Exploring the magic of a Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola collaboration at the Daisy Dream launch

When Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola take the stage at the launch for his fragrance Daisy Dream (from $85, Hudson’s Bay) at New York’s Dia Center for the Arts, you want to study them the way a zoologist watches animals in their natural habitat. You’re compelled to scrutinize not only their behaviour but what they’re wearing—she’s in slim, cropped black pants, a coral sweater (both by the designer himself) and black ballet flats, while he’s in a suit paired with dingy Adidas Stan Smith sneakers. Being in such close proximity makes the impenetrable sphere of cool that surrounds them all the more apparent; you fantasize about what their conversations must be about, what clothes he designs with her in mind and whether they share current iPod playlists.

They’ve been friends since the early ’90s, and Jacobs has enlisted Coppola over the years for various projects, from modelling in the ad for his very first fragrance to advising on shoes and bags for Louis Vuitton. He tapped her once again for directorial duties on the TV commercial for Daisy Dream, and it sounds like it was an effortless task. “We have similar tastes in music and photography, so I felt like I knew how to approach it,” says Coppola. “How Marc sees women is something I identify with.” As a feature film director, she embraced the opportunity to not have to deal with dialogue. “I think in the way that a fragrance is sort of abstract, I liked not having to tell a story, but more a mood or an atmosphere.”

For Jacobs, being youthful is more an attitude than a number. “To be young is not an age, really, it’s to remain curious and interested in things,” he says, “And to feel like there is always something else you can do, see or learn.”

To convey daytime dreaminess, perfumer Alberto Morillas used blue wisteria, calling it a “strange, exotic flower” and “more sophisticated than a rose.”

The pair met when Coppola came to New York with her mother and paid a visit to Perry Ellis to see Jacobs’s grunge collection. The two clicked immediately. “My mom was kind of surprised that we started talking about music and bands we liked,” recalls Coppola.

Coppola often scores her films with atmospheric music—think My Bloody Valentine, Air and The Jesus and Mary Chain. She chose Brooklyn band Sleigh Bells’ Ambient sounding “End of the Line” as the backdrop for the new ad.

Shot in the Bavarian countryside, Coppola’s commercial riffs off her film The Virgin Suicides. “It was a reference to the mood of the imagery of these girls in the fields,” says Coppola. “There’s a dreamy quality to her lying around looking at the clouds.”

“The whole Daisy thing started with Daisy Buchanan,” says Jacobs, “The Mia Farrow Daisy Buchanan. She is my favourite character in literature. There was some irony in a sense, because a daisy doesn’t smell, but it is a flower that I felt evoked a certain spirit in a lot of women.”

We’ve got an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs’ Daisy Dream.

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