Over the past four decades, Marc Jacobs has introduced grunge to the catwalk, legitimized street art at Louis Vuitton, and plucked rising fine artists mid-ascent for collaborations with his eponymous line.
To celebrate his fashion house’s 40th anniversary, Jacobs has partnered with Tribeca-based agency ICNCLST to drop reimagined designs by some of those fabled talents. A survey of works by the artists who have collaborated with Marc by Marc Jacobs and the house’s new Gen Z-coded Heaven collection is also newly opened in Los Angeles.
“Like many, the first time that I learned of Takashi Murakami, it was not through a gallery but rather through his iconic collaboration with Marc,” ICNCLST Founder Sky Gellalty,—who co-curated the forthcoming exhibition, titled “Just Like Heaven,” with the Heaven by Marc Jacobs team—remarked in press materials. “Marc essentially set the blueprint for all that I, and so many of my friends, do as a career.” Over the phone, Gellalty added that he met Jacobs on the board of youth empowerment organization Free Arts, and was impressed to learn that Jacobs is as good of a person as he a designer.
“Just Like Heaven” opened on November 22 and remains on view through January 18 at Control Gallery, which Gellalty co-founded with Beyond The Streets creator Roger Gastman.
The show will feature about 20 original artworks from stars like Sophia Coppola, Damien Hirst, and Marilyn Minter—alongside younger names like photographer Petra Collins, tattoo artist Keegan Dakkar, and painter Alake Shilling.
“I think it is a rare opportunity for all of the artists, because without someone like Marc,” Gellalty told me, “they might not have a venue to exhibit together.”
The pieces on view will span several decades. Some will be the original artworks that were later turned into designs. The eventual fashions themselves may also appear. A few participants—like graffiti writer Futura 2000, sketch artist Eri Wakiyama, and Pharell-approved creative Cactus Plant Flea Market (aka Cynthia Lu)—are contributing pieces made just for the show. Others, like musician Bladee (who appears on Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ re-release) are even offering works in unfamiliar mediums. And, in true Beyond The Streets style, there will be t-shirts and prints available in the exhibition’s gift shop.
Art and fashion have historically intertwined. Elsa Schiaparelli, whose avant-garde maximalism unseated Coco Chanel’s austere allure as the leading aesthetic after WWI, famously worked with Salvador Dali to devise her Lobster dress. Nonetheless, as Jacobs remarked in a recent conversation with Jerry Saltz filmed by Vogue, art has long been adamant about separating itself from craft. “When a fashion designer says ‘fashion is art,’ they are pretentious, arrogant” Jacobs remarked. “Like, ‘how dare you’ think you are a great artist? You work in cloth and you make fashion.’”
“I think that’s a shortcoming on the part of my world, that it tries to keep every other world at an arm’s length,” Saltz responded.
Gellalty hopes “Just Like Heaven” will inspire a larger institution to stage a retrospective of Jacobs’s pioneering efforts at this intersection somewhere down the line.
