Sofia Coppola shares her style secrets: 'A kind of uniform helps
Upstairs at Café de Flore is Sofia Coppola’s safe place for interviews. Her Paris apartment is a stone’s throw away and her parents’ apartment, where she often stayed as a teenager, is around the corner.
It’s a Friday, sunny, and the lunch crowd is lingering, some eating tuna niçoise, some – like the louche young man planted in the corner with his laptop – being conspicuously literary, clearly conscious of the connection the café has to Paris’s people of letters.
Sofia, 44, picks her way through the crowd, smiling anxiously. She’s slight and dressed in dark clothes, but her clear skin and white teeth stand out across the room. When she arrives, she speaks so softly it’s like a murmur.
She makes small talk about travel then stops, distracted by the window boxes blooming green and pink. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘The flowers. Sorry. I haven’t been here since the winter. I haven’t seen that.’
There’s a sense that she’s a beat apart from everyone else. She reacts to questions with a kind of vague surprise. It’s hard to imagine her voice booming across a film set, like her father’s – Francis Ford Coppola, the grand auteur of 20th-century American cinema – is said to. But it certainly hasn’t held her back. As a kid she acted in her father’s films, but later decided to get behind the camera.
She is the writer and director of six features, including Lost in Translation – for which she was nominated for three Oscars and won for Best Writing – The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring. Only the third woman ever to be nominated for a directing Oscar, she seems bashful about her achievements. ‘I don’t really think about it,’ she says. ‘Although maybe more now. I was asked to do a book of my work and I thought, “Well, there are so many books about men directors, maybe I should, just so that there are more female voices out there."
But her lofty achievements do not exclude an interest in fashion – or beauty. We’re meeting because she has been collaborating with Louis Vuitton, reworking the original bag she designed for the brand in 2009, which she carries today in her favourite navy blue. ‘It’s a good size, it fits a lot,’ she says – revealing the inside of the bag, bulging with boxed French creams and lotions that she just swept up from the pharmacy. Given her flawless skin that appears bare except for a flush of sheer colour on her cheeks, I should have demanded the names and prices.
The newer version of her bag comes in a perforated leather – ‘I thought that was cute for spring’ – and with coloured piping. It looks like a small, chic sportsbag from the 1980s. She hasn’t got one herself yet, but she wants one in white for the summer.
She started working with Louis Vuitton after making Marie Antoinette (2006), when she was taking time off from films to look after her elder daughter Romy, now nine (she also has a younger daughter Cosima, six, both with the French musician Thomas Mars). She has been friends with Marc Jacobs, who was then Vuitton’s creative director, since the 1990s.
‘And because of Marc, I met the bag department and they have a tradition of doing custom-made bags, so I did one and we turned it into a line. I guess it was in that time where bags were all about charms and hardware and just big, and so I designed something simple that my friends and I would like.’
She doesn’t do fuss. ‘No, but I want to look put-together even if I’m running around. I like something that’s not specific to a season that you can have for years and years. The quality’s beautiful. And for me it’s fun going into the office. I never have a regular job where I do that. Working somewhere like Vuitton, where they have every material you can choose from and they can make samples of anything you can think of, it’s a dream way to be creative.’
I wonder how the word ‘muse’ sits with her. ‘I don’t think of myself like that, but I’ve always loved fashion since I was a kid,’ she says. ‘I was obsessed from a really young age and when I was a teenager my parents encouraged it. I think my dad enjoyed it, he’d always ask my opinion about style.’
With a lot of stellar connections, doors swung open for Sofia. As a teenager she interned at Chanel for two summers. ‘I loved it. I’m from a small country town [albeit the Coppola vineyard in California] and there weren’t any like-minded people that were very sophisticated and my friends were, you know, pre-internet, so we weren’t connected. I used to get The Face in the mail and that was my connection to the outside world. So to come to Paris in the 1980s was so exciting.’ She wasn’t planning to be a fashion designer. ‘I thought I’d be a fashion editor – like Diana Vreeland or something. I didn’t expect to work on films.’
There are possibly as many devotees of Sofia’s personal style as there are of her movies. She has been a permanent member of the Vanity Fair Fashion Hall of Fame – a distinction bestowed on the likes of Coco Chanel and Lauren Bacall – since 2007, after appearing on the US magazine’s best-dressed list year after year. Today she is working her signature pared-down style in a navy striped Sonia Rykiel jumper, black jeans and sweet black Valentino block-heeled Mary Janes.
She may have been a country girl, but she was surrounded by glamorous people. One of her first memories, she has said, is of sitting on Andy Warhol’s knee. But what she loved about them was not the showbiz razzmatazz but ‘the detail. How people’s personalities came through in their style.’
One family friend who she always thought tremendously stylish was Aurore Clémente, a French actress who was cast in Apocalypse Now and married Francis Ford Coppola’s production designer, Dean Tavoularis. Clémente had been a model who broke the rules by not wearing make-up and had her own simple, classic style. ‘She was this really chic woman – she always wore a man’s shirt, but before everyone else did. I also loved people like Agnès B in the ’80s. The way Parisian women dress, it doesn’t look like a lot of effort has been put in, but they always look chic and interesting. That made an impression on me.’
She says she doesn’t think about her style, but admits ‘a kind of uniform helps’. When she’s working, she wears a Charvet man’s shirt, made in Paris. ‘There are a few things I wear all the time – Acne jeans, the staples that you just know you like and don’t have to think about too much. And then it’s fun to dress up for special occasions.’
But mostly you will find her wearing navy blue. ‘Oh, it’s so boring!’ she exclaims. ‘My friend who designs shoes at Louis Vuitton, he’s always laughing at me. “Do you want it in navy blue, Sofia?” and I’m like, “Um, yes, I do.” My memoir will be called: Does This Come in Navy?’
Her daughters may have different ideas. Romy is currently hankering after a pair of ‘emoji’ leggings that apparently all the kids are wearing in New York. She has also started questioning Sofia’s taste. ‘I was wearing those Tod’s driving shoes with the fuzzy lining [shearling] to take her to school and she said, “Why are you wearing slippers?” I looked down and she had a point.’
This summer, after directing La Traviata in Rome – her first opera – she’ll start working on her next film, The Beguiled, a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood film about a girl’s boarding school, starring Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst and Nicole Kidman. ‘I’ve never worked with her before but I’ve always wanted to,’ says Sofia of Kidman. ‘And to have the three of them together…’
She enjoys creating stories about women. ‘It’s hard for me to watch a movie with only men in it, without female characters. I can’t relate to it. I grew up around all boys and men,’ she adds, ‘my dad’s sets were mostly [dominated by] men and there were my brothers and cousins. I was with boys all the time.’ Did she have to shout to get heard? ‘No, because I was like the baby girl I got a lot of attention in an all-male family.’ She smiles. ‘But I do feel like I’m very into my feminine side because of that.’
By the time Sofia has left, adding a navy Louis Vuitton donkey jacket to her chic ensemble, the conspicuous typist has somehow managed to pass on his scripts to Sofia’s publicist. A woman in her 70s, possibly an academic, who had been having an erudite conversation with her lunchmate about the Middle East, leans over and says, ‘Is that woman you were talking to who I think she was?’ On confirmation, she is pleased. ‘She looks so like she does in her photographs,’ she says approvingly.
The SC Bag PM, from £2,480, is available from the end of May. See uk.louisvuitton.com
telegraph.co.uk
