This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Timeless Issue, no. 371, Spring 2023. Order your copy here.
Thinking too much about the metaverse can make your brain curdle. But before the digital landscape was corrupted by NFTs and AI, the metaverse was envisioned as a utopia: a universally accessible place where everyone could share in a beautiful, egalitarian culture. Early renderings of this digital paradise featured fairy aliens, fallen angels, neon lights, and cyber-rave clothing. While that heavenly vision isn’t much like how the metaverse turned out in 2023, digital dreamers have found a promised land on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. It’s called Heaven by Marc Jacobs.
Launched in 2020, the Heaven by Marc Jacobs brand is where Anna Sui curates the best pieces from her 90s runways for sale. It’s where Beabadoobee shops for her tour wardrobe, where Doja Cat dresses down in corsetry and where Kyle MacLachlan sports gothic angel wings. It’s the home of Kate Moss in pink hair, lounging in nine-inch-high platform boots. It’s where you can buy issues of the legendary Fruits magazine or shop a selection of curated books including rare art tomes by Kyoichi Tsuzuki and Mike Kelley. It has 52 million views on TikTok where Gen Z shoppers review and critique each product drop, shredding into cardboard boxes to reveal pleated miniskirts and printed mesh tops to their friends and followers. Heaven is where the patron saint of cool girls, Sofia Coppola, shares images from The Virgin Suicides on silk midi skirts and where her cool girl stans go to watch episodes of her cult 90s TV series Hi Octane.
Much like the metaverse, this real, tangible Heaven exists wherever you are – in the Marc Jacobs store, on the brand’s Instagram, or in the reverberating circles of fandom that have buoyed the label’s success. On Twitter, fans use upwards of fourteen exclamation points to express how a Heaven drop makes them feel, often a life or death scenario, especially if the brand’s Kiki boots are on the menu. In the physical world, screen printed T-shirts, vitamin earrings, or fluffy bunny bags populate dance floors at Elsewhere, Pussy Palace, and wherever young people are letting loose.
On Spring Street in New York City, Heaven’s headquarters are bustling with racks of vintage Marc by Marc Jacobs clothing, mood boards of Gregg Araki and Milla Jovovich pictures, and patterns for new knitwear scattered on tables. In the back corner is the heart of Heaven herself: Ava Nirui.
Born in Australia, Ava worked at various New York brands before a chance encounter led her to Marc Jacobs. She had produced a bootleg Marc hoodie and rather than litigate, the brand invited her to do a collaboration. “Marc started following me on Instagram, and I was so starstruck,” Ava says, from an office covered in Coppola movie posters, small kawaïi dolls, and a large butterfly wing sculpture. Eventually, she went to the office to meet Marc – “I was so nervous I was shaking,” she says – and he offered her a job on the spot. “It’s literally my dream job,”she says of her perch in Heaven.
At first, she created several one-off collaborations under the Marc Jacobs brand, one with Cactus Plant Flea Market, and another with Stray Rats. Consolidating the collabs into a brand came next, but unlike those other collaboration factories that cycle through creative partners by the week, Heaven thrives on heart, valuing relationships over retail. Its drops don’t follow a typical seasonal model, and neither do the people it chooses to partner with or the product it encourages them to make. Heaven nourishes and adapts its product offering to suit the people who make it.
“There are three kinds of collaborators for us,” Ava says. “First we work with a lot of Marc’s friends, and we’re very lucky to be able to have access to them, like Sofia Coppola. Then there are also my friends, people who live in New York, or in Australia, and friends who are artists. We are the generation inspired by Marc’s friends, who obsessed over Marc’s world. And there are also younger collaborators who I may not know personally, that I’ve seen on Instagram or TikTok, or who have been introduced to me by one of my friends.”
One of Marc’s friends, the designer Anna Sui who has appeared in Heaven campaigns and has an upcoming project with the brand, explains that this relationship-based way of working mirrors how she and Marc got started in the 80s and 90s. “I think Heaven is what we love about fashion, something emerging, underground, and not so corporate,” Anna says, noting that even though Heaven is LVMH-backed, “there’s a soul that is very special. You want to be part of that club, not necessarily for reasons of luxury or prestige, but so that when you wear Heaven you can use this cool vocabulary that helps you identify other cool people.”
“I think that’s what is missing a lot in fashion now,” Anna continues. “When you see somebody wearing it, it’s their personality that shines through, but there is still a feeling of belonging to the coolest group.”
Here, the true heart of Heaven comes through: obsession. While other businesses run on the bottom line, Heaven is moved by intuition. That’s how those Kiki boots got back into circulation; Ava longed for them after their debut on Marc’s SS16 runway, found some pairs in storage, and decided to put them on sale. It’s how her first ever Marc Jacobs purchase, a sweater with button- off sleeves, was reimagined for 2023. And it’s why the Heaven floor of the office is spilling over with objects, books, magazines, and archival Marc Jacobs designs. “I love stuff!” Ava laughs. For her, every image, song, and album cover is a gateway to a new world of collaborators and ideas.
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“A lot of the things that exist within Marc Jacobs’s history – people, music, movies, all of that – are things that feel very natural to me, things I grew up obsessed with and that young people are extremely obsessed with now,” she continues.
“Honestly, sometimes it is really easy coming up with the ideas,” she says. “I love collecting and referencing, and most of all I’m constantly thinking about Marc. I’m not kidding. Every single thing I do, I think: Would he like this, would he think this is interesting, or would he think this is cool?” Authenticity, of course, is another core pillar of Heaven.
It’s this bleeding heart mentality that makes Heaven a natural partner for other soul-first artists – whether that’s The Deftones or indie Australian brand Daisy. “I never want to force collaborators into creating something that they don’t feel inspired by,” Ava says. As such, sometimes collaborations are full capsule collections, and other times it’s a single product, like tie-dye teddy bears made by Eri Wakiyama and Cactus Plant Flea Market. “It really depends on the person and where their interest lies,” Ava says. “We never have such a grand plan for what the season will look like.”
It may seem like in Heaven, everything comes easy. Dreams become reality, fantasy finds a place in the physical world, and curious shoppers stumble into new subcultures – this kind of creative cross-pollination is so unlikely in 2023 we have resorted to only believing it could happen in a made-up, meta world. But this is what fashion used to be like. On the corners of Bleecker Street and Perry Street in the West Village during the Indie Sleaze era, twenty-somethings would cluster inside Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs stores, BookMarc, and Jacobs’s famous tchotchke store – all situated around the block from each other.
Decades before, it was Lafayette Street in New York, where Liquid Sky dressed Chloë Sevigny, or Fairfax in Los Angeles, where Sofia Coppola briefly ran a store called – you guessed it – Heaven. Today, it is a Marc Jacobs metaverse where you can trade noughties obsessions and geek out over indie films, IRL or URL. Fandom begets fandom and friendship. “This is maybe a little cheesy,” Ava demurs, “but I do feel extremely inspired by collectors and people who love Marc Jacobs and love Heaven. I feel very lucky to be able to step into their worlds.” And who knows, maybe you, reading this article right now, will be the next collaborator to lend your voice to Heaven? From your mouth to Heaven’s ears.
Credits
Photography Alexandra Leese
Fashion Laëtitia Gimenez Adam
Hair Syd Hayes at Art + Commerce for Babyliss
Make-up Crystabel Riley at Julian Watson Agency
Nail technician Adam Slee at Streeters
Set design Phoebe Shakespeare at Saint Luke Artists
Lighting technician Dusan Szokolovics and Ed Bourmier
Fashion assistance Fanny Kübler and Suzannah Snow
Set design assistance Hermione Fenton
Production LG Studio
Producer Gracie Yabsley
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING
Casting assistance Alejandra Perez
Model Iris Law at IMG
All clothing, shoes and jewellery HEAVEN BY MARC JACOBS
Socks (worn throughout) stylist’s studio