Fashion for 2011: Check Out Elle Fanning’s New Marc Jacobs Ads! Elle Fanning is the teenage dream fashionistas. Willowy, bright-blonde and goldenskinned, she’s a luminous film star – actually, the best of her generation, an Oscarwinner in the making – a muse to fashion designers and first pick for the school volleyball team. This summer, when she stars in Super 8, JJ Abrams’s Seventies-set family film, she’s going to become really famous. With her first appearance in the movie, casually rolling up a small-town street behind the wheel of her father’s muscle car, you hear the sound of a million adolescent boys’ hearts breaking. Fanning has what Abrams calls an “other-speciesness”: an almost eerie understanding of how to play a character. “Only an actress of some supernatural life experience,” says Abrams, “that Elle for some miraculous reason possesses, could pull off that kind of stuff.” With any child actor, there’s a worry that, even if they’re not on a Judy Garland-style diet of uppers and downers, they’ll be brattish, or horribly precocious. Fanning is neither of these things. In fact, she is a delight. Tall for her 13 years – “I grew seven inches in two years”, she tells me proudly – she towers over a lot of adult leading actors, but she has the Bambi-like gawkiness of someone growing into their body. She’s giggly and talks breathlessly if you get her on the right subject, which is of course fashion. Elle Fanning appears in the Fall 2011 ad campaign for Marc by Marc Jacobs featuring new clothing and Marc Jacob bags , and the Super 8 starlet looks serious and mature beyond her 13 years. So how did Dakota’s little sister land the gig?
As you know, Dakota has been modeling for Marc Jacobs since 2006, but it seems like it was one of Elle’s recent movie roles that really helped land her the campaign. Elle starred in 2010′s Somewhere, which was directed by Jacobs’ longtime friend, Sophia Coppola. The film’s premiere was co-sponsored by Louis Vuitton, and surprise, surprise! Jacobs has been the creative director of the French fashion house since 1997.
Fanning is already a 10-year veteran of the movie business. Allow me to try to put this in some context. At the age of two years and 11 months, when few toddlers have had any experience in the entertainment industry – most are appallingly work-shy – Fanning was making her screen debut in I Am Sam. At eight, when Fanning was shooting her first leading role in a feature film (Phoebe in Wonderland), I was refusing to take a grade two piano exam on the grounds that it would put me under too much pressure. Four years later I gave up the piano; Fanning, meanwhile, marked her 12th birthday with a Young Hollywood Best Actress Award for her role in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. Do Elle’s ads live up to the hype? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Photo Credit: Marc Jacobs