Marc Jacobs Launches Heaven, a New Collection of Teen Dream Fashion
Once upon a time, there was a small slice of fashion heaven on the corner of Bleecker and West 11th thoroughfares. You could buy T-shirts with naked Naomi Campbell and Victoria Beckham and Miley Cyrus on them. Condoms bring$1.50 and were in a bottomless tableware caddy next to camo pens and crucial fobs and madrases and sand apkins and brummagem Pan Am flight bags and flip- duds and big vinyl totes in opalescent quilted colors. It was gaudy and tacky and over the top and always crowded. At Christmas, a Santa would perch in the window and give away free moment print pictures taken on his stage. (In springtime, he converted into an Easter Bunny.) Formerly, in 2006, I slid my Mint Chocolate Verizon slider phone across the register to get the phone number of the deals associate at the store, a man I honored, shirtless, fromlastnightsparty.com. We noway did go on that date.
Marc Jacobs Heaven
Still, you’ll formerly know heaven as that Marc Jacobs store, If you were a New York or New York – conterminous teen in the aughts. It was the apex of fashion at that moment, slotted beside the flagship Marc Jacobs locales, with their Stam bags and Juergen Teller photos in the windows, but affordable and smart enough to capture the hearts and minds of a new generation of fashion addicts. I safeguarded there, and all my musketeers did too, showing off our plastic demitasse rings and shooting star barrettes in free ages. The idea of fashion as a glamorous escape was at its peak in those times, with Television shows like The Hills and America’s Next Top Model, featuring about how any girl could be plucked from her ho-hum life and turn into the girl who went to Paris.
MJ store
That MJ store closed in the 2010s and fashion’s pendulum swung down from tacky swank glam to the nun- enthusiasm austerity of Phoebe Philo’s Céline. But the pendulum swings back. Teenage dreams of fashion are what energies Marc Jacobs’s new collection, so aptly named Heaven. Launched history and priced between$ 45 and$ 395, Heaven is a florilegium of all the effects millennials remember from Bleecker and 11th and the fashion culture that radiated from that hot spot. Technically speaking, it’s a polysexual line of apparel with pubescent dread expressions like “ completely fucked up” and “ more teen angst” published on baby tees and hoodies, pleated skirts in acid daisies, and baby caricature cardigans. There are also quaint magazines and CDs for trade under its banner and a selection of stuffed creatures inspired by a binary- headed bear that appears in a 1994 snap of a raw Katie Grand, Jacobs’s longtime poet and collaborator.
The collaborations that dot its launch are the concoction of Ava Nirui,@avanope, a blessed watchman of fashion’s history and predictor of its present. Spiritually, Heaven is the incarnation of a restless nostalgia for Gregg Araki and Fruits magazine — both Heaven collaborators — and (thoughun-cited in the press release) Funky Rat by Marc Jacobs, plus all the kind of dingy but essential “ everything stores” that peopled New York when those effects were all the rage.
Heaven is a direct-to-consumer collection, one that pulls at the heartstrings of those of us who wish for nothing further than to crawl back into our nonage bedrooms, slide open our Verizon Chocolate phones, and trade our teen angst for a date with the hot Marc Jacobs store hand. Consider its Instagram runner, which mimics the bedroom walls of any fashion sprat from the aughts, with its MxMJ juggernauts ofM.I.A. and Dakota Fanning. It’s grungy fashion for now, offhanded style with a tincture of comeliness that bucks Insta- filtered life, and a lot of cool stuff to buy to make you feel hopeful about the future.
