the novel and the film precursors may support Coppola’s argument. That does not mean, however, that Coppola could not, in her adaptation, have altered Hattie’s characterization or included additional characters as slaves. This more expanded ensemble could, however, have detracted from the intensely claustrophobic atmosphere of the seminary. 79 Sofia Coppola, quoted in Claire Marie Healy, “Sofia Coppola: Keep Your Dreams,” Dazed, June 23, 2017, http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/36488/1/ sofia-coppola-beguiled. 80 In an interview, Coppola referred to Farrell as their “token hunk.” She said of the garden sequence: “we were cracking up [as if] we were shooting a calendar at the same time … It was fun to make him the object.” Quoted in Kristin Lopez, “In Conversation with Sofia Coppola,” Film School Rejects, May 19, 2017, https://filmschoolrejects.com/interviewdirector-sofia-coppola-beguiled/. In an interview at Lincoln Center, she identified a photo of Steve McQueen cooling himself off with water from a garden hose as inspiring her image of masculinity. See Michael Odmark, “The Close-Up: Sofia Coppola Talks Filmmaking and The Beguiled,” Film Linc Daily, June 22, 2017, https://www.filmlinc.org/ daily/the-close-up-sofia-coppola-talks-filmmaking-and-the-beguiled/. 81 Backman Rogers makes a similar observation: “Until the very end, it is the women who determine what McBurney sees and believes: this is revenge by appearance or

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beguilement. Their carefully ritualistic preparations over grooming and dress are not mere frippery, but an artful form of deception, and the charade is maintained to the end as McBurney suffocates, still in a state of disbelief that mere girls could poison him” (Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 1289). 82 Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 2741. She states succinctly, “They lead their lives under the aegis of objects and self-objectification” (Kindle loc. 2886). 83 Quoted in “Behind the Real Bling Ring,” DVD featurette, The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola (Lionsgate Entertainment, 2013). 84 Maryn Wilkinson, “Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, and the Performance of the Teenage Girl in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013),” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 12/13 (2017): 31. Note that this differs from the process described by Elizabeth Wilson, whereby garments “take on qualities of the wearer and of the occasions on which they were worn. Their feel and smell come to represent memories, conscious and unconscious.” Elizabeth Wilson, “Magic Fashion,” Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 8, no. 4 (2004): 379. 85 Quoted in Richard Prince, “Sofia Coppola,” Interview, June 14, 2013, https://www. interviewmagazine.com/film/sofia-coppola. 86 The omnipresence of surveillance suggests Michel Foucault’s theory of “panopticonism.” He explains the process of self-regulation using Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, a circular structure with cells facing on to a central observing station. Each cell has windows in front and back, enabling the guard in the center to view the prisoners at all times. For Foucault, what is more significant than the guard’s ability to see is that each prisoner realizes the possibility of being seen at any time, and will alter his/her behavior based on this possibility. The prisoners thus regulate their own behavior. This mechanism of “panopticonism” operates broadly in Western societies, which Foucault describes as “disciplinary societies” where power is not wielded by one individual, one institution, or the state, but internalized by the society’s members and exercised through self-monitoring and self-surveillance. Foucault’s model, however, describes individuals’ self-regulation, whereas the Bling Ring members are emboldened to violate the law. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). 87 Sara Pesce, “Ripping Off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-Branding in California,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (2015): 7. 88 Bauman and Raud, Practices of Selfhood, 42, 45. Bauman notes that this shifts the dynamics of self from “cognitive and moral spaces” to a purely aesthetic one. John Fowles makes a similar observation in The Magus: his character initiates his moral growth only once he realizes “there were no watching eyes.” John Fowles, The Magus: A Revised Version (New York: Dell, 1978), 666. 89 In her fascinating book, Catherine Zimmer argues that “the visual technologies associated with cinema are intimately connected with surveillance practice and the production of knowledge through visibility, even as ‘cinema’ exceeds categorization

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as a purely visual medium.” Catherine Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 4. In other words, Coppola’s film not only represents surveillance, as in using the filters to replicate grainy recorded images or by pulling back to show the police following the burglars online, but it engages in surveillance simply by registering the characters’ illicit acts using a camera. As Zimmer notes, representation and surveillance are “mutually structuring” (14). 90 Munich, “Introduction: Fashion Films,” 2. 91 Munich, “Introduction: Fashion Films,” 2. 92 Drake Stutesman, “Costume Design, or, What is Fashion in Film?” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 21. 93 Todd Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some Place’: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism against a Postmodern Landscape,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 55. 94 The image of floating in a pool also resonates with Bauman’s choice of “liquid modernity” to describe the dynamics of the self and contemporary social interaction: “a multi-centered, deregulated, fragmented and fluid world of similarly fragmented and deregulated lives” (Bauman and Raud, Practices of Selfhood, 40). 95 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 128. In Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, she adds that his vehicle reduces him to a clichéd image of masculinity-in-crisis, noting the parallels to Charlotte’s comment to Bob about buying a Porsche in Lost in Translation (Kindle loc.1881). 96 Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 90. 97 The final scene calls to mind Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). At three moments, Buñuel’s film is interrupted by a shot of six characters walking wordlessly down a road against a backdrop of ambient noise. While ambiguous and part of a surrealist text resistant to simple interpretation, the scenes do have tantalizing implications for Coppola’s film. Owing to their repetition, the six characters also appear to be in motion but going nowhere in particular (as Johnny is when driving in circles in the film’s opening). The purposefulness of their purposeless walk can be construed as a satire of bourgeois striving. By contrast, Johnny’s change in direction, from circular to straight, combined with the significance of his white shirt, does suggest a potential for genuinely purposeful action. 98 Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 1591. 99 Lucy Bolton notes that “her clothes are plain, simple, and not figure-hugging”; she “does not appear to wear make-up, and her hair is natural, straight and unadorned,” and she feels alienated from her husband “because, among other things, he uses hair products.” Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 106. Backman Rogers identifies the source of

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Scarlett Johansson’s wardrobe: it “was supplied by niche, upmarket brands such as Araks (whose pink ‘Sonja’ panties feature in the opening title sequence) and French label APC, which perhaps marks her out further as someone who has the distinctly middle-class privilege of having the time and financial resources to question her role in life at a young age” (Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 1751).

100 Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 136. Also see Wendy Haslem, “Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation,” Senses of Cinema 31 (April 2004), http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/ feature-articles/lost_in_translation/. 101 Tay, Women on the Edge, 137. 102 The shot is an homage to a photorealist painting by John Kacere. See Chapter 3. 103 On the film’s connection to the romantic comedy genre, see Geoff King, Lost in Translation. Todd Kennedy notes that the film inverts the “sexist winter–spring romance.” Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 47. Tay argues the film denies “heterosexual closure and the happily-ever-after sought by conventional Hollywood narratives” (Women on the Edge, 137). 104 Megan Abbott, “They Hadn’t Heard Us Calling,” The Virgin Suicides, Criterion Collection DVD Special Edition, dir. Sofia Coppola (New York: Criterion, 2018). 105 Quoted in Vincent LoBrutto and Harriet R. Morrison, The Coppolas: A Family Business (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 90. 106 Coppola obviously follows Alfred Hitchcock, particularly Rear Window, in selfreflexively referencing surveillance apparatuses, such as binoculars and telescopes. The Virgin Suicides, however, introduces memory and desire as additional filters of experience, emphasizing the power of emotion to alter perception. 107 Lane and Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola,” 189. 108 Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema, 36. 109 See Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker, 2nd edn (Oxford and London: Routledge, 2011), 127. Also see No. 5 in BFI, “The BFI Guide to How to Make a Sofia Coppola Film,” YouTube, July 12, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Jqpxy0CNg&index=5&list=PL6iyk30XguJgNJ huXwdyMQTWkQ7rV0KF0. 110 Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head,” 49. Jesse Fox Mayshark similarly argues that the film “riffs on the idea of Marie Antoinette refracted through various prisms: fairytale princess clichés, feminist historicism, Hollywood celebrity gossip, post9/11 tension.” Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2007), 177. 111 Backman Rogers notes the scene’s “increasingly hermetic framing and sound design” and argues that it “forces viewers to feel the weight of duration” (American

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Independent Cinema, 123). She notes elsewhere that “the close-up here works to depersonalize rather than isolate and individuate the face” (Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 2179).

Chapter 2 1 Lynn Hirschberg, “Girls on Film,” W, June 18, 2013, https://www.wmagazine.com/ story/sofia-coppola-director-the-bling-ring-with-emma-watson. 2 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 2nd edn (London: Polity, 2015), xxvii. Elizabeth Wilson similarly claims, “Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles.” Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 3. Christopher Breward’s definition is similar: “Fashion is taken to mean clothing designed primarily for its expressive and decorative qualities, related closely to the current short-term dictates of the market, rather than for work or ceremonial functions.” Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 5. 3 Christopher Breward notes that fashion illustrations in the 1920s and 1930s connected interiors, furniture, costumes, and bodies in “an idealized representation of fashionable life as a totalizing artform.” Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 123. 4 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 3. 5 Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 170–1. 6 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 9. 7 Interestingly, Beggs, like Coppola, also studied art, intending to be a painter. Quoted in Kate McQuiston, “An Interview with Richard Beggs,” Music and the Moving Image 13, no. 1 (2020): 63. 8 Caroline Evans, “The Walkies: Early French Fashion Shows as a Cinema of Attractions,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 110. 9 See “CHANEL Haute Couture Fashion Show,” 7 Days Out (Boardwalk Pictures, 2018), https://www.netflix.com/watch/80212884?trackId=14277283&tctx=0%2C4%2C1c3 b886f-3bae-41a1-a245-bbdce6b509f0-244388329%2C%2C. Coppola, who worked at Chanel as an intern in the 1980s, attended the show featured in the documentary and spoke about her work for the fashion house.

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10 Lynn Yaeger, “All the Runway’s a Stage: Rachel Feinstein’s Set Design for Marc Jacobs,” Vogue, February 13, 2012, https://www.vogue.com/article/all-the-runways-a-stagerachel-feinsteins-set-design-for-marc-jacobs. Coppola has ties to both artists. See Chapters 3 and 4. 11 Stef Yotka, “Forget Paris Fashion Week, H&M Is Changing Direction with an Immersive Theater Project in Sedona, Arizona,” Vogue, January 31, 2019, https://www. vogue.com/article/h-and-m-sedona-arizona-immersive-theater-project-spring-2019. Coppola directed a film for H&M’s Marni collection in 2012. See Chapter 3. 12 See Elisabetta Povoledo, “Valentino and Sofia Coppola Make an Opera,” The New York Times, May 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/fashion/valentino-sofiacoppola-la-traviata.html. Also see James Imam, “Sofia Coppola’s La Traviata Opera Debut Looks Good but has Little to Say,” The Guardian, May 23, 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/music/2016/may/23/sofia-coppola-la-traviata-valentino-romeopera-verdi, and Kristin Tice Studeman, “Sofia Coppola Takes You Inside Valentino’s ‘La Traviata,’” W, May 24, 2016, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/sofia-coppolavalentino-la-traviata-opera-exclusive-look/all. For a more detailed discussion of Coppola’s involvement, see Chapter 4. 13 See Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 18; Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013, https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1302-Spring-2013/Sofia-Coppola. aspx. Justin Wyatt notes that her costume design in “Life with Zoe” is highlighted in the children’s costume ball where her designs transform the children into perfect replicas of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Elvis, and Cleopatra. Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 24. Production design also serves print fashion: fashion editors create sets to unfurl narratives in the pages of magazines as well. 14 Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 61–2. 15 Pamela Church Gibson, “The Fashion Narratives of Tom Ford: Nocturnal Animals and Contemporary Cinema,” Fashion Theory 21, no. 6 (2017): 632. She also describes his film A Single Man as resembling “a series of commercials.” Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 99. 16 Theorists of material culture point out that “material” is another word for cloth, and that “cloth and clothing constitute the widest imaginable category of material culture, covering a spatial domain that extends from the miles of textiles annually produced by hand or factory to the most intimate apparel of the human body, and a temporal domain whose earliest moments … pre-date the Neolithic.” Jane Schneider, “Cloth and Clothing,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (London: Sage, 2006), 202. But, naturally, material culture is composed of goods of all kinds. As Daniel Miller has argued, goods are culture, and by “their active participation in a process of social self-creation … they are directly constitutive of our understanding of ourselves and others.” Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1987), 206, 215.

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Refer also to his subsequent works. Daniel Miller, Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). For an overview of the importance of object-based research for fashion studies, see Ingrid E. Mida and Alexandra Kim, The Dress Detective: A Practical Guide to Object-Based Research in Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 17 Quoted in Mark Olsen, “Sofia Coppola: Cool and the Gang,” Sight and Sound 14, no. 1 (2004): 15. 18 Sofia Coppola, quoted in Grace Coddington, “Sofia Coppola,” Face to Grace M2M: Made to Measure TV, October 10, 2018, https://m2m.tv/watch/sofia-coppola. Also see Anthony Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross,” DGA Quarterly, September 2017, https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1702-Spring-2017/CollaboratorsCoppola-Ross.aspx. 19 Vincent LoBrutto and Harriet R. Morrison, The Coppolas: A Family Business (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 131. 20 Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 174; Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), Kindle loc. 2114. 21 Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 1080. 22 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 155. For an overview of the many books on music and cinema, see Elsie Walker’s introduction to Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory (New York: Oxford, 2015), 2–3. Also see the articles in the special issue of Music, Sound and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (December 2008): 107–224, ed. Tony Grajeda and Jay Beck, titled “The Future of Sound Studies.” 23 Tim Anderson, “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65. 24 Subsequent videos drew directly from her films: Air’s “Playground Love” (2000) piggybacked on The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Kevin Shields’ “City Girl” (2003) on Lost in Translation (2003). Coppola also appeared in several videos: as Joan Crawford in Sonic Youth’s “Mildred Pierce,” directed by Dave Markey (1990); in Madonna’s “Deeper And Deeper,” directed by Bobby Woods (1992); as a “Times Square junkie” in The Black Crowes’ “Sometimes Salvation,” directed by Stéphane Sednaoui (1992); as a gymnast in The Chemical Brothers’ “Electrobank,” directed by Spike Jonze (1997); and in Phoenix’s “Funky Squaredance,” directed by Roman Coppola (2002). 25 Quoted in Rickey, “Lost & Found.” 26 Anderson notes the song’s beat gives Chloe her “swagger” (“Lost in Transition,” 69–70). 27 Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 65. 28 Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, “Introduction,” in Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, ed. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), Kindle loc. 410.

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29 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Museums: Representing the Real?” in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 258. 30 Esther Leslie, “Dreams for Sale,” in Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa Uhlirova (London: Koenig Books, 2013), 32. 31 Leslie identifies the close-up as “a filmic analogue to the fashion detail” (“Dreams for Sale,” 32). Jordanova notes that “authenticity is about something feeling right, and being legitimized by those who deem it authentic” (“Museums,” 259). Miller notes that “like spatial position, temporality is an intrinsic property of the object, which always exists in time, and will potentially signify the amount of time elapsed since it was created” (Material Culture, 124). 32 Llewellyn Negrin, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Corporeal Experience of Fashion,” in Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, ed. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), Kindle loc. 2619. 33 Quoted in Elana Fishman, “Why Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled Skips the Hoop Skirts but Keeps the Corsets,” Racked, June 19, 2017, https://www.racked. com/2017/6/19/15784952/the-beguiled-costumesFishman. 34 Mattie Kahn, “Costume Designer Nancy Steiner Explains Her Role in the New Twin Peaks,” Elle, January 11, 2017, https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a42002/nancy-steinercostume-designer/. Coppola initially wanted to design the costumes herself, but realized the job was too big. See Dhani Mau, “How Nancy Steiner Became the Most Influential Costume Designer You Hadn’t Heard Of,” Fashionista.com, December 14, 2016, https://fashionista. com/2016/12/nancy-steiner-costume-designer. She selected Steiner after seeing her work in Todd Hayne’s Safe (1995), hiring her, as well as editor James Lyon, to capture the same look and atmosphere of suburban malaise (LoBrutto and Morrison, The Coppolas, 90). 35 Quoted in Katharine K. Zarrella, “Costume Designer Nancy Steiner Talks Dressing the New Twin Peaks,” Fashion Unfiltered, November 23, 2016, https://fashionunfiltered. com/people/2016/twin-peaks-revival-costume-designer-nancy-steiner-interview/. Drake Stutesman has argued that costume is “a piece of film architecture”: “Costume is a high art. The costume designer uses the word ‘build’ to describe an outfit’s construction. The costume is an object, a literal building that the actor enters, ‘wears,’ or inhabits in order to perform.” Drake Stutesman, “Costume Design, or, What is Fashion in Film?” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 21. 36 Quoted in Kahn, “Costume Designer Nancy Steiner”; Mau, “How Nancy Steiner Became”; Ruthie Friedlander, “Meet the Costume Designer You Never Knew You Knew,” InStyle, November 4, 2016, http://www.instyle.com/fashion/nancy-steinercostume-designer-you-never-knew-you-knew. 37 Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 73–4. 38 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 65–6.

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39 On the uses of popular song in contemporary romantic comedies, see Lisa M. Rüll, “A Soundtrack for Our Lives: Chick-Flick Music,” in Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies, ed. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (New York: Routledge, 2008), 79–91. Aaron Copland suggested five broad functions of nondiegetic music in film: “creating atmosphere, underlining the psychological states of characters, providing background filler, building a sense of continuity, sustaining tension and then rounding it off with a sense of closure. These do not seem to be necessarily exclusive categories, nor do they exhaust the range of functions that music can perform in movies.” Quoted in Jerrold Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 257). Levinson adds fifteen of his own (257–8), though he considers exclusively scored music rather than popular songs with lyrics. 40 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 59. 41 Quoted in Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 72. Also see LoBrutto and Morrison, The Coppolas, 90; Gold, Great Filmmakers, 24. Coppola notes that musician Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth gave her Eugenides’s novel. “Revisiting The Virgin Suicides,” The Virgin Suicides, DVD, directed by Sofia Coppola (New York: Criterion Collection, 2018), DVD Extra. 42 Antoine Bourgougon, “Nicolas Godin from Air on the Gear Used in ‘Moon Safari’,” Reverb, March 6, 2018, https://reverb.com/news/nicolas-godin-from-air-on-the-gearused-in-moon-safari. 43 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 5. 44 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 34. For more on the film’s debt to fashion photography, see Chapter 3. 45 Breward, Fashion, 126; Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 200–2; Elliott Smedley, “Escaping to Reality: Fashion Photography in the 1990s,” in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 144–56. 46 Sean O’Hagan, “Sofia Coppola,” The Guardian, October 8, 2006, https://www. theguardian.com/film/2006/oct/08/features.review. 47 Coppola, quoted in Kristin Lopez, “In Conversation with Sofia Coppola,” Film School Rejects, May 19, 2017, https://filmschoolrejects.com/interview-director-sofia-coppolabeguiled/. 48 The song was arranged by composer Laura Karpman, the sound design by Richard Beggs. William Brown notes that the song was also used in “Gone with the Wind (Fleming 1939), which tells the story of a spoilt southern white girl trying to become a woman during the Civil War, as well as in The Searchers (Ford 1956), which tells the story of a racist white man trying to rescue his niece from Native Americans. That is,

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the song is associated in film with the Civil War and with race.” William Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own: Feminism, Posthumanism, and Race in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled,” Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2020): 79. 49 Coppola credits a photo as inspiration for the scene: “Morning Beauty” by contemporary fashion photographer Yelena Yemchuk, with model Sasha Pivovarova looking through a sheer, embroidered curtain. See Michael Odmark, “The Close-Up: Sofia Coppola Talks Filmmaking and The Beguiled,” Film Linc Daily, June 22, 2017, https://www.filmlinc.org/ daily/the-close-up-sofia-coppola-talks-filmmaking-and-the-beguiled/. 50 “‘It’s called polyphonic music, but if you stretch it down, it sounds like what we wanted,’ Mars says. ‘It sounds like ambivalence, there’s a romantic tension that can be violent.’ The band heightened this by slowing down parts of the ‘Magnificat’ to extreme levels, up to 200 times slower than normal, and by filling in the chords with synthesizers when it was lacking tension.” Paula Mejia, “Known For Her Musical Choices, Sofia Coppola Does Something Strikingly Different With ‘The Beguiled’ Soundtrack,” Nylon, June 28, 2017, https://nylon.com/articles/sofia-coppola-beguiled-soundtrack. 51 See Mekado Murphy, “Anatomy of a Scene: The Beguiled,” The New York Times, June 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/movies/the-beguiled-reviewsofia-coppola.html. 52 “Mars described the climax as the ‘plat de résistance’ of the score—an excerpt from Monteverdi’s ‘Magnificat,’ slowed down 800 percent, its horns and chorus pushed to their very limit.” Katherine Cusumano, “How French Band Phoenix Transformed the Music in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled,” W, July 13, 2017, https://www.wmagazine.com/ story/the-beguiled-sofia-coppola-behind-the-score-phoenix. 53 Matthew Jacobs, “The Miss Sofia Coppola Seminary for Eternal Admirers,” The Huffington Post, June 23, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sofia-coppolathe-beguiled_us_594a6d12e4b0db570d37f3d0; Lopez, “In Conversation with Sofia Coppola”; Nicolas Rapold, “Interview: Sofia Coppola,” Film Comment, June 19, 2017, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-sofia-coppola/; Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 54 Stacey Battat conducted research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s textile archives and studied fashions of the Civil War era to create historically accurate clothing, from the ladies’ gowns to the men’s uniforms. Fishman, “Why Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled Skips the Hoop Skirts.” 55 Anthony Powell, quoted in Patrick Fahy, “Clothing Tess, Poirot and Indiana Jones,” BFI, March 8, 2016, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/ clothing-tess-poirot-indiana-jones. 56 Quoted in Fahy, “Clothing Tess.” 57 Chloe Malle, “Pioneer Women Are Roaming the City,” The New York Times, September 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/style/prairie-woman-style-batshevadoen.html. The same article notes that the social media feed of one brand contributing

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to the trend, Doen, “suggests a Sofia Coppola adaptation of ‘O Pioneers!’” The author bypasses a direct reference to The Beguiled in favor of a more generalized application of Coppolism to the nineteenth-century frontier, foregrounding her distinct visual aesthetic in a general sense over costume design. 58 Coppola, quoted in “A Guided Tour to Sofia Coppola’s Inspirations by Sofia Coppola Herself,” W, May 30, 2017, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/sofia-coppoladeconstructs-her-mood-boards/all. 59 Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 18. 60 Coppola, quoted in Jacobs, “The Miss Sofia Coppola Seminary for Eternal Admirers.” 61 Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 375. Courtney Herber similarly argues that “The ephemeral nature of life at Versailles in Marie Antoinette’s life is well represented by that wrecked bedroom. It was the first set of rooms that she explored when she first arrived at Versailles. It was where she made many attempts to seduce her husband, where she gave birth to her children, and did all of her infamous shopping. Indeed, it is where we see her at her most real, her most vulnerable.” Courtney Herber, “‘Let them eat cake, she says’: Assessing Marie-Antoinette’s Image,” in Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France: Reputation, Reinterpretation, and Reincarnation, ed. Estelle Paranque (New York: Springer, 2019), 319. 62 Diana Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism,” in Fashion and Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 227. 63 Samiha Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 99. 64 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 47. For a history of the palace, see Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 156–7. She similarly argues that “Versailles is a crucial means of this film both embodying baroque luxury and figuring its attachments to the surface and to a material-visuality” (151). As a testament to the team’s work, a recent historical exhibition in Paris, “Marie Antoinette: Metamorphosis of an Image,” displayed Canonero’s costumes (including the blue dress and hat Kirsten Dunst wears at the handover) and employed art director Anne Seibel “to recreate, using fabrics from the set, the ambience of the queen’s bedroom at Versailles.” Nazanin Lankarani, “Marie Antoinette’s Enduring Mystique,” The New York Times, October 16, 2019, https://www. nytimes.com/2019/10/16/arts/marie-antoinette-exhibition-Paris.html. 65 Quoted in Handyside, Cinema of Girlhood, Kindle loc. 3181. 66 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 183.

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67 Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” 219. 68 Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” 213–14. 69 Quoted in Lobrutto and Morrison, The Coppolas, 111; Coddington, “Sofia Coppola.” 70 See Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” 215. 71 On the history of the little black dress, see Amy Hofman Edelman, The Little Black Dress (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 72 Quoted in “The Making of Marie Antoinette,” directed by Eleanor Coppola; Marie Antoinette, DVD, directed by Sofia Coppola, Sony Pictures, 2007, DVD Extra. 73 Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos,” 13–14. 74 Production Notes, Cinema Review, http://www.cinemareview.com/production. asp?prodid=3647. 75 In fact, Adam Ant was inspired by David Hemmings in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), which is actually about the British Army during the Crimean War (1853–6) and features post-Waterloo (1815) officers, and is thus after the Romantic era that gave the New Romantics their label. For a brief history of Westwood and McLaren’s collaborations, see Breward, Fashion, 189–90. 76 Scholars in film adaptation studies have been particularly good at stressing the simultaneous effects of image, dialogue, and sound in cinema, in contrast to other arts, such as literature. Robert Stam, for instance, claims that film is a “synesthetic and synthetic art,” with five materials of expression (“moving photographic image, phonetic sound, music, noises and written materials”). Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2000), 61, 59. 77 Lesley Chow, “Fashion and Dunst: The Substance of Marie Antoinette,” Bright Lights Film Journal 56 (May 1, 2007), http://brightlightsfilm.com/fashion-dunst-substancemarie-antoinette/#.WtoSjC_MzGI. 78 Lucy Fife Donaldson, “‘You Have to Feel a Sound For It to Be Effective’: Sonic Surfaces in Film and Television,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 85–6. 79 Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh, 163. 80 Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 114. She notes that flour was an ingredient used in the powder. 81 Anthony Lane, “Lost in the Revolution,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/23/lost-in-the-revolution. 82 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 46.

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83 Acord, quoted in Production Notes. 84 Quoted in Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 79–80. 85 Quoted in Richard Prince, “Sofia Coppola,” Interview, June 14, 2013, https://www. interviewmagazine.com/film/sofia-coppola. 86 Filming took place at over twenty locations in and around Los Angeles. 87 Laura Henderson, “Framing The Bling Ring: (Im)material Psychogeography and Screen Technology,” COLLOQUY Text Theory Critique 28 (2014): 36–7. 88 Henderson, “Framing The Bling Ring,” 23. 89 Sara Pesce, “Ripping Off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-Branding in California,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (2015): 19–20. 90 Delphine Letort, “The Cultural Capital of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013): Branding Feminine Celebrity in Los Angeles,” Celebrity Studies 7, no. 3 (2016): 312. 91 Quoted in Prince, “Sofia Coppola.” 92 Edwin “Stats” Houghton, “Dapper Dan Talks Gucci Partnership, Dressing Harlem’s Notorious Gangsters, and Getting Busted by Sonia Sotomayor,” GQ Style, March 5, 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/dapper-dan-gucci-harlem-atelier-exclusive-interview. Stella Bruzzi identifies Chanel as the original influencer of African-American street style citing her “chunky gold-look chains” and “huge Byzantine crosses studded with brightly coloured glass,” as well as her exaggerated accessories. Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 106–7. She argues that the “fetishisation of the designer label within black street styles … is not the result of random selection, but a coherent socio-political statement which is proof that street kids can afford luxury items” (109). 93 Quoted in Audie Cornish, “Dapper Dan, Telling Stories in Leather, Fur and Logos,” NPR, July 8, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/08/739508701/dapper-dan-tellingstories-in-leather-fur-and-logos. See Daniel R. Day, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem (New York: Random House, 2019). 94 Houghton, “Dapper Dan.” 95 Elizabeth Wilson traces the pattern, from the dandy in the eighteenth century, through bohemian styles of the 1920s and the Mods/Rockers of the 1960s to the punks (Adorned in Dreams, 182–96). Also see Fred Davis, who argues, “anti-fashion is as much a creature of fashion as fashion itself is the means of its undoing.” Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 161. Ted Polhemus identifies two basic moves in street style: dressing up or dressing down. Bruzzi argues that while “white groups express the latter tendency, the majority of black fashions illustrate the former” (Undressing Cinema, 102). 96 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 203.

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  97 Breward, Fashion, 103. On the “triangulation” of music, visual branding and fashion, see Janice Miller, Fashion and Music (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011), 12. Also see Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 153–66.   98 Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 11. Also see Wendy Haslem, “Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation,” Senses of Cinema 31 (April 2004), http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/lost_in_translation/.   99 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 35. See Carolus Praet, “Japanese Advertising: The World’s Number One Celebrity Showcase? A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Frequency of Celebrity Appearances in TV Advertising,” in Proceedings of the 2001 Special AsiaPacific Conference of the American Academy of Advertising, Gainesville, FL, ed. Marilyn S. Roberts and Robert L. King, 6–13. 100 Anne Allison, “The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009): 90. In the uniquely circular fashion of popular culture, Coppola’s film is credited as enhancing the “coolness” of the trend (“Karaoke, The Trend that Always Was?” KaraFun, September 20, 2018, https://www.karafun.com/ blog/815.html). 101 Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 74. 102 Geoff King, Lost in Translation, 92. 103 Homay King observes: “Bob remains a somewhat hopeless fish out of water to the end: his minor attempts to interact with Japan come across as affably tolerant at best and phony or patronizing at worst. Charlotte’s relatively open state, by contrast, allows her to merge with the culture and even to appropriate elements from Japan in ways that resist reinscribing the lines of absolute difference. We see her admiring traditional Ikibana displays, decorating her hotel room with artificial pink cherry blossoms, and tying a paper prayer to a tree outside a temple in Kyoto. In these scenes, we have the impression that Charlotte goes forth to meet Japan rather than pulling it closer to herself—that it is she who is becoming other to herself rather than Japan being assimilated through these appropriations.” Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 166. 104 Coppola, quoted in Gold, Great Filmmakers, 24. 105 Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 76. 106 Geoff King notes that nondiegetic music is “conspicuous by its absence” (Lost in Translation, 119). 107 Jonathan Faiers notes that “red, and its socio-cultural construction as the colour of passion, immorality and exhibitionism, has meant that film teems with scarlet women of varying degrees of wickedness and licentiousness.” Jonathan Faiers, Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 203–11.

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108 Lucy Bolton argues that the pink wig is a “parody of a showgirl performance”; “the artificiality of the scene is heightened not only by the unrealistic fancy-dress wig but also the incongruity of the song’s words and movements with respect to Charlotte’s character and Johansson’s previously understated performance.” Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 120. 109 Sofia Coppola, “Small Stories #4,” in BEAMS Beyond Toyko, trans. W. David Marx (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 140. 110 Coppola, quoted in Coddington, “Sofia Coppola”; Nancy Steiner, quoted in Mau, “How Nancy Steiner Became.” 111 Nancy Steiner, quoted in Mau, “How Nancy Steiner Became.” 112 Bollen, quoted in Prince, “Sofia Coppola.” 113 Quoted in Mark Rozzo, “Secrets of the Chateau Marmont,” Vanity Fair, February 4, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/02/secrets-of-the-chateau-marmont. Much of the history here comes from Rozzo’s article, published to mark the hotel’s ninetieth anniversary. 114 Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema, 116, 125. 115 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 25; Dennis Lim, “It’s What She Knows: The Luxe Life,” The New York Times, December 10, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/ movies/12sofia.html?pagewanted=all. 116 Lobrutto and Morrison, The Coppolas, 131. Beggs discusses the deliberateness of the sound design in Somewhere, as well as other Coppola films, in Kate McQuiston, “An Interview with Richard Beggs,” Music and the Moving Image 13, no. 1 (2020): 71. 117 He played the same song to Coppola during one of her visits with her family (Gold, Great Filmmakers, 56). 118 Dorff notes that after he tried on 150 pairs of jeans, Coppola and Battat decided on an old pair of Levi’s. Sarah Nicole Prickett, “Q&A: Stephen Dorff on Old Levi’s, Elle Fanning, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere,” Fashion, December 22, 2010, https:// fashionmagazine.com/culture/qa-stephen-dorff-on-old-levis-elle-fanning-and-sofiacoppolas-somewhere/). Christopher Breward notes that “in its earliest sixteenth- and seventeenth-century incarnation the indigo-dyed hard-wearing cotton claimed connections with both the textile center Nîmes in France (thus denim) and the port of Genoa in Italy (jean).” But the needs of “land-workers, gold-diggers and cattle-drivers in the American West of the 1850s” inspired Levi Strauss and other manufacturers to produce “durable overalls and trousers for an active and itinerant workforce” (Breward, Fashion, 110–11). For denim’s significance in the 1950s and beyond, see James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Gotham Books, 2006); Rachel Louise Snyder, Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008); Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, Global Denim (London: Bloomsbury

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Notes Academic, 2011). Boots have historical associations with human mobility, and from their origins in indigenous cultures tens of thousands of years ago they have had utilitarian purposes. See John Peacock, Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005); Rebecca Shawcross, Shoes: An Illustrated History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). The Red Wing workboots Dorff wears originated in Wisconsin in 1905, initially for farmers and then for military personnel. Fittingly, in the 1940s when his were created, Red Wing initiated mobile shoe sales. See https://www. redwingheritage.com/us/USD/page/history. Church Gibson notes that Brando derived what he called his “slob look” from “workwear and army surplus stores for reasons of comfort and economy” (Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 64).

119 Todd Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some Place’: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism against a Postmodern Landscape,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 52–3. 120 Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some Place,’” 59. 121 Quoted in Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), vii. 122 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), ProQuest Ebook Central, n.p. In his phenomenological interpretation of Marie Antoinette, Walton makes a similar claim that can be extended to all Coppola’s films: “movement, materiality, decorative décor, surfaces, and textures function as highly charged repositories of meaning” (Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh, 160).

Chapter 3   1 Quoted in “Making Somewhere,” Somewhere, DVD, director Sofia Coppola (Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2011).   2 See Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013, https://www.dga. org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1302-Spring-2013/Sofia-Coppola.aspx; Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 18; Mary Hurd, Women Directors and Their Films (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2007), 130; Vincent LoBrutto and Harriet R. Morrison, The Coppolas: A Family Business (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 85.   3 James Mottram, “The Sundance Sisters: Sofia Coppola and Kimberly Peirce,” The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Over Hollywood (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006), 247.   4 Gold notes that Coppola’s look book for Lost in Translation also included “views from the Park Hyatt hotel and a photo of the hotel bar singer” (Gold, Great Filmmakers,

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51). Rickey sees her look books as “visual shorthand from her days as a fashion entrepreneur” (“Lost and Found”), but Coppola prefers “mood board” to capture the collage effect of film. Quoted in Philip Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” Aperture 231 (Summer 2018): 30.   5 Coppola, quoted in Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23. Coppola named BEAMS’s magazine and “participated in photo shoots in Tokyo, New York City, Los Angeles, London and Paris. The dual page style won the magazine a New York ADC Award.” BEAMS Beyond Tokyo, trans. David Marx (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 227. A reproduction of her two-page spread “California Girls”, pictured in the volume, prefigures her style in The Virgin Suicides, with its muted pastel color palette and natural lighting.   6 LoBrutto and Morrison, Coppolas, 101.   7 Hurd, Women Directors, 130; Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 151; Evgenia Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 352. On the Mapplethorpe exhibition at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris, see LoBrutto and Morrison, Coppolas, 137. A brief video about the exhibition can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBnbW8eTslk.   8 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23. Also see Loney Abrams, “Who Does Sofia Coppola Collect? See Inside the ‘Virgin Suicides’ Auteur’s Dreamy Art Collection,” Artspace, September 21, 2016, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/news_events/ how_i_collect/sopfia-coppola-54204.   9 See Sofia Coppola, “A Conversation with Sofia Coppola and Rachel Feinstein,” in Rachel Feinstein, ed. Bill Powers (New York: tarSIZ, 2008), 13–17; Paul Jasmin, Lost Angeles, ed. Dimitri Levas (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004); Bill Owens, Leisure, ed. Robert Harshorn Shimshak (New York: Fotofolio, 2004); Sofia Coppola, “Foreword,” Fiorucci, ed. David Owen (New York: Rizzoli, 2017); Sofia Coppola, “Small Stories #4,” BEAMS Beyond Toyko, trans. W. David Marx (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 140–2; Sofia Coppola, “Introduction,” Marc Jacobs Illustrated, ed. Grace Coddington (New York: Phaidon Press, 2019). Coppola’s connection to Rachel Feinstein is exemplary of how art and fashion intersect: Feinstein was friends with Bruce Weber, and she met Coppola backstage at a Marc Jacobs show in New York when she was working on her screenplay for Marie Antoinette. The two bonded over the Baroque period and Rococo style (Feinstein, “A Conversation,” 13). Feinstein inspired Marc Jacobs’s 2004 collection (and posed for photos by Juergen Teller for the campaign, a pose she replicated using an older model for the invitation to a 2005 gallery show) and designed sets for his 2012 New York fashion show. She and her husband John Currin also appeared in a short video for his Fall/Winter 2015 collection: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zlJoL2y195o. 10 See Coppola’s interview with Grace Coddington (“Sofia Coppola,” Face to Grace, M2M: Made to Measure TV, October 10, 2018, https://m2m.tv/watch/sofia-coppola), as well as Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), Kindle loc. 2886.

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11 In fact, fashion photography has, from its origins, been an artistic practice. Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911–2011, a recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, dates its origins to Edward Steichen’s work in 1911. Curator Paul Martineau explains the exhibit used 1911 as starting point “since that was the year Edward Steichen (1879–1973) was challenged to create the first ‘artistic’ fashion photographs, of gowns by the French couturier Paul Poiret. The successful results were published in the Parisian journal Art et decoration.” Paul Martineau, “Introduction,” Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 13. Rosetta Brookes argues that traditionally fashion photography has been considered the “lightweight end of photographic practice.” Rosetta Brookes, “Fashion Photography, the Double-Page Spread: Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Deborah Turberville,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 17. 12 Paul Martineau, “Introduction,” Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 14–15. For a definitive and detailed overview, see Alistair O’Neill, “Fashion Photography: Communication, Criticism and Curation from 1975,” in Fashion Cultures Revisited, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 147–60. 13 Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 108. Guy Bourdain’s 1976 Sighs and Whispers campaign for Bloomingdale’s lingerie initiated the trend by adapting the wide-screen format, set design and formal composition of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Michal RazRusso, “From Rebellion to Seduction, 1970–89,” in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 225–6. Also see O’Neill, “Fashion Photography,” 155–7. 14 Stephanie Zacharek, “Lost in Translation,” Salon.com, September 13, 2003, https:// www.salon.com/2003/09/12/translation/. 15 Quoted in Gold, Great Filmmakers, 42. 16 Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 17 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 2362. 18 “Color by Numbers: The Films of Sofia Coppola,” Fandor.com, June 19, 2017, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=djN8YllY4cs&list=PL6iyk30XguJgNJhuXwdyMQTWkQ 7rV0KF0&index=25. Coppola first saw the Ladurée macaron colors used in dresses for Marc Jacobs’s Spring 2003 collection, which she cites as her inspiration. Sofia Coppola, “Introduction,” in Marc Jacobs Illustrated, ed. Grace Coddington (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2019). 19 Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 105; Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 376, 2790; Christopher Bollen, Introduction to Richard Prince, “Sofia Coppola,” Interview, June 14, 2013, https://www. interviewmagazine.com/film/sofia-coppola.

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20 Others suggest the contemporary average is 2.5 seconds. See a 2010 study of 150 films showing that the average shot length has decreased. James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong, and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film,” Psychological Science 21, no. 3 (2010): 432–49, http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/ pubs/cuttingetalpsychsci10.pdf. Average shot-length data for Coppola’s pictures comes from the Cinemetrics database: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/satltdb.php#cm. 21 As David Campany notes, “cinema’s ‘long take’ may strike us as boldly photographic and it is often described as such.” David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008), 17. 22 Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 155. 23 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 27. 24 Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2007), 170–1. 25 Laura Mulvey, Death 24 X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 67. A thorough discussion of the complex relationship between moving and still images lies outside the bounds of this book. As early as 1929, for instance, Sergei Eisenstein theorized that all art was dialectical and hence even still images aspired to motion. Cinema, as the most comprehensive of all arts, incorporated their discrete conflicts: visual (painting and photography), kinetic (dance), tonal (music), verbal (language), and character and action (fiction and drama). Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 101–22. For additional discussion see, for instance, Campany, Photography and Cinema; Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon, eds., Between Still and Moving Images: Photography and Cinema in the 20th Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012). Cognitive psychology also provides insights into the mechanisms involved in visual processing, including our perception of apparent motion. See David Bordwell, “Convention Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 93–4. 26 Craik, Face of Fashion, 99; Paul Martineau, “Style in the Face of Crisis, 1930–1946,” in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 85; Hilary Radner, “On the Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s,” in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 131. 27 Breward, Fashion, 123.

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28 Susanna Brown, “Letting the Skirts Down, 1947–1969,” in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 157. 29 Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 145. Woodworth similarly argues, “Coppola’s films collectively lead us to question our assumptions about point of view, the camera and the look” (Woodworth, “Feminist Theorization,” 154). 30 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23. 31 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), Kindle loc. 874. 32 Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 880; Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979). 33 The image appears in Bill Owens, Our Kind of People: American Groups and Rituals (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1975). In her foreword to Owens’s book Leisure, Coppola mentions the image and notes that it “along with many others from Suburbia, became visual references for my first movie.” Sofia Coppola, “Foreword,” in Bill Owens, Leisure, ed. Robert Harshorn Shimshak (New York: Fotofolio, 2004), 4. She praises his focus on “the banal details of life” and notes his position as a “participant in that world and an outsider at the same time” (4). 34 In his introduction to Owens’s Leisure, Gregory Crewdson argues that Coppola, and other artists who came of age in the 1990s, “share a distanced fascination with 1970s style, fashion, and décor. Their interest in this subject matter comes not from direct experience, but from a vast reservoir of existing images and representations. For a generation of artists, Bill Owens’s photographs define the iconography of the 1970s. The Suburbia series has become part of our cultural lexicon” (5). 35 Quoted in Tavi Gevinson, “Girls with Power and Mystique: An Interview with Sofia Coppola,” Rookie, 17 June 2013, http://www.rookiemag.com/2013/06/sofia-coppolainterview/2/. 36 See Soroya Roberts, “The Eternal Becoming of Sofia Coppola,” Hazlitt, June 19, 2017, https://hazlitt.net/longreads/eternal-becoming-sofia-coppola. Eggleston’s image might have been inspired by fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s image of model Liz Gibbons sprawled out on the grass with a camera. See “Girl With Camera Lying on Grass” (1938). 37 Quoted in Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 31. 38 Sofia Coppola quoted in “A Guided Tour to Sofia Coppola’s Inspirations by Sofia Coppola Herself,” W, May 30, 2017, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/sofiacoppola-deconstructs-her-mood-boards/all and quoted in Michael Odmark, “The Close-Up: Sofia Coppola Talks Filmmaking and The Beguiled,” Film Linc Daily, June 22, 2017, https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/the-close-up-sofia-coppola-talks-filmmakingand-the-beguiled/.

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39 Backman Rogers sees an allusion to William Henry Machen’s (1832–1911) depiction of Christ in The Tomb (Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 1240). I would argue that Machen’s starkly realistic style, combined with its juvenile female figure in prayer over the corpse, is at odds with Coppola’s more romanticized, even sexualized, image, underscored by its adult female figure’s direct touching of the living male body. 40 See quotes from Coppola in Gevinson, “Girls with Power and Mystique”; Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures”; and Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 41 Owens, Suburbia, 9. 42 Backman Rogers argues, however, that its mise-en-scène extends the film’s critique to the structures supporting its characters’ narcissism. She notes that the parental figures “are too absorbed in making ‘detox’ juices and reading the newspaper” and thus “the critique is clearly levelled at structural orders (economic, state familial institutions) rather than merely one young female” (Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 2917). 43 The painting has been incorrectly identified as Jutta (1973), which features a female figure in a similar pose but wearing a black negligée and panties. The posture of the reclining female in Jutta does match Charlotte’s, but Coppola identifies Maude as her reference in an interview with Annette Insdorf for the 92nd Street Y, including an image of Kacere’s painting at approximately five minutes in. See “Sofia Coppola on Filmmaking: A Talk and Q&A with Annette Insdorf,” YouTube, April 22, 2020, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKj92etN7fw&t=308s. 44 Numerous critics have noted that Coppola works against conventions privileging the male gaze. Woodworth argues that “the way [Charlotte] lays and moves around is not performed for the male eye; she is generally without an onscreen male surrogate for the viewer, and the way she frequently folds up her body has the opposite effect of display. In fact, the moment of greatest exposure, when she briefly stands on the bed to hang a cherry blossom paper lantern, ends with her stubbing her toe getting down, undermining what may have potentially been a provocative moment” (Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization,” 148). Also see Wendy Haslem, “Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation,” Senses of Cinema 31 (April 2004), http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/ feature-articles/lost_in_translation/; Geoff King, Lost in Translation, 2. 45 Contrast, for instance, Jeff Wall’s “cinematographic” works—e.g., A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993—with Coppola’s. Both employ casts, sets, crews, and postproduction special effects to replicate still images, but Coppola’s are moving images rather than still photos that capture motion. The inverse of Coppola’s project can be seen in the work of Gregory Crewdson, who employed film-like production teams and lighting for his series Twilight (1998–2001) and Beneath the Roses (2003– 2008), or Cindy Sherman, who staged portraits in the style of promotional film stills in Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80.

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46 Quoted in Alexander Ballinger, New Cinematographers (New York: Collins Design, 2004), 31. 47 Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 46. 48 For these reasons, “Bourdin’s stills photography has been perceived as a form of arrested cinema—stills from moving narrative tableaux frozen in time that plunge the viewer into the action in media res [sic], before or after the moment of suspense. Bourdin’s staging often resembled a film set by channeling cinéphilic references to Hollywood glamour through the codes of b-movies, noirs, and crime thrillers.” Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 44. 49 Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 171. 50 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 311. 51 She recounts her encounter with Newton at the Chateau Marmont in her interview with Grace Coddington (“Sofia Coppola”). The quote comes from Sofia Coppola, “I Wanna Be Like You,” Vogue, October 2003, 110. Scholars of Newton’s work concur with Coppola’s judgment. Brookes argues that his photos are “like film stills isolated from the cinematic flow” (Brookes, “Fashion Photography, the Double-Page Spread,” 19). 52 See her comments in interviews with Odmark, “The Close-Up” and Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures.” 53 See Coddington, “Sofia Coppola.” 54 Coppola credits both images as inspiration. Quoted in Dennis Lim, “It’s What She Knows: The Luxe Life,” New York Times, December 10, 2010, https://www.nytimes. com/2010/12/12/movies/12sofia.html?pagewanted=all, and Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 25. Weber’s book of Hamilton’s photos, Thank Your Lucky Stars, features the photo of Clint Eastwood on its cover. Newton and Weber were linked in her imagination. She told W magazine, “There’s a Bruce Weber photo of Matt Dillon in bed that inspired Johnny Marco’s style. For Somewhere I was thinking about photos by Helmut Newton. Helmut lived at the Chateau Marmont in the winter in Room 49. Stephen’s character lives in the same room, a floor above.” Quoted in Lynn Hirschberg, “Somewhere,” W, December 1, 2010, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/sofiacoppola-somewhere-ss/all. A photograph taken on set by Douglas Kirkland shows Dorff replicating Eastwood’s pose, talking on the phone with breakfast in bed: https:// www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/stephen-dorff-photographed-on-the-setof-somewhere-a-film-news-photo/644173362. A similar image of Dustin Hoffman appears in The Graduate, another allusion in Coppola’s film to its Hollywood precursor (see Chapter 1). 55 Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 2157.

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56 Virginia Postrel notes “the enduring appeal of black-and-white photography as a medium for glamour.” Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 120. 57 Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 17. 58 Their slow-motion “power” walk toward the camera also references the now ubiquitous shot in film, so clichéd as to be the subject of edited montages posted on YouTube or Vimeo. The fashionable details in Coppola’s shot ally it with the fashion video tradition, but the allusion to the visual trope’s repeated use in film and television further establishes that the group’s self-image is filtered through stock images. The shot also invokes the fashion-show finale as the models flank the designer on stage. 59 Quoted in Brown, “Letting the Skirts Down,” 148. 60 Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 853. 61 Referring generally to the film’s references to fashion tableaux, Samiha Matin identifies five common elements: a stationary camera, orchestrated composition, choreographed movement, the color palette of magazine graphics, and striking poses in doorways, windows, and other architectural forms. Samiha Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 104. 62 Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity,” 103. 63 Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 25. 64 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 163–5. 65 Maryn Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive,” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 223. 66 Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface,” 227; Dana Stevens, “Queen Bees: Sofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette Have a Lot in Common,” Slate, October 19, 2006, https://slate. com/culture/2006/10/marie-antoinette-reviewed.html. 67 Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 68 Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface,” 228. Backman Rogers also observes that the smooth tracking shot establishes “a parity amongst people, coveted objects and celebrities” (Backman Rogers, Politics of Visual Pleasure, Kindle loc. 2846). 69 Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 314. 70 Sara Pesce, “Ripping Off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-Branding in California,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4,

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no. 1 (2015): 12. While Pesce refers to The Bling Ring here, her observation, as I demonstrate, can be expanded beyond that film. 71 Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface,” 227. 72 Laura Henderson terms their acts of selfie taking as “self-paparazzi.” Laura Henderson, “Framing The Bling Ring: (Im)material Psychogeography and Screen Technology,” COLLOQUY text theory critique 28 (2014): 28. 73 Quoted in Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23. 74 Coppola, quoted in Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 33. Also see Mottram, “The Sundance Sisters,” 251, and Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 6, 66, 69. A. O. Scott wrote in his review of the film, “In the boys’ fevered imaginations, Lux and her sisters appear in golden meadows, or superimposed on rolling cloudscapes like the silent heroines of a mid-70’s soft drink or shampoo commercial. (Not for nothing does Lux share her name with a brand of dishwashing detergent).” A. O. Scott, “Evanescent Trees and Sisters in an Enchanted 1970’s Suburb,” The New York Times, April 21, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/21/movies/film-review-evanescent-trees-andsisters-in-an-enchanted-1970-s-suburb.html. The sequence was shot by Coppola’s brother Roman. “Revisiting The Virgin Suicides,” The Virgin Suicides, DVD, directed by Sofia Coppola (New York: Criterion Collection, 2018), DVD Extra. 75 Peretz, “Something About Sofia.” 76 The still images in the film were created by fashion photographer Corinne Day. Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema, 34. Her images were published alongside Coppola’s in a spread for Face magazine in May 2000 and with Ed Lachman’s in a photo book published in Japan with an afterword by Takashi Homma, credited with creating the images of suburban Tokyo that influenced the film. Zoetrope also produced a magazine to coincide with the film’s release in 1999. Coppola published the screenplay of Marie Antoinette (New York: Rizzoli, 2006) with frame enlargements from the film, as well as photos (credited to Coppola and Leigh Johnson), a nod of sorts to the tradition of the “ciné-novels” created by directors of the French New Wave. See Campany, Photography and Cinema, 86. 77 “The Making of Marie Antoinette,” directed by Eleanor Coppola, DVD extra, inMarie Antoinette, DVD, directed by Sofia Coppola (Culver City, CA: Sony, 2007); Jacki Wilson, Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 1. Wilson also describes it as “a performing painting or sculpture” (1). 78 See Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity,” 109. 79 Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 375. 80 Quoted in Todd Gilchrist, “Interview: Sofia Coppola,” IGN, October 17, 2006, https:// www.ign.com/articles/2006/10/17/interview-sofia-coppola?page=1. Days of Heaven’s cinematographer Néstor Almendros describes Malick in terms that could equally

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apply to Coppola: he “puts great store by the look of his film”; “He has an exceptional visual sense and an equally exceptional knowledge of painting,” as well as photographic techniques. See Néstor Almendros, A Man with a Camera, trans. Rachel Phillips Balash (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 167–86. The shots of flowers in Coppola’s film also resemble photos by Christina Hejtmanek, Forever (2003) and Once (2005). Coppola has said that “a photo she took of daisies in a field … reminds me of The Virgin Suicides and ’70s nature shots.” “Soft Focus,” W, May 1, 2014, https://www. wmagazine.com/gallery/christina-hejtmanek-sofia-coppola/all. 81 Caroline Weber argues that, paradoxically, Revolutionary fashion came “from her own repertoire of once controversial, simplified ensembles,” such as the white linen skirts, milkmaid’s bonnets, and Granada hats she wore at the Petit Trianon. Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 203. 82 Diane Pernet, quoted in Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film, 50. 83 Nick Rees-Roberts identifies Scott’s work for Chanel as having “first expanded the advertising format to the mini-film by incorporating a lifestyle narrative that relied on glamourous, aspirational settings to display models at the poolside of luxurious villas. It thereby retained the setting for the fashion editorial but took the commercial beyond the conventions of fashion photography, hitherto reliant on the film star’s fame, charisma, and face” (Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film, 49). 84 Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film, 5, 4. Gary Needham identifies four forms: “the ‘boutique film’ associated with e-stores, … ‘the designer’s film’ associated with the creative individual or brand, ‘the authored film’ created by a known film director, and ‘the artist’s film’ which is a brand-funded feature created by an established artist.” Gary Needham, “The Digital Fashion Film,” in Fashion Cultures Revisited, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 107. 85 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 79. While Wyatt refers to her 2013 commercial for Daisy, he discusses the 2014 ad for the trio of Daisy scents. 86 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 81. 87 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 79. 88 Rees-Roberts, Fashion Films, 11. In a behind-the-scenes video, Coppola claimed, “I’ve never done anything around fashion,” which, given her history, can only be taken to mean this was her first effort to promote clothing. Quoted in “Marni at H&M: Behind the Scenes at the Commercial Shoot,” YouTube, February 2, 2012, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=A7x4pCMRVQw&list=PL6iyk30XguJgNJhuXwdyMQTWkQ7r V0KF0&index=18. 89 Quoted in Nick Newman, “Watch Sofia Coppola’s Calvin Klein Ads Starring Kirsten Dunst, Rashida Jones and More,” The Film Stage, April 21, 2017, https://thefilmstage. com/news/watch-sofia-coppolas-calvin-klein-ads-starring-kirsten-dunst-rashidajones-and-more/ and “A Guided Tour.”

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90 Rees-Roberts quotes Nick Knight who argues that the distinction between music in the fashion film and music video relates to narrative: in music video, narrative follows the sound, while in fashion film, the “visual mustn’t serve the music” for “the narrative is imbued in the pieces of clothing” (quoted in Rees-Roberts, Fashion Films, 12). 91 Quoted in “A Guided Tour.” In an interview with Paul Schrader for the A24 podcast, Coppola expressed her love of American Gigolo. “This is How it Should End with Paul Schrader & Sofia Coppola,” A24, May 30, 2018, https://a24films.com/notes/2018/05/ episode-04-this-is-how-it-should-end-with-paul-schrader-sofia-coppola. 92 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 82. 93 Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” Differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 93–4. 94 Bottega Veneta, “The Lauren 1980,” https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us/women/thelauren-1980_grd31781. 95 See, for instance, Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,”150, and Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker, 2nd edn (Oxford and London: Routledge, 2011), 130. 96 Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 359. Pam Cook notes that while “Sofia Coppola does not appear in Sconce’s exclusively male pantheon of smart film-makers … her work shares the predilection for irony, dark undertones, preoccupation with surface style, engagement with consumer culture and address to sophisticated audiences of the smart clique.” “An American in Paris: Sofia Coppola and the New Auteurism,” Melbourne University workshop, 25 September 2013, 5, https://drive.google.com/ file/d/0Bz2RL4R29lF2YjlWYW82M3FORjQ/edit. Fiona Handyside concurs, adding “she had only released one film, The Virgin Suicides, when his article was published in 2002” (Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 677). 97 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 574, 2901.

Chapter 4 1 Quoted in Ingeborg Kohn, Charlie Chaplin: Brightest Star of Silent Films (Rome: Portaparole, 2005), 10. 2 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 14. 3 Adrienne Munich, “Introduction: Fashion Films,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 1. Pamela Church Gibson concurs: “not only has film had a greater influence on fashion that any other form of

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visual culture but … the very shaping of consumer culture as we know it depends upon the cinema.” Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 55. 4 Vanessa Friedman, “Dear V.M.A.s: Bring Back the Bad Taste,” The New York Times, August 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/style/vmas-fashion-review. html?smid=nytcore-ios-share. The financial stakes are staggering. Forbes estimates that in 2020 it costs $10 million “to get an A-list actress camera-ready for her walk down the Oscars red carpet. This is a bargain by Hollywood’s standards when compared to Cate Blanchett’s $18.1 million look in 2014, which is the most expensive in Oscars history. The cost for the average attendee is $1.5 million and a first-timer usually spends about $266,000.” Dana Feldman, “Oscar 2020: By the Numbers,” Forbes, February 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2020/02/04/ oscars-2020-by-the-numbers/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_ content=3100655240&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainTwitter#7e8e307034ef. 5 Quoted in Axel Madsen, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 124. 6 Ivan Shaw, “Ye Fakers: Realism and Fantasy, 1990–2011,” in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 289. 7 Shaw, “Ye Fakers,” 289. 8 See Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 9 Charles Eckert, “The Carol Lombard in Macy’s Window,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 103. 10 Paul Martineau, “Style in the Face of Crisis, 1930–1946,” in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 83. 11 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 62. On Audrey Hepburn’s distinct role in popularizing haute couture (through her collaboration with Givenchy) as well as ready-to-wear, see Gaylyn Studlar, “‘Chi-Chi Cinderella’: Audrey Hepburn as Couture Countermodel,” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, ed. David Desser and Garth S. Jowett (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 159–78. 12 Hilary Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 137. 13 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 53. 14 Quoted in Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema, 141. 15 Vanessa Friedman, “The Rebirth of New York Fashion,” The New York Times, September 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/style/marc-jacobs-newyork-fashion-week.html.

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16 Steff Yotka, “‘Glamorous But With a Wink’: Sofia Coppola Crafts an Ode to Coco Chanel,” Vogue, October 11, 2019, https://www.vogue.com/article/sofia-coppolachanel-short-film-mademoiselle-prive-tokyo. 17 The Japanese youth culture street style takes its name from the neighborhood around the Harajuku subway station in Tokyo, where, starting in the 1900s, teens gathered dressed as Lolitas, cyber-punks or characters from anime/manga. Jason Richards, “Japan’s Influence on Grimes Grows Deeper,” The Japan Times, March 21, 2013, https:// www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/03/21/music/japans-influence-on-grimes-growsdeeper/#.Xc8xhi2ZOu4. One viewer comments on Coppola’s film, “always count on Sofia to pick an amazing soundtrack.” 18 For an exhaustive analysis of the Chanel goods in Life Without Zoe, consult Dallo Spazio, “‘We Have Champagne and Caviar, Baby’: Chanel Accessories and Costume Jewellery in Francis Ford Coppola’s Life Without Zoe,” https://superqueen.wordpress. com/2013/12/31/we-have-champagne-and-caviar-baby-chanel-accessories-andcostume-jewellery-in-francis-ford-coppolas-life-without-zoe/. 19 “CHANEL Haute Couture Fashion Show,” 7 Days Out, directed by Andrew Ross, Boardwalk Pictures, 2018, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80212884?trackId=1427728 3&tctx=0%2C4%2C1c3b886f-3bae-41a1-a245-bbdce6b509f0-244388329%2C%2C. 20 Sara Pesce, “Ripping Off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-branding in California,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (2015): 13. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz similarly argues that both Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring “can be read as a self-reflexive comment on American celebrity youth culture.” Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 180. 21 Graeme Turner, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall, Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9. 22 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 12, 14. 23 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 16. For more on celebrity consult Christine Gledhill, Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991); Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower Press, 2000); Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001); Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004); Maureen Orth, The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). On female film stars, fashion, and celebrity, see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1987); Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994); Helen Warner, Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Rachel Moseley, Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity (London: British Film Institute, 2005).

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24 Quoted in “A Conversation with Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola,” Rome, October 19, 2003, Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola, Focus Features, 2003. On Bill Murray’s image, see Colin Marshall, “The Philosophy of Bill Murray,” Open Culture, June 20, 2016, http://www.openculture.com/2016/06/the-philosophy-of-bill-murraythe-intellectual-foundations-of-his-comedic-persona.html. 25 Anna Backman Rogers argues that Johnny Marco is “a commodity or brand” but not a person. Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 125. Todd Kennedy claims similarly that he is “controlled and commodified by the image-machine that is Hollywood.” Todd Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some Place’: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism against a Postmodern Landscape,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 55. 26 Anna Backman Rogers, “And That I See a Darkness: The Stardom of Kirsten Dunst in Collaboration with Sofia Coppola in Three Images,” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019): 121. 27 See, for instance, Caroline Weber, who argues she was “an active and zealous manipulator of her own celebrity.” Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 110. Diana Diamond credits her with inventing haute couture. Diana Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism,” in Fashion and Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 227. 28 For a thorough analysis of her celebrity, see David Thomson, Nicole Kidman (New York: Penguin, 2008). 29 See Chapter 1, note 80. 30 Backman Rogers, “The Stardom of Kirsten Dunst,” 133. 31 “Production Notes: The Bling Ring,” http://www.cinemareview.com/production. asp?prodid=13627. 32 In fact, Neiers exploited social media, taking to Twitter and Instagram, as well as creating a podcast, Recovering from Reality. She used these forums to criticize Nancy Jo Sales for her unflattering article. See Nancy Jo Sales, “Exclusive: Nancy Jo Sales on the 10th Anniversary of the Bling Ring,” Vanity Fair, January 17, 2020, https://www. vanityfair.com/style/2020/01/nancy-jo-sales-10th-anniversary-bling-ring. 33 Agnès Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors,” The Guardian, May 26, 2006, https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/27/comment.filmnews. 34 Dana Stevens, “Queen Bees: Sofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette Have a Lot in Common,” Slate, October 19, 2006, https://slate.com/culture/2006/10/marieantoinette-reviewed.html. 35 See Wesley Morris, “Get Rich or Die Trying: Sofia Coppola, Hip-Hop, and Zombies,” Grantland, June 20, 2013, https://grantland.com/features/brad-pitt-world-war-z-bling-ring/.

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36 Nathan Heller, “Sofia Coppola: You Either Love Her or Hate Her. Here’s Why,” Slate, December 28, 2010, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/12/you-either-lovesofia-coppola-or-hate-her-here-s-why.html. 37 Quoted in Lynn Hirschberg, “The Coppola Smart Mob,” The New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/magazine/thecoppola-smart-mob.html. 38 Soroya Roberts, “The Eternal Becoming of Sofia Coppola,” Hazlitt, June 19, 2017, https://hazlitt.net/longreads/eternal-becoming-sofia-coppola. 39 Christina Lane and Nicole Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 189. 40 Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 25. 41 Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 15–17. A review appearing in conjunction with a screening of Coppola’s six features at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto goes even further, arguing that her performance shaped all her films. See Mayukh Sen, “The Teenage Heartbreak of Sofia Coppola’s Mary Corleone,” The Review, TIFF, December 8, 2017, https://www.tiff.net/ the-review/the-teenage-heartbreak-of-sofia-coppolas-mary-corleone. 42 For an overview of the issue, see Dara Brock, “Vogue Italia December 1992: Sofia Coppola,” I Want to Be a Coppola, October 15, 2011, http://www.iwanttobeacoppola. com/journal/2011/10/15/vogue-italia-december-1992-sofia-coppola.html. Translations are credited on the site to Francesca Berti. 43 Quoted in Hirshberg, “Coppola Smart Mob.” 44 On MilkFed’s influence, see Jess Cartner-Morley, “LA Chic,” The Guardian, April 29, 1999, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/apr/30/features11.g28, and Sofia Coppola, “Small Stories #4,” in BEAMS Beyond Toyko, trans. W. David Marx (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 140–2. The launch was covered by W magazine and featured photos of Sofia, Zoe Cassavetes, and Stephen Dorff modeling items from the line. See Merle Ginsberg, “Launching Sofia,” W, September 1, 1994, https://www.wmagazine. com/story/sofia-coppola-milk-fed. In the article, she claims she gravitates more toward the “Mom sensibility” than the “little girl thing.” 45 Sofia Coppola: Perfect Style of Sofia’s World (Tokyo: Maburutoron maburu bukkusu shuppan honbu, 2012). 46 Kate Finnigan, “Sofia Coppola Shares her Style Secrets: ‘A Kind of Uniform Helps,’” The Telegraph, May 22, 2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/sofia-coppolashares-her-style-secrets-a-kind-of-uniform-helps/. 47 Kristin Anderson, “11 Reasons Sofia Coppola Is an Ultimate ’90s Style Icon,” Vogue, July 7, 2016, https://www.vogue.com/article/sofia-coppola-90s-style-milk-fed-

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marc-jacobs; Christina Perez, “3 Things I Learned About Style From Sofia Coppola’s Totally Understated Chic,” Glamour, May 16, 2013, https://www.glamour.com/ story/sofia-coppolas-understated-chi; Katie Robinson, “The Beguiled Director Sofia Coppola’s Greatest Style Moments,” Town&Country, June 9, 2017, https://www. townandcountrymag.com/style/fashion-trends/g9978432/sofia-coppola-fashion-style/. 48 Jessica Chandra, “26 Examples of Sofia Coppola’s Aspirational, Cool-Girl Style,” Elle Australia, May 31, 2017, https://www.elle.com.au/fashion/sofia-coppola-style-file-13305. 49 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), Kindle loc. 2891. The Sofia bag was relaunched in 2016. 50 Julie de Libran, https://www.juliedelibran.com/the-collection. 51 Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (2006): 36. Cook’s observations about a “new creative elite” appear to be borne out in Nathan William, The Eye: How the World’s Most Influential Creative Directors Developed Their Vision (New York: Artisan, 2018). His profiles of creative directors in fashion, publishing, and entertainment note similarities in style and experience to Coppola’s (e.g., a unified sensibility or aesthetic sense, artistic collaborators/friends as inspiration, early exposure to art and travel, design- or art-school education, avid collecting of art). 52 Quoted in Hirschberg, “Coppola Smart Mob.” 53 Sean O’Hagan, “Sofia Coppola,” The Guardian, October 8, 2006, https://www. theguardian.com/film/2006/oct/08/features.review1. 54 Dana Polan, “Auteur Desire,” Screening the Past, March 2001, http://www. screeningthepast.com/2014/12/auteur-desire/. 55 A thorough discussion of the issues lies outside the bounds of this chapter. For a helpful review of the arguments, see Thomas Elsaesser, “A Retrospect: The Film Director as Auteur— Artist, Brand Name or Engineer?” (1995), http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com/images/ stories/pdf/elsaesser_the_author_a_retrospect.pdf. Patricia White has also noted that, in part through her participation at Cannes, Coppola has “garnered enough cultural capital to be admitted to the cinéma d’auteurs.” Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 22. 56 Polan, “Auteur Desire.” 57 Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker, 2nd edn (Oxford and London: Routledge, 2011), 130. Belinda Smaill contends that her directorial style and sensibility are bound up with her public persona.” Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 148–9. Evgenia Peretz describes her first three films as “extensions of herself.” Evgenia Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 352. 58 Caitlin Yunuen Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 176.

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59 Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 39. 60 Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 131. 61 See Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head,” 40; Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism,” 187; Handyside, Sofia Coppola. Roberts cites Handyside to shore up her argument in Hazlitt that all of her films, not simply the triology, “are coming of age tales featuring young, privileged white women—pre-adolescents, actual adolescents, delayed adolescents— none of women really come of age” (Roberts, “Eternal Becoming”). 62 Pam Cook “An American in Paris: Sofia Coppola and the New Auteurism,” Melbourne University workshop, September 25, 2013, https://drive.google.com/file/ d/0Bz2RL4R29lF2YjlWYW82M3FORjQ/edit; Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 130. 63 She made the same point in a 2008 article. See Lisa Armstrong, “Sofia Coppola: I’m More Interested in Looking Than Being Looked At,” The Times, June 4, 2008, https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sofia-coppola-im-more-interested-in-looking-than-beinglooked-at-vmz09k6w66f. 64 Lynn Hirschberg, “Sofia Coppola’s Guide to Paris,” The New York Times, September 24, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/travel/tmagazine/24coppola.html. 65 See, for instance, Coppola’s interview with Grace Coddington. “Sofia Coppola,” Face to Grace, M2M: Made to Measure TV, October 10, 2018, https://m2m.tv/watch/sofiacoppola. See also Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 2886. 66 Stylist Magazine, June 19, 2013. 67 Loney Abrams, “Who Does Sofia Coppola Collect? See Inside the ‘Virgin Suicides’ Auteur’s Dreamy Art Collection,” Artspace, September 21, 2016, https://www.artspace. com/magazine/news_events/how_i_collect/sopfia-coppola-54204. 68 Introduction to Philip Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” Aperture 231 (Summer 2018): 21. 69 Backman Rogers, “Sofia Coppola,” 6. 70 Timothy Corrigan, “The Commerce of Auteurism: A Voice without Authority,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 47, 46. Thomas Elsaesser, like Corrigan, argues the auteur of the 1980s was reacting to competition from television: “The auteurtheory comes to stand less and less for particular styles, themes or even mise-en-scène, applied from without (by critics or students), and more for a new kind of selfdefinition of the American director, which has to do with his (mainly ‘his’) position within the national and international film-market, including European film festivals, such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin or Rotterdam. One could say that the term ‘auteur’ in the 1980s makes a fascinating journey from critical category to brand-name and marketing-device, mainly because in the uncertain world of the cinema in the age of television, of blockbusters, mainstream cinema and independents, of art-cinema and new waves, there are very few sign-posts and markers, and in the end, it is the market that demands labels and recognition-signs: whether they like it or not, directors

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cannot just be directors—they have to advertise themselves, promote themselves, create a brand identity for themselves: the filmmaker as superstar and the filmmaker as cult director are some of the most familiar results of this process” (Elsaesser, “A Retrospect,” 9). This may suggest that with the increasing proliferation of visual media and the conglomeration of Hollywood, pressure to establish oneself as an auteur has intensified. Interestingly, Elsaesser’s model of New Hollywood branding is Francis Ford Coppola: “he is a celebrity, i.e. he is ‘known for being known’, and as such ‘bigger than life’. But he also like a brand name of a product, a sort of one man, one name logo: seal of quality, definer of expectations, locus of imaginary/fantasy identification” (10). 71 Pam Cook, “History in the Making: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and the New Auteurism,” in The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, ed. Tom Brown and Belen Vidal (London: Routledge, 2014), 215. 72 The website “I Want To Be a Coppola” includes images from the issue, as well as an analysis: http://www.iwanttobeacoppola.com/journal/2013/7/11/sofia-coppola-vogueaustralia-august-2013.html. The entire issue also appears on The Citizens of Fashion website: https://thecitizensoffashion.com/2013/07/15/sofia-coppola-by-paul-jasminfor-vogue-australia-august-2013/sofia-coppola-by-paul-jasmin-for-vogue-australiaaugust-2013/. 73 “A Guided Tour to Sofia Coppola’s Inspirations by Sofia Coppola Herself,” W, May 30, 2017, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/sofia-coppola-deconstructs-her-moodboards/all. 74 Sofia Coppola, “Foreword,” in Fiorucci, ed. David Owen (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 7. 75 Monica Heisey, “So, You’ve Wandered Into a Too-Expensive Store,” The New York Times, November 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/opinion/sunday/ holiday-shopping-humor.html. 76 Dhani Mau, “How Nancy Steiner Became the Most Influential Costume Designer You Hadn’t Heard Of,” Fashionista.com, December 14, 2016, https://fashionista. com/2016/12/nancy-steiner-costume-designer. 77 See http://theblingring.com/index.html. 78 The ads can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue=106&v=v-A2EH0vyd4&feature=emb_logo. 79 Pamela Church Gibson, “Pornostyle: Sexualized Dress and the Fracturing of Feminism,” Fashion Theory 18, no. 2 (2014): 197. 80 Delphine Letort, “The Cultural Capital of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013): Branding Feminine Celebrity in Los Angeles,” Celebrity Studies 7, no. 3 (2016): 317. 81 Maryn Wilkinson, “Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, and the Performance of the Teenage Girl in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013),” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 12/13 (Spring/Fall 2017): 28; Pesce,

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“Ripping Off Hollywood Celebrities,” 21; Todd McGowan, “There Is Nothing Lost in Translation,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 1 (2007): 54. 82 Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 45. 83 See https://www.folie.space/about-the-virgin-suicides-perfume. 84 See https://www.fumerie.com/house/moth-and-rabbit/the-virgins. 85 Coddington, “Sofia Coppola.” 86 See https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/chateau-california-photos#12. 87 Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors.” 88 Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” 203. 89 Chloe Malle, “Pioneer Women Are Roaming the City,” The New York Times, September 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/style/prairie-woman-style-batshevadoen.html. 90 Kevin O’Keefe, “What On Earth Is the Marketing Strategy for ‘The Beguiled’?,” Mic, June 23, 2017, https://www.mic.com/articles/180514/what-on-earth-is-the-marketingstrategy-for-the-beguiled. 91 Cook, “History in the Making,” 223. 92 Cook, “History in the Making,” 224. 93 Anthony Lane, “Lost in the Revolution,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/23/lost-in-the-revolution. 94 The images can be found here: https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/marie-antoinettephotos. 95 Coddington, “Sofia Coppola.” 96 Nathan Heller, “Elle Fanning Is an Old Soul Who Has Visions of the Future—And Directing,” Vogue, June 2017, https://www.vogue.com/article/elle-fanning-interviewmarilyn-monroe-technology-june-vogue-cover. The celebrity endorsement is literally highlighted in the text of the online version, with links to a description and Vogue articles about the designers. 97 Karen Karbo, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman (Guilford, CT: Skirt!, 2009), 11. 98 Olivia Lidbury, “Louis Vuitton Host Party for Sofia Coppola’s Latest Film ‘Somewhere,’” The Telegraph, December 8, 2010, http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/ TMG8188784/Louis-Vuitton-host-party-for-Sofia-Coppolas-latest-film-Somewhere. html. 99 Booth Moore, “Sofia Coppola, Kirsten Dunst Toast Sonia Rykiel in L.A.,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 10, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ sofia-coppola-kirsten-dunst-toast-sonia-rykiel-la-1057220.

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100 Munich, “Introduction: Fashion Films,” 1. 101 Quoted in Elizabeth Povoledo, “Valentino and Sofia Coppola Make an Opera,” The New York Times, May 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/fashion/ valentino-sofia-coppola-la-traviata.html. 102 George Smart, “Review: La Traviata at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera,” Harper’s Bazaar, May 23, 2016, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/going-out/news/a37202/ la-traviata-review-valentino/. 103 James Imam, “Sofia Coppola’s La Traviata Opera Debut Looks Good but Has Little to Say,” The Guardian, May 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/ may/23/sofia-coppola-la-traviata-valentino-rome-opera-verdi. 104 Elizabeth Paton, “After Karl, Chanel Keeps Close to Home,” The New York Times, December 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/fashion/chanel-metiersdart-virginie-viard-paris.html; Rhonda Richford, “Kristen Stewart, Marion Cotillard Sit Front Row at Sofia Coppola-Designed Chanel Show,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 5, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kristen-stewartmarion-cotillard-sit-front-row-at-sofia-coppola-designed-chanel-show-1259782. 105 “Storytellers” can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrdbT4hpwBk. 106 See “Is Apple a Luxury Brand? That Depends On Your Definition of Luxury,” The Fashion Law, July 30, 2018, https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/is-apple-a-luxurybrand-it-depends-on-who-you-ask; Walter Frick and Scott Berinato, “Apple: Luxury Brand or Mass Marketer?” Harvard Business Review, October 2, 2014, https://hbr. org/2014/10/apple-luxury-brand-or-mass-marketer. 107 Brent Lang, “Apple Taps A24 to Produce Slate of Films,” Variety, November 15, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/film/news/apple-a24-films-1203029800/. 108 Tripp Mickle and Eric Schwartzel, “Apple Plans to Bring Feature-Length Films to Theaters,” The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ apple-plans-to-bring-feature-length-films-to-theaters-11569579632. 109 Rick Porter, “Sofia Coppola Developing Edith Wharton Drama at Apple,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 12, 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/ sofia-coppola-developing-edith-wharton-drama-at-apple-1294356; Joe Otterson, “Sofia Coppola to Develop Edith Wharton’s ‘Custom of the Country’ as Apple Series,” Variety, May 12, 2020, https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/sofia-coppola-edithwharton-custom-of-the-country-apple-series-1234604636/. 110 Quoted in Jessica Goodman, “Sofia Coppola Made a Charming Holiday Movie Out of Gap Ads,” Huffington Post, October 29, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost. com/2014/10/29/sofia-coppola-gap-ads_n_6068320.html. 111 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 11. 112 Quoted in Peretz, “Something About Sofia.” 113 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 32–4.

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Conclusion   1 Quoted in Lynn Hirschberg, “The Coppola Smart Mob,” The New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/magazine/thecoppola-smart-mob.html.   2 “The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films,” August 23, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/culture/ story/20160819-the-21st-centurys-100-greatest-films.   3 Jake Coyle and Lindsey Bahr, “‘Tree of Life’ Tops AP’s Films of the Decade,” PBS.org, December 16, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/tree-of-life-tops-aps-bestfilms-of-the-decade; Stephanie Zacharek, “The 10 Best Movies of the 2010s,” Time, November 13, 2019, https://time.com/5725149/best-movies-2010s-decade/; Richard Brody, “The Twenty-Seven Best Movies of the Decade,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/decade-in-review/the-twenty-seven-bestmovies-of-the-decade.   4 Samuel La France, “Sofia Coppola’s Certain (and Uncertain) Women,” TIFF, December 6, 2017, https://www.tiff.net/the-review/sofia-coppolas-certain-and-uncertain-women; Contemporary Directors Symposium: Sofia Coppola, 16 May 2018, School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex.   5 Fawnia Soo Hoo, “The ‘Lady Bird’ Costume Designer Looked to ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ ’90s-Era Kirsten Dunst and Chloë Sevigny for Inspiration,” Fashionista.com, December 6, 2017, “https://fashionista.com/2017/12/lady-bird-movie-costumes-design.   6 Ananda Pellerin, “‘Little Women’: Costumes Get a Modern Spin in Greta Gerwig Adaptation,” CNN, February 9, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/little-womencostumes-jacqueline-durran/index.html.   7 Rachel Syme, “How Jacqueline Durran, the ‘Little Women’ Costume Designer, Remixes Styles and Eras,” The New Yorker, January 13, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/ culture/on-and-off-the-avenue/how-jacqueline-durran-the-little-women-costumedesigner-remixes-styles-and-eras.   8 Quoted in Nathan Williams, The Eye: How the World’s Most Influential Creative Directors Developed Their Vision (New York: Artisan, 2018), Kindle loc. 2862–4.   9 Shiona Turini worked previously for Cosmopolitan and W, and as a stylist. On her designs for the film, see Jazz Tangcay, “‘Queen and Slim’ Designer Shiona Turini on the Power of Costumes,” Variety, December 2, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/artisans/ actors/queen-slim-lena-waithe-daniel-kaluyya–1203420188/; Yohana Desta, “Queen & Slim: How Black Panthers, Diahann Carroll Inspired the Film’s Designer Costumes,” Vanity Fair, November 27, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/ queen-and-slim-costume-designer-interview. While Matsoukas says she deliberately avoided the look of Thelma & Louise (quoted in Ramin Zaheed, “‘Queen and Slim’ Director Melina Matsoukas Protests Police Brutality with her Film,” Los Angeles Times,

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https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-11-18/queen-andslim-protests-police-brutality), others have taken the turquoise car as an obvious allusion. Michelle Goldberg, “The Thrilling Shock of ‘Queen & Slim,’” The New York Times, December 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/192019/12/02/opinion/queenslim-slave-play.html. 10 Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “There’s More Style than Substance in the Bonnie & Clyde Riff Queen & Slim,” The AV Club, November 15, 2019, https://film.avclub.com/there-smore-style-than-substance-in-the-bonnie-clyde–1839999695. Katie Walsh, “Queen & Slim,” Herald & Review, November 26, 2019, https://herald-review.com/entertainment/ movies/movie-reviews-nov-queen-slim-knives-out-parasite/article_7011c4b7-6e22547f-b554-2e1f53f05305.html. 11 See, for example, SC Lannom, “The Wes Anderson Style Explained,” Studio Binder, August 19, 2019, https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/wes-anderson-style/; Andrés Peña, “Wes Anderson’s Color,” Vimeo, 2017, https://vimeo.com/182987900. 12 Mekado Murphy, “You Can Look, but You Can’t Check In,” The New York Times, February 28, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/movies/the-miniaturemodel-behind-the-grand-budapest-hotel.html. 13 Quoted in Williams, The Eye, Kindle loc. 2403. 14 Louis Wise, “From Gucci Ads to Instagram Fads: How the Wes Anderson Aesthetic Took Over the World,” The Guardian, April 7, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/ apr/07/from-gucci-ads-to-instagram-fads-how-the-wes-anderson-aesthetic-took-overthe-world. On the popularity of Anderson’s cinematic fashions, see Molly Hannon, “How to Dress Like a Wes Anderson Character for Fall,” High Snobiety, October 17, 2017, https://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/10/17/wes-anderson-character-style-buy/. 15 Brenden Gallagher, “A Brief History of Wes Anderson’s Influence on the Runway,” Grailed, July 25, 2017, https://www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/wes-anderson-styleinfluence; Steff Yotka, “A Brief History of Wes Anderson’s Many Fashion-World Collaborations, His Latest for H&M Included,” Vogue, November 28, 2016, https:// www.vogue.com/article/wes-anderson-fashion-collaborations. 16 Jeff Lanuza Photography, “Wes Anderson Inspired Photography,” YouTube, May 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SW7YukRz6I. 17 Giuliana Bruno, “Surface, Fabric, Weave: The Fashioned World of Wong Kar-wai,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 83–105. The essay is reprinted in her book: Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 35–51. 18 A sampling of Wong’s short films, including his commercial work, is posted here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkEJHonerj-J2_AymsF3rJ-uCK86_otWM. 19 See Wikanda Promkhuntong, “Wong Kar-wai: ‘Cultural Hybrid’, Celebrity Endorsement and Star-Auteur Branding,” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 3 (2014): 348–53.

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20 “Okja: A Genetic Super Pig and the Environment,” BBC, June 29, 2017, https://www. bbc.com/news/world-asia-40337161. 21 Christopher Laverty, “Snowpiercer: Q&A with Costume Designer Catherine George,” Clothes on Film, August 1, 2014, http://clothesonfilm.com/snowpiercer-qa-withcostume-designer-catherine-george/35353/. 22 Choe Sang-Hun, “Bong Joon Ho’s Path from Seoul to Oscar Dominance,” The New York Times, February 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/world/asia/ bong-joon-ho-south-korea.html. 23 Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, “Introduction,” in Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, ed. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), Kindle loc. 254. 24 Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9, 103. 25 Also named were Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers), Lulu Wang (The Farewell), Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), Alma Har’el (Honey Boy), Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), and Mati Diop (Atlantics). 26 Vanessa Friedman, “Marc Jacobs and the Monumental Dream of New York,” The New York Times, February 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/style/New-YorkFashion-Week-Marc-Jacobs.html. 27 Williams, The Eye, Kindle loc. 2927. 28 Elizabeth Paton, “The Artisans Behind Italian Fashion Tremble at Their Future,” The New York Times, May 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/italyluxury-fashion-coronavirus.html. 29 Brent Lang and Gene Maddaus, “Hollywood’s Great Depression: Meet the Entertainment Workers Left Jobless by the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Variety, April 29, 2020, https://variety.com/2020/biz/features/hollywood-coronavirus-entertainmentindustry-unemployment-jobs–1234592106/. 30 Vanessa Friedman, “Gucci Says Fashion Shows Should Never Be the Same,” The New York Times, May 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/style/alessandromichele-gucci-future-fashion-shows.html.

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Pesce, Sara. “Ripping Off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-Branding in California.” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (2015): 5–24. Poirier, Agnès. “An Empty Hall of Mirrors.” The Guardian, May 26, 2006. https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/27/comment.filmnews. Polan, Dana. “Auteur Desire.” Screening the Past, March 2001. http://www. screeningthepast.com/2014/12/auteur-desire/. Postrel, Virginia. The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2013. Povoledo, Elisabetta. “Valentino and Sofia Coppola Make an Opera.” The New York Times, May 18, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/fashion/valentino-sofia-coppolala-traviata.html. Praet, Carolus. “Japanese Advertising: The World’s Number One Celebrity Showcase? A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Frequency of Celebrity Appearances in TV Advertising.” In The Proceedings of the 2001 Special Asia-Pacific Conference of the American Academy of Advertising, Gainesville, FL, edited by Marilyn S. Roberts and Robert L. King, 6–13. Prickett, Sarah Nicole. “Q&A: Stephen Dorff on Old Levi’s, Elle Fanning, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere.” Fashion, December 22, 2010. https://fashionmagazine.com/ culture/qa-stephen-dorff-on-old-levis-elle-fanning-and-sofia-coppolas-somewhere/. Prince, Richard. “Sofia Coppola.” Interview, June 14, 2013. https://www. interviewmagazine.com/film/sofia-coppola. Radner, Hilary. Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. Radner, Hilary. “On the Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s.” In Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, edited by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, 128–42. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rapold, Nicolas. “Interview: Sofia Coppola.” Film Comment, June 19, 2017. https://www. filmcomment.com/blog/interview-sofia-coppola/. Rauser, Amelia. “Madras and Muslin Meet Europe: On Neoclassical Cultural Appropriation.” Lapham Quarterly, March 18, 2020. https://www.laphamsquarterly. org/roundtable/madras-and-muslin-meet-europe. Raz-Russo, Michal. “From Rebellion to Seduction, 1970–89.” In Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, edited by Paul Martineau, 225–36. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018. Rees-Roberts, Nick. Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. “Revisiting The Virgin Suicides.” The Virgin Suicides. DVD. Directed by Sofia Coppola. New York: Criterion Collection, 2018. DVD Extra. Richford, Rhonda. “Kristen Stewart, Marion Cotillard Sit Front Row at Sofia CoppolaDesigned Chanel Show.” The Hollywood Reporter, December 5, 2019. https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/kristen-stewart-marion-cotillard-sit-front-row-at-sofiacoppola-designed-chanel-show-1259782. Rickey, Carrie. “Lost and Found.” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013. https://www.dga.org/ Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1302-Spring-2013/Sofia-Coppola.aspx.

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Rickey, Carrie. “The ‘Beguiled’ Test: Does the Director’s Gender Matter?” The New York Times, June 23, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/movies/the-beguiled-testsofia-coppola.html. Rivière, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–13. Roberts, Soroya. “The Eternal Becoming of Sofia Coppola.” Hazlitt, June 19, 2017. https:// hazlitt.net/longreads/eternal-becoming-sofia-coppola. Robinson, Katie. “The Beguiled Director Sofia Coppola’s Greatest Style Moments.” Town&Country, June 9, 2017. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/fashiontrends/g9978432/sofia-coppola-fashion-style/. Rocamora, Agnès and Anneke Smelik, eds. Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. Rozzo, Mark. “Secrets of the Chateau Marmont.” Vanity Fair, February 4, 2019. https:// www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/02/secrets-of-the-chateau-marmont. Rüll, Lisa M. “A Soundtrack for Our Lives: Chick-Flick Music.” In Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, 79–91. New York: Routledge, 2008. Sales, Nancy Jo. “Exclusive: Nancy Jo Sales on the 10th Anniversary of the Bling Ring.” Vanity Fair, January 17, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/01/nancy-josales-10th-anniversary-bling-ring. Sales, Nancy Jo. “The Suspects Wore Louboutins.” Vanity Fair, February 3, 2010. https:// www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/03/billionaire-girls-201003. Sankey, Elizabeth. “The Score: Mapping the Music and Extravagant Style of ‘Marie Antoinette’.” Noisey, April 15, 2016. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/r7p3ba/thescore-marie-antoinette-music-style. Schneider, Jane. “Cloth and Clothing.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 203–20. London: Sage, 2006. Sconce, Jeffrey. “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film.” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 349–69. Scott, A. O. “‘The Beguiled’: Sofia Coppola’s Civil War Cocoon.” The New York Times, June 22, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/movies/the-beguiled-reviewsofia-coppola.html. Scott, A. O. “Evanescent Trees and Sisters in an Enchanted 1970’s Suburb.” The New York Times, April 21, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/21/movies/film-reviewevanescent-trees-and-sisters-in-an-enchanted-1970-s-suburb.html. ScreenPrism. “You Know It’s a Sofia Coppola Film IF …” YouTube, June 22, 2017. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryzgxwJpv1A&index=5&list=PL6iyk30XguJgNJhuXwdy MQTWkQ7rV0KF0&t=6s. Sen, Mayukh. “The Teenage Heartbreak of Sofia Coppola’s Mary Corleone.” The Review, TIFF, December 8, 2017. https://www.tiff.net/the-review/the-teenage-heartbreak-ofsofia-coppolas-mary-corleone.

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Index “1 Thing” 93 3rd Eye 85 “9 Piece” 84 2046 200 “A Dream Goes on Forever” 64 Abbott, Megan 48 Abrams, J. J. 188 Acord, Lance Lick the Star cinematography 122 Lost in Translation cinematography 86, 100, 101–2, 116 Marie Antoinette cinematography 73, 78 Adam and the Ants 76–7 Adrian 6, 156 Agnès B. 91, 177 Ahrendts, Angela 188 Air 65–6, 89, 194 Alcott, Louisa May 196 Alexander 163 Almodóvar, Pedro 173 “Alone Again (Naturally)” 63 Altman, Robert 4 American Gigolo 22, 149–52 Amerie 93 Amp 59 Anderson, Paul Thomas 4 Anderson, Tim 59, 62 Anderson, Wes 144, 198–200 Annie Hall 22 Ansen, David 101 Antonioni, Michelangelo 4, 100 A.P.C. 91, 177 Aperture 174 “Aphrodisiac” 76

Apocalypse Now 178 Apple 188–9, 204 Armani, Giorgio 6, 22 Artspace 174 Ashley, Laura 70–1 Astaire, Fred 7, 100 atmosphere 58–61 Atwood, Colleen 6 “Avalon” 147 Avedon, Richard 103, 147–8 Bacharach, Burt 66, 148 Backman Rogers, Anna 2, 17, 21, 24, 35, 44, 59, 93, 104, 122, 130, 162, 163, 174 “Bad Girls” 84 Bailey, David 100, 120 Balmain 9, 82 Bardot, Brigitte 145 Barking Dogs Never Bite 200 Barnett, Sheridan 120 Barney, Tina 100, 112–13 Barrett, K. K. 75, 141 Battat, Stacey 61 1970s’ influences 70–1 collaboration with Coppola 56 costume designer for Somewhere 6, 95 costume designer for The Beguiled 6, 29, 196 costume designer for The Bling Ring 82–3, 175 Bauman, Zygmunt 15, 18, 36 BEAMS 91, 100 Beaton, Cecil 126, 184–5 Bed, Bath and Beyond 167

272 The Bee Gees 63 Beggs, Richard 10, 99 collaboration with Coppola 56 Lost in Translation soundtrack 88–9 Somewhere soundtrack 93 The Beguiled 1970s’ influences 69–70 ambiguous title 31 amputation scene 32 Battat as costume designer 6, 29, 56, 70, 196 Civil War setting 29–30, 33, 66–9 costume as key to identity 29–31 dinner scenes 30–1, 33 filmed on Louisiana plantations 58 group dynamics 15 lace as metaphor 68 McBurney’s masculinity 31–2 overt focus on fashion 21 photographic influences 109–11 prairie-dress style 70, 180, 197 showcasing fashion 5 shroud scene 33–4 soundtrack 66–7, 69 Southern Gothic styling 66–8 tableaux 125–8 Vogue feature 182–4 Belushi, John 92 Beyoncé 9, 92, 197 B.G. 85 Bilson, Rachel 35 Bingham, Dennis 72 Birkin, Jane 146 Black Swan 147 Blahnik, Manolo 6, 73, 75, 82, 120 “Bling Bling” 85 The Bling Ring cinematography 36–7, 135–6 clothing defining personalities 82–3 dynamics of fame 160, 162 focus on material goods 6, 34–5, 37–8, 81–2, 133–4 group dynamics 15 inexperienced cast 164 Los Angeles setting 81

Index overt focus on fashion 5, 21 photographic influences 112–13, 133–4 pink stilettos scene 38–9 “Rich Bitch” titles 165 soundtrack 59, 83–6, 136 title sequence 34–5, 165 viewer experience 53 Bloom, Orlando 35, 136 Blow-Up 4, 100 Boccaccio ’70 159 Bolton, Lucy 2 Bong, Joon-ho 200–202 Bonhôte, Ian 5 Bottega Veneta 151–2 Bourdin, Guy 101, 117–19, 130 Bow Wow Wow 26, 76 Brando, Marlon 7, 96, 97 “Brass in Pocket” 46 Braudy, Leo 35 Breakfast at Tiffany’s 74 Brevik-Zender, Heidi 3, 75, 132, 166 Breward, Christopher 202 A Brief History of Seven Killings 198 British Film Institute 10 Brody, Adrian 199 Brody, Richard 17 Broussard, Israel 37 Brown, Chris 38 Bruno, Giuliana 200 Bruzzi, Stella 6–7, 21–2 Bryant, Kobe 203 Bullock, Sandra 155 Buñuel, Luis 120 Burtynski, Ed 199 Butler, Judith 18–19 Buxton, Mark 179 Byrne, Rose 130 Caddyshack 161 Callas, Maria 167 Callis, Jo Ann 71 Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil 143 Canonero, Milena 6

Index costume designer for Marie Antoinette 22, 29, 75, 78 The Grand Budapest Hotel 199 Marie Antoinette feature in Vogue 182, 184–5 Carroll, Diahann 197 Cartier 144, 149–52, 176 Cash, Johnny 190 Cassavetes, Zoe 167 Castello Cavalcanti 199 The Castle on Sunset 92 Castor & Pollux 79 Castro, Fidel 19 “Ce Matin La” 65 Cera, Michael 191 Chanel, Coco 74, 155, 158, 185, 187 Chanel, Gabrielle 158 Chanel, house of 134, 182 Coppola’s commercials 144, 157–60 digital show 204 links with Coppola 11, 157–60, 166–7, 187–8 runway shows 56 yellow bag 35–6, 84 Chang, Katie 35, 164 Chaplin, Charlie 154 Chastain, Jessica 186 Chateau Marmont famous guests 92 film premiere after-parties 185 setting for Somewhere 9, 40–1, 58, 119–21, 123, 186 Vogue feature 175, 179 Chiuri, Maria Grazia 187 Choo, Jimmy 82 Chow, Lesley 77 Church Gibson, Pamela 57, 156, 178, 192–3 Clooney, George 191 “Clouds Up” 65 Coco Avant Chanel 4 Coddington, Grace 5, 120, 155, 179, 181–2 “Come Sail Away” 64 Connery, Sean 161 Constant, Fabien 5

273

Cook, Pam 11, 12, 15, 168–71, 175, 180–1 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover 22 “Cool” 94–5 Coolidge, Jennifer 67, 182 Cooper, Gary 155 Coppola, Francis Ford 87, 177–8, 192–3 Coppola, Roman 75, 199 Coppola, Sofia appearance in Marc Jacobs ads 66 artistic influences 1–2, 10, 99–100, 174 atmosphere 58–61 best director at Cannes 2 clothing as key to identity 52 collaboration with Apple 188–9 collaboration with designers 56 collaboration with Jacobs 174–5 complete oeuvre 1 Coppolism 10, 12, 17, 57, 166, 176–85 costume designer 57, 159 critical acclaim for oeuvre 194 director as auteur 169–75 dynamics of fame 160 fashion background 11, 57 fashion–fame–film industrial complex 155–60, 174–93 fashioning past worlds 61–80 fashioning the present 80–98 female in male-dominated world 2 filming commercials 4, 144–52, 157–9, 176 films sponsored by fashion brands 185–6 focus on clothing and fashion 2–3, 10–11, 16 focus on identity issues 14–15 fusion of art and commerce 11–12 Hi-Octane series 167 importance of locations 58–9 influence of famous father 164–5 La Traviata 56–7, 187 lack of dialogue in films 15–16, 40, 46, 48–50 links with Chanel 11, 157–60, 166–7, 187–8 location shooting 58

274 male protagonists in films 3 MilkFed clothing line 11, 91, 120, 167, 177 music videos 59 On the Rocks 187, 189 Oscar for best original screenplay 169 Oscar nomination for directing 2 personal clothing style 167–8, 173, 175–6 photographer 10, 100, 173, 174 photographic influences 103–19 relation to feminist politics 2–3 role in The Godfather III 167 screenplays 1, 16, 23, 164 self-fashioning 166–74 signature film style 1–2, 10–11, 101–4 signature shot 52 significance of visual representation 8, 52–3 “Sofia” designs by Julie de Libran 168 use of music 2, 8, 29, 57, 58–69, 75–80, 83–6, 88–90, 92–3, 98, 147–9, 190 use of tableaux 125–32 Vogue cover 167 Vogue editor 100 Vogue feature on Marie Antoinette 181 Vogue feature on The Beguiled 182–4 Vogue guest star 171–3 Corrigan, Timothy 11, 175 costume design 6, 9, 21, 40, 48, 56, 59, 70, 82–3, 90–2, 93–6, 156 costume drama 29, 73–5 Covid-19 pandemic 204–5 Craik, Jennifer 19 Crawford, Joan 155, 156 “Crazy on You” 64 Crosby, Bing 191 Crosby, David 92 Crowley, Nathan 56, 187 “Cry” 190 Cullinan, Thomas 29, 66 The Custom of the Country 189 Cutler, R. J. 5 Cyrus, Miley 191

Index Dahl-Wolfe, Louise 101 Dane, Dana 84–5 Danes, Claire 155 Dapper Dan 85, 198 The Darjeeling Limited 199 David, Hal 148 David, Jacques-Louis 140, 142 Davis, Angela 197 Day, Corinne 66 Days of Heaven 143 de Betak, Alexandre 204 de Chatillon, Jean Hughes 185 de Givenchy, Hubert 6, 22 de la Renta, Oscar 182 de Libran, Julie 168, 176, 186 deadmau5 83 Dean, Esther 38 Dean, James 7, 96 “Deep Down” 190 Deneuve, Catherine 157 Depp, Lily Rose 158 The Devil Wears Prada 4, 156 Diamond, Diana 22, 73, 179 Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel 5 Dieterle, William 6 Dietrich, Marlene 22, 155 Diggable Planets 85 Dillon, Matt 121 Dior and I 5 Dior, Christian 144 Dior, house of 182 Coppola’s commercials 144–6, 176 Marie Antoinette collection 179 “Dolly My Baby (Remix)” 85 Doane, Mary Ann 149 Donaldson, Lucy Fife 77–8 Donen, Stanley 4 Dorff, Stephen 16, 40, 162 Dunckel, Jean Benoit 66 Dune magazine 91, 100, 173 Dunst, Kirsten associated with fashion brands 186 The Beguiled 29, 163 Calvin Klein commercials 147 Cannes best actress award 163

Index endorsement of Coppola 176 feature in Vogue 182 “Let them eat cake” 28, 146–7 Marie Antoinette 23, 109, 119, 130, 163, 180, 182 The Virgin Suicides 162 Durham, Andrew 167 Durran, Jacqueline 196–7 Dyer, Richard 160 Eastwood, Clint 122 Eaton, Courtney 149–51 Eckert, Charles 155, 177 Eggleston, William 100, 105–10 Ehrenreich, Alden 146 Eilish, Billy 202 Ekberg, Anita 74 Elgort, Arthur 149, 151 Elle 159, 168 ELO 64 Ettedgui, Peter 5 Eugenides, Jeffrey 48, 58, 100, 104 Evans, Caroline 6, 56 Eyes of Laura Mars 100 Faiers, Jonathan 6–7 Fanning, Dakota 186 Fanning, Elle 186 The Beguiled 30, 109 endorsement of Coppola 176 Somewhere 16, 41 Vogue feature 182–4 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 163 Faris, Anna 45, 90 Farley, Lillian 103 Farmiga, Taissa 38, 164 Farrell, Colin 30, 163 fashion and identity 17–21 brands sponsoring Coppola’s films 185–6 creating an identity 21–40 fame–fashion–film industrial complex 11–12, 154–93, 200, 202

fashion films 4–5, 144–52 gamut of aesthetic practices 55–6 in film 5–9 Fashions of 1934 6 Feinstein, Rachel 56, 100 Fellini, Federico 199 feminism 2–3, 71, 197 Fendi 199 Ferry, Bryan 147 Fincher, David 144, 189 “Fior di Latte” 148 Fiorucci 100, 173, 176 Five Girls 147 The Flaming Lips 59, 167 Flores, Pamela 25 “FML” 83 Fontaine, Anne 4 Foo Fighters 93 Ford, Tom 57 “Formation” 197 Frances Ha 197 Frankel, David 4 Fraser, Antonia 22–3, 180 Fraser, Kennedy 182 Friedlander, Lee 100 Friedman, Vanessa 8, 154, 156–7 Friedrich, Caspar David 199 Funny Face 4, 100 Gadot, Gal 186 Gainsbourg, Serge 146 Galiano, John 179–80, 182 Galt, Rosalind 10 Gandhi, Mahatma 42, 122 Gang of Four 28 Gap 144, 189–90 Garavani, Valentino see Valentino Garbo, Greta 92, 122, 155 Gaultier, Jean Paul 22 George, Catherine 201 Gere, Richard 150 Gerwig, Greta 196–8, 203 Ghesquière, Nicolas 182 Ghostbusters 161 Giddens, Anthony 15, 18

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276 Gilda 74 Givenchy 182 Glamour 168 Glazer, Mitch 189 Glenn, Scott 128 Godard, Jean-Luc 144 The Godfather III 167 Godin, Nicolas 66 Goffman, Erving 15, 18, 20 Grable, Betty 156 The Graduate 41 Grainge, Paul 178 The Grand Budapest Hotel 198–9 Grande, Ariana 202 Greenberg 197 Grimes 157 Groundhog Day 161 Gucci 85, 182, 198, 199, 204 “Gucci Bags” 85 Guevara, Che 19 H&M 56, 144, 146, 147 Hamilton, John R. 121 The Hand 200 Handyside, Fiona 2, 3, 20, 153 Hare, Marcia 105–8 Harper’s Bazaar 103, 159 Hartnett, Josh 48–9 Haskins, Sam 137, 147 Hayashi, Fumihiro 91 Hayman, Stephanie 167 Haynes, Todd 6 Hayworth, Rita 74 Hazel and the Jolly Boys 190 Head, Edith 6 Heart 64 Heisey, Monica 176 Heller, Nathan 165–6, 182 “Hello, It’s Me” 63 Henderson, Laura 81 Hepburn, Audrey 74, 156 Hepburn, Katherine 156 Hermann, Bernard 59 Herzog, Charlotte 6 Hi-Octane series 167

Index Hilton, Paris 35, 38–9, 58, 61, 81–4, 92, 160, 162, 181 Hitchcock, Alfred 15, 59, 120 Hollander, Anne 119, 135 The Hollies 64 “Hong Kong Garden” 76 Hope, Bob 190 Horst, Horst P. 101 The Host 200 Howard, Emma 30, 109 Howard, Ron 188 Hustlers 202 Huston, Anjelica 120 Hutton, Lauren 147, 149–52 “I Feel Love” 149 “I Got Stripes” 190 “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself ” 148 “I’m Not Ready for Love” 190 “I’m Special” 90 In Bruges 163 In the Mood for Love 200 Indiscreet 63 Interview with a Vampire 162 Isherwood, Christopher 57 Isle of Dogs 198–9 Jacobs, Marc 9, 100, 166, 186 collaboration with Coppola 66, 168–9, 174–5 Coppola’s commercials 144–6 Coppola’s Vogue cover 171–2 grunge style 56, 83 New York Fashion Week 204 perfume commercials 66, 145, 167, 168 sponsoring The Beguiled premiere 185 James, Charles 126 James, Marlon 198 Jasmin, Paul 100, 101, 175 “Je t’aime … moi non plus” 146 The Job 176 Jobs, Steve 19 Johansen, David 191 Johansson, Scarlett 16, 43, 161

Index Johnson, Boris 202 Jolie, Angelina 35 Jones, Rashida 147, 187, 191 Jonze, Spike 144 Jordan, Chris 199 Jordanova, Ludmilla 60 Jorgensen, Jay 6 Jourdan, Charles 117–18 Kacere, John 114, 117 Kagemusha 178 Kahlo, Frida 19 Kaluuya, Daniel 198 Keaton, Diane 22 Kelly, Audrey 122 Kennedy, Todd 2, 10–11, 53, 96–7, 116, 142, 170 Kidman, Nicole 29, 70, 110, 163 Kika 22 Kim, Narae 188 King, Carole 63 King, Freddie 198 King, Geoff 86–7, 88 King, Michael Patrick 6 “Kings of the Wild Frontier” 76 Kinski, Nastassja 70 Kitamura, Nobu 91 Klein, Calvin 6, 144, 147–9, 176 Klimt, Gustav 199 Kurosawa, Akira 87, 177–8, 199 L’Ombrelle Verte 142, 143 La Dolce Vita 74 La Femme à l’ombrelle—Madame Monet et son fils 143 La Traviata 56–7, 187 Lachman, Edward 102, 105, 194 Lady Bird 196 Lagerfeld, Karl 56, 157, 158–9 Lane, Anthony 22, 180 Lane, Christina 22, 52, 166 Lang, Helmut 91 Lauren, Ralph 70 Laurence, Oona 31, 109 Laverty, Christopher 6

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Le Bon Marché 168 Le Sourd, Philippe 109–10 Lee, Nathan 10 Lee, Spike 144, 203 Legend, John 191 Léger, Hervé 82 Leibovitz, Annie 155, 181–3 Leslie, Esther 7 Lespert, Jalil 5 Letort, Delphine 84, 178 Letty Lynton 156 Levy, Shawn 92 Lewis, Caitlin Yunuen 2–3, 12, 169 Lewis, Jenny 191 Lick the Star 167, 194 cinematography 122–3 Coppola’s signature shot 52 “fashion show” 6, 123 group dynamics 15, 128 importance of music 59 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 199 Lin Tay, Sharon 45 Linchuck, Maryna 145 The Little Black Jacket 158 Little Women 162, 196–7 LoBrutto, Vincent 93 The Lobster 163 Loewe 182 Lohan, Lindsay 35, 84, 86, 92, 160 Lopez, Jennifer 202 Loren, Sophia 167 “Lorena” 66–7 Lost in Translation cinematography 86–7 clothing echoing plot 45–8 clothing indicating character 43–6 Coppola’s most lauded film 43 costume reflecting personality 90–2 hotel settings 58 Japanese setting 86–8 limited dialogue 46 Oscar for best original screenplay 169 photographic influences 114–17 romantic comedy 1 screenplay 16, 17

278 soundtrack 88–90 Steiner as costume designer 6, 44, 62 Love, Natalie 148 Lubezki, Emmanuel 188 Lucas, Isabel 186 Lynch, David 144, 147 Mademoiselle C 5 “Magic Man” 64 “Magnificat” 69 Major, Reema 85 Malcolm X 19 Malick, Terrence 143, 145 Manning, Roger J. Jr. 89 Mapplethorpe, Robert 100 Marie Antoinette Canonero as costume designer 6, 22, 29, 73, 75, 78, 182, 184–5 cinematography 73 closing scene 72–3 Converse hightops shot 75 costume creating character 22–3, 73–4 dynamics of fame 160 execution dress 27 fashion spin-offs 179–81 focus on identity 23, 27–8 handover scene 23–4 influenced by paintings 140 “I Want Candy” sequence 25–6, 132 “Let them eat cake” scene 28, 78, 147 Manolo Blahnik shoes 6, 73, 75, 120 marketing 180 opening sequence 28–9 photographic influences 117–19 recurring image of ribbon 71–2, 73, 74 soundtrack 9, 59, 75–9 tableaux 130–2 Versailles setting 24–7, 58, 73 Vogue feature 181 Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine 142 Marimekko 9 Mars, Thomas 93, 149 Martin, Dean 161, 191 Marx, Karl 98, 132–3

Index Matin, Samiha 17, 26, 27, 131 Matsoukas, Melina 197–8, 203 Maude 114 Mayshark, Jesse Fox 56, 119 McCartney, Stella 9 McDean, Craig 173 McGill, Hannah 16 McLaren, Malcolm 76 McQueen 5 McQueen, Alexander 82, 182, 184 Meisel, Steven 101 Melancholia 163 Memories of Murder 200 M.I.A. 84 Miami Vice 163 “Midnight at the Oasis” 89 MilkFed clothing line 11, 91, 120, 167, 177 Minamimagoe, Kazuyoshi 91 Minke, Walt 59 Minority Report 163 Miu Miu 182 “Moi Je Joue” 145 Monet, Claude 142, 143 Monroe, Marilyn 158 Monteverdi, Claudio 69 Moonrise Kingdom 199 Moore, Julianne 158 Moore, Roger 161 Moran, Kim 199 “More Than This” 90 Morel, Jean 103 Morisot, Berthe 142–3 Morrison, Harriet 93 Morocco 22 Morrison, Jim 92 Moschino 180 Moss, Kate 147–8 The Mother 200 Mulvey, Laura 103 Munich, Adrienne 21–2, 40, 154 Munkácsi, Martin 103 Murray, Bill 16, 43, 87, 161 A Very Murray Christmas 189–92 Musgraves, Kacey 191 “My Hero” 93–4

Index Napier, April 196 “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” 140, 142 Nash, Graham 92 Neiers, Alexis 164 New York Stories 57, 159 Newton, Helmut 92, 100–1, 120–1, 123, 158, 173 Nichols, Mike 41 Nickerson, Camilla 155 “Nightmares” 85 Nishizawa, Kana 188 “Nobody Does It Better” 90 “Oblivion” 157 O’Hagan, Sean 169 O’Halloran, Dustin 79 Okja 200 On the Rocks 1, 187, 189 Onassis, Jackie Kennedy 158 “Opus 17” 79 Orth, Maureen 156 O’Sullivan, Gilbert 63 Owens, Bill 100, 105–6, 111 Ozu, Yasujiro 199 Paltrow, Gwyneth 199 Parasite 201–2 Parker, Sarah Jessica 155 Parsons, Gram 92 Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna 73 Patridge, Audrina 35, 37, 58, 102, 160 Penn, Irving 124, 125, 184 Perlmutt, Bent-Jorgen 5 Pernet, Diane 144 Pesce, Sara 36, 82, 160 Peyton, Elizabeth 173 Phantom Thread 4 Pharrell 3, 158 Phoenix 69, 79, 93, 148, 191 Piccoli, Pierpaolo 187 Picnic at Hanging Rock 70 Pillow Talk 63 Plant, Robert 92 “Playground Love” 194 Poehler, Amy 191

Poirier, Agnès 164 Polan, Dana 11, 169 Polanski, Roman 70 The Police 95 Poots, Imogen 147 Portman, Natalie 146–7, 203 postfeminism 2–3, 169–71 Powell, Anthony 70 Prada 199 Premiers Symptômes 65 Prêt-a-Porter 4 The Pretenders 90 Prince, Richard 100, 173 The Promise 190 Psycho 59 Pugh, Florence 197 Queen & Slim 197–8 Radner, Hilary 156 Rampling, Charlotte 120 Ray, Johnnie 190 Ray, May 74 Ray, Nicholas 96 Rebel Without a Cause 96 “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” 85 Rees-Roberts, Nick 4, 57 Reitzell, Brian 76, 89 Ribisi, Giovanni 45, 48 Rice, Angourie 31 Richter, Nicole 22, 52, 166 Riecke, Addison 30 Rihanna 197 Ritts, Herbert 101 Rivière, Joan 19 Robbie, Margot 158 Roberts, Soraya 166 Roberts, William Leonard II 84 Rocamara, Agnès 59, 202 Rock, Chris 191–2 Rodarte 182 Roitfeld, Carine 5, 172 Ross, Anne 56, 88 Ross, Rick 84 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27, 142, 143

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280 Roxy Music 90 Rudolph, Maya 191 The Royal Tenenbaums 199, 200 “Run to Me” 63 Rundgren, Todd 63, 64 Ryder, Winona 167 Rye Rye 83 Rykiel, Sonia 168, 176, 186 Sabrina 6, 22 Safe 6 Sales, Nancy Jo 81, 82, 164 Sargent, John Singer 74 Savides, Harris 36, 135, 145 Saving Mr. Banks 163 “Scarborough Fair” 89 Scavullo, Francesco 100 Schneider, Romy 159, 176 Schrader, Paul 150 Schwartzman, Jason 191 Scoggins, Donald L. 6 Scorsese, Martin 15, 144 Scott, Ridley 144 The September Issue 5 Sex and the City 6, 156 Seydoux, Lea 186 Shaw, Ivan 155 Shields, Brooke 148 Shields, Kevin 89 Shiele, Egon 199 “Shine” 59 Siegel, Don 29, 66, 149 Simon and Garfunkel 41 Sims, David 173 Sinatra, Frank 161 A Single Man 57 Siouxsie and the Banshees 76 Sipkin, Chad 158 Skye, Iona 167 Sloan 66 Smaill, Belinda 59 Smelik, Anneke 59, 202 S.N.L. 161, 192 Snowpiercers 201 “So Far Away” 63

Index “So Lonely” 95 Sobchack, Vivian 8, 98 Somewhere allusions to fashion photography 119–23 Battat as costume designer 6, 95–7 Chateau Marmont setting 9, 40–1, 58, 92–3, 119–21, 123, 186 clothing indicating character 41–3 dynamics of fame 160–1 head mold scene 53–4 limited dialogue 40 pole-dancing twins 41–2, 93–5 questioning identity 40–1 screenplay 16 significance of surface appearance 53–4 soundtrack 93–5 Sontag, Susan 104 “Sounds of Silence “ 41 Spider-Man trilogy 163 Spielberg, Steven 188 The Spirit of ’76 57 St. Laurent, Yves 6 Stefani, Gwen 94, 191 Steichen, Edward 122, 155 Steiner, Nancy 6 collaboration with Coppola 56 costume designer for Lost in Translation 44, 91 costume designer for The Virgin Suicides 48, 196–7 creating characters with costume 21 supplying voice on Lost in Translation 44 using costume to create personality 62 Stevens, Dana 164–5 Stevens, Isabel 16 Stewart, Kristin 158 Stiller, Ben 4, 199 Stockhausen, Adam 198 “Strange Magic” 64 The Strokes 79 Stylist Magazine 174 Styx 64

Index Suburbia 111 Sullivan, Ed 191 Summer, Donna 149, 150 Sunrise Boulevard 84 “Sunshine” 83 Suntory whiskey commercial 44, 87, 161, 175, 177, 192 Super Cat 85 Sulton, Larry 100 Swanson, Gloria 155 Swift, Taylor 9 Swinton, Tilda 158, 201 Tarantino, Quentin 173 Tay, Sharon Lin 104 Taylor, Chuck 75 Taylor, Elizabeth 158 Taylor, Lisa 149, 151 Tcheng, Frédéric 5 Teller, Juergen 66, 167 Tess 70 Testino, Mario 167, 171, 172, 173 “The Air that I Breathe” 64 “The Melody of a Fallen Tree” 79 Theyskens, Olivier 182 “This Here Giraffe” 59, 167 The Thomas Crown Affair 63 Ti Amo 149 Tiffany & Co. 175 Tigerland 163 Tillmans, Wolfgang 66 “Tipp City” 59 Tisci, Riccardo 9 Trump, Melania 202 Tupac 85 Turini, Shiona 197 Turner-Smith, Jodie 197 Turner, Lana 156 Tyrnauer Matt 4 Uhlirova, Marketa 7 Un Chien Andalou 120 Valentino 56, 182, 187 Valentino: The Last Emperor 4

281

Vanity Fair 81, 125, 164, 194 Variety 188, 189, 204 A Very Murray Christmas 189–92 Victoria’s Secret 82, 136 The Virgin Suicides cinematography 137 clothing replacing dialogue 48–50 creating 1970s’ world 61–5 dynamics of fame 162 fallibility of judgment of appearance 50 fantasy scenes 50–1 filmed in Toronto 58 group dynamics 15 importance of music 59, 62–6 perfumes created about scenes 179 photographic influences 104–9, 137–40 screenplay 65 Steiner as costume designer 6, 21, 48, 56, 62, 196–7 tableaux 128–30 Visconti, Luchino 159, 176 Vogue 78, 124, 168, 174, 185, 197 The Beguiled feature 182–4 Chateau California 179 Coppola as guest editor 100, 159, 171, 175 Coppola as guest star 171–3 Coppola on cover 157, 159, 175, 167, 171–2 Coppola’s photographs 100, 159 Fanning on cover 182–4 film stars on cover 155 Marie Antoinette feature 180–2 road-trip feature 120 tableaux 125, 181 Vreeland, Diana 5, 100 Vreeland, Lisa Immordino 5 Vuitton, Louis 38, 85, 134, 168, 175, 182, 185–6, 199 W 100, 109, 159, 176 Walton, Saige 78 Warhol, Andy 100, 192–3 Wasson, Erin 186

282 Watson, Emma 35, 164, 176 “We Found Love” 197 Weber, Bruce 100, 101, 121 Weber, Caroline 27–8, 78, 182 Weinstein, Harvey 203 Weir, Peter 70 West, Jesse 85 West, Kanye 3, 9 Westwood, Vivienne 76 Wharton, Edith 189 “Whatever Happened” 79 White Stripes 148 White, Julie 191 Who Are You, Polly Magoo? 4 Wilder, Billy 6 The Wild One 96, 97 Wilkinson, Maryn 36, 135–6 Williams, Andy 191 Wilson, Elizabeth 8, 24, 55, 154 Wilson, Jacki 141

Index Wilson, Luke 199 Windsor for the Derby 79 Wintour, Anna 5 Woman with Blue Bow 71 The Women 6 Women’s Wear Daily 159 Wong, Kar-wai 144, 200 Woodbine, Bokeem 198 Woodworth, Amy 2, 16 Wright, Joe 144, 147 Wu, Jason 9 Wyatt, Justin 63, 64, 145, 149 Yeoman, Robert 198 Young, Mallory 22–3 Yves St. Laurent 4 Zacharek, Stephanie 101 Zellweger, Renée 155 Zoolander series 4

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