Have you heard of “Coppolacore”? It’s like normcore, only not ugly; cottagecore but not frumpy; gorpcore without the fleece; Barbiecore but not bright.
Coppolacore is pale pink and girlish; it can be gauzy and romantic or as precise as a custom-made Charvet shirt. The characteristic messy bedrooms and dresser tops crowded with perfume bottles have inspired many millennial Pinterest boards and Gen Z TikTok. But the delicacy of the look belies the power beneath, at its very Coppola core.
Not many creators have an aesthetic with a name, but Sofia Coppola’s personal style mixed with the sensibility of her films—The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring, Priscilla—is an irresistible narcotic to girls of a certain age and poetic leaning. It all fits for a woman Bill Murray dubbed “the velvet hammer.”
No one does superficial as well as Coppola, who offers up each ruffle and iced petit four for interpretation. In fact, Coppola has been criticized for being more concerned with surfaces and appearance than with meaning. But it’s a lazy slight.
“I don’t understand why looking at superficiality makes you superficial,” she commented in a New Yorker profile earlier this year, undoubtedly knowing why and pushing back all the same.
Now she’s bringing out three tinted lip balms for Augustinus Bader, each one painstakingly considered, each enticing, and—not to be all superficial about it—potentially life-changing, to me if not to the rest of the population.
Coppola absolutely sweats the small stuff. “I feel like I’ve been researching this for 20 years,” she tells me. When I ask her about her first experience with lip balm, she replies, “I like that you can say this with all seriousness.” I can and, unfortunately, often do.
Coppola has dabbled in the Labello tinted balms and Rosebud Salves of the world but was frustrated by their shortcomings—they’re either not tinted enough or too vivid to meet her exacting standards. “I’ve tried so many and it’s always like one is almost there, but it’s too much pigment.” She went so far as to melt lipsticks in the microwave and stir them with lip balm. Several tubes of Nars Scarlet Empress fell victim to her experimentation.
Coppola has been criticized for being more concerned with surfaces and appearance than with meaning. But it’s a lazy slight.
A devotee of Augustinus Bader’s skin-care products, particularly The Rich Cream and the Lip Balm, Coppola wrote to the German professor in Leipzig, asking if he’d consider making a tinted version of the balm. Her request: Something “sheer enough that you could put it on without a mirror,” she says. “Not too shiny and not sticky at all. Just like a little stain of color that’s moisturizing.” Three tinted balms bearing her signature are hitting the market this month.
Whenever I see Coppola on planes or at parties, we discuss the latest skin-care products and current favorite facialists. “I’m kind of a closet beauty editor,” Coppola says.
The contents of her medicine cabinet, which was photographed for French Vogue in 2004, have been dissected by bloggers ever since. “I love products—I love the packaging and the smell. And I love that moment to yourself, especially after a hard workday, with things that smell nice. My favorite escape from my work life is fashion and beauty.”
One of Coppola’s first teachers was her mother, Eleanor, who, before her death, on April 12, stuck to a simple Clinique lipstick and preferred her beauty in garden form. “She’s always emphasizing the importance of beauty on health and feeling good,” Sofia says. Her tutors in fragrance, skin care, and makeup were her parents’ friends, “my French aunties,” Aurore Clémant, the actress who starred in Lacombe, Lucien, and Carole Bouquet, of Trop Belle pour Toi and, in the 80s and 90s, the face of Chanel No. 5. “They looked like they weren’t done. It’s that kind of easy beauty.”
She is drawn to the looks of Marisa Berenson, Anjelica Huston, and Tina Chow. “A lot of it has to do with personality. I don’t like a bland look.” When Coppola was 13, Huston told her, “Don’t worry, you’ll grow into your nose.”
Coppola doesn’t mess around. Her first fragrance as a teenager was Cristalle, by Chanel. When she goes to events, she turns to Orlando Pita to style her hair and Dick Page to apply her makeup, two of the finest in the field, who spend most of their time working on runway shows and fashion shoots.
“I’m not a qualified makeup artist, but I’ve spent 10,000 hours looking at makeup artists and asking them to describe things,” she says. By Malcolm Gladwell’s calculations, that makes her a master.
“I think beauty is really important,” she says, preaching to the converted. “It always felt sort of indulgent, but now science is catching up with how important it really is. So now I feel less shy about it.”
Coppola’s characters are often trapped in bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets. These are the places where young women spend their interior lives trying to figure out who they are by staring into a mirror, examining their exterior selves. In filming The Bling Ring, “there was a moment in the real story where the girl was trying on the celebrity’s perfume and it just felt so invasive. Fragrance, especially, is so connected with your identity.”
Women’s interests are often seen as frivolous compared to men’s. Virginia Woolf wrote, “Football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’… This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”
Coppola gives dignity and meaning to the surfaces, even if it’s slight and perfunctory. Even if it’s a salve that fits in a pocket almost like an afterthought.
On a recent trip to Le Bon Marché, in Paris, one of Coppola’s teenage daughters gave her a restriction: “You can’t buy another tinted lip balm.” Now she’s fully stocked with the perfect set. They’re just enough and never too much.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look