Fashion house Marc Jacobs is extending its move into episodic branded entertainment with The Swap, a new microdrama starring Rowan Blanchard and Jemima Kirke.
The film is the latest instalment of ‘Question Marc’, the fashion house’s storytelling platform that launched in April with The Scene, a scripted micro-drama written by and starring Rachel Sennott. The initiative is designed to bring together fashion, entertainment and culture through stories released across social platforms.
The Swap begins after a Marc Jacobs runway show, when two guests accidentally leave with each other’s identical Scene Bags. The mix-up sends the characters, played by Blanchard and Kirke, on intersecting journeys across New York, as they discover the contents of each other’s bags and begin to form assumptions about one another.
The brand describes the story as an exploration of “identity, perception, and the ways we interpret one another”, with playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris also making a cameo appearance.
The Scene Bag again occupies a central role in the narrative, having previously featured prominently in The Scene. In that April campaign, Sennott played a character racing around Manhattan trying to secure an invitation to the Met Gala, with the bag functioning as a recurring visual device and companion to the character.
Marc Jacobs positioned The Scene as the first instalment in an ongoing series of scripted micro-dramas, making The Swap a continuation of that strategy rather than a standalone seasonal campaign. The brand says further episodes will be released throughout the autumn.
Kirke said the story was particularly rooted in the relationship between New York, its inhabitants and the objects they carry. “This campaign is a storybook homage to a New York woman and the ways she lives her day to day, about two opposite women looking for one another in a massive city. As native New Yorkers they’re able to find the common ground by paying attention to the details.”
