Chanel Fêtes Sofia Coppola at Chateau Marmont

The French fashion house held an intimate dinner in L.A. for the filmmaker and a trove of creatives

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL
Photography by STEFANIE KEENAN/WireImage

Sofia Coppola and Molly Shannon.

Chanel gathered Sofia Coppola’s friends and family at the Chateau Marmont, a perennial favorite where the writer, director, and producer set her fourth movie, Somewhere, for a dinner to celebrate the launch of her first book, Sofia Coppola Archive: 1999–2023 (MACK) on Tuesday, September 19. A host of creatives — including Coppola’s husband, Thomas Mars — joined her for the alfresco gathering, and the evening became a date night for many of her guests, which included frequent collaborator Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons, Rashida Jones and Ezra Koenig, John Mulaney and Olivia Munn, Honor Titus and Gia Coppola, Mitch Glazer and Kelly Lynch, Cleo Wade and Simon Kinberg, and Harley Viera-Newton and Ross Schwartzman.

Also on hand was Priscilla Presley, whose intimate 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, is the basis for Coppola’s forthcoming film Priscilla. Dakota and Elle Fanning (a Somewhere alumna), Anjelica Huston, Kim Gordon, James Gray, Molly Shannon, Chloé Zhao, Alexandra Shipp, Awkwafina, Dree Hemingway, Laura and Kate Mulleavy, Lisa and Laura Love, Kelly Sawyer, Jennifer Meyer, and Paris Hilton (who lent her house to Coppola when she filmed The Bling Ring) also turned up to celebrate the filmmaker.

Guests got a first look at the 488-page tome, a visual compendium of the artifacts fueling Coppola’s eight films. The book is filled with on-set snapshots, annotated script pages, dog-eared novels, and rose-hued ephemera written in notebooks or pinned to bulletin boards pertaining to The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and her other works, including Priscilla. In the volume, meant to resemble a scrapbook rather than a polished coffee table book, Coppola tells Lynn Hirschberg how she began writing her first script, which became The Virgin Suicides. “It was a puzzle. I like adapting books because it’s like a game, something you have to figure out,” she writes. “I began by adapting a few characters, just as an exercise. But I got so into it I ended up writing a whole script.”

The reflective evening was also a bit of a full-circle moment for Coppola, who celebrated her 21st birthday at the Chateau, interned with Karl Lagerfeld at age 15, and later dressed characters for her father’s film Life Without Zoë in the French house’s suits, extending the house founder’s already sizable forays into motion picture costuming. Over the years Coppola has directed campaign films and collection teasers for Chanel, tapping into her dreamy, girl-centric aesthetic, and she has often returned to the Chateau to celebrate her new films with friends. All the while, she’s done it her way. On this starry California evening, guests took home copies of her book, with its unabashedly pink cover, but only after Princess — Maya Rudolph and her friend Gretchen Lieberum’s Prince cover band — performed (deliriously) onstage.