Heaven by Marc Jacobs Fall 2021 Ad Campaign

Review of Heaven by Marc Jacobs Fall 2021 Ad Campaign by Photographer Hugo Comte with Model Bella Hadid

Bella Hadid is baby in a new Fall 2021 campaign for Heaven by Marc Jacobs. With photography by Hugo Comte, the campaign doubles down on the creative qualities which have made the line feel like a cynical cash grab since its inception.

In pieces with signature Heaven style – ripped from the late 90’s and Tumblr blogs – Bella Hadid poses on a New York City rooftop which calls into question whether she is actually just in a studio. The imagery doubles down on the vintage magazine shoot vibe with grainy camera quality and bar codes.

With its 90’s aesthetic, pseudo-edginess, and infantilism, Heaven has seemed since its launch a year ago like an obvious attempt for Marc Jacobs to connect with a Zoomer crowd, and this campaign feels like an especially strong example of this “greetings fellow kids” approach. The vintage magazine aesthetic and Gremlins and Virgin Suicides graphics tap into the quirky nostalgia for a time they were never alive that today’s climate-and-capitalist-horror-oppressed-and-obsessed kids can’t get enough of, while the schoolgirl skirts and pacifier jewelry feeds the pervasive fetish of never growing up.

True, the present is scary, but is the right response to look backwards and fetishize – in this case, overtly sexualize – the past? Is it worth it to cater to an idealized client so heavily when the aesthetics in question feel so retrogressive, cynical, and exploitatively infantilizing?

Is Marc Jacobs sacrificing artistic and social integrity by telling young customers to look only to the past, instead of being genuinely creative and imagining a new future? Not only does the campaign feel aesthetically unoriginal and insincere, but it seems to send a bad political message that the world is not worth changing.