The Emperor’s New Clothes

The commodification and fetishization of East Asian identity in Heaven by Marc Jacobs

In September of 2020, renowned fashion designer Marc Jacobs announced the creation of Heaven, a new subline of his eponymous label marketed as a “polysexual,” “teen-dream” collection. From its onset, the line was notable for its return to the kitschy, grungy aesthetics of the Y2K era, a fragment of reconciliation between high- and low-end fashion. For Jacobs, who has largely worked in this high-fashion, luxury space, Heaven constituted a break through its complete embrace of street style, its direct-to-consumer production, and its clear attempt to appeal to a younger generation.

It was promoted as, and in many ways was, an appreciation and celebration of the distinctly Japanese influence that this aesthetic impulse emerged from. Many of Heaven’s stylistic markers were drawn from the legendary street style of the 1990s to 2000s Harajuku district in Tokyo, with its garish colors and maximalist textures—much of which was immortalized within the pages of the street fashion magazine FRUiTS. This connection, early in the label’s development, was explicit and direct—photographer Shoichi Aoki, the founder of FRUiTS, shot the label’s first lookbook in 2020. To celebrate the new label in Tokyo, Jacobs’ brand helped to open an archival exhibition that displayed walls upon walls of old copies of FRUiTS alongside the new Heaven collection, bringing this movement’s historical past into the present.

It is undeniable that Heaven drew its aesthetic and its brand from this distinctly Japanese fashion scene, but it did so in a way that seemingly paid reference to and honored its aesthetic lineage, the latest stylistic iteration in a long dialogue between East and West. Y2K fashion movements, for example, happening simultaneously with Harajuku’s heyday, both took inspiration from and, in turn, inspired that scene. Hysteric Glamour, one of the most significant style-setting brands of that era in Japan, founded its entire formal concept upon a mostly (but not entirely) ironic co-option of American culture—baby tees emblazoned with signifiers of American comics, rock musicians, pornstars.

Fast-forward a little under two years, and Heaven has announced its newest collection—a collaboration with legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. Its featured item: a $325 wool/nylon hybrid sweater (oversized, of course) with the name of Wong’s 1995 film Fallen Angels in yellow text on the front, and a slightly smaller “Marc Jacobs” on the back. Or, even worse: a $75 baby tee, again with “Fallen Angels” written on the front over the top of a signature Marc Jacobs teddy graphic, this time with “by marc jacobs” positioned right under the film title, as if to implicitly assert the mark of a different (white) authorial signature.

What happened here? How did, in the span of three years, a seemingly respectful and intentional association with the Harajuku aesthetic turn into the bare-minimum practice of name-slapping an Asian artist onto a sweater or a t-shirt? What is Wong Kar-wai doing as part of Heaven, considering that the clothes themselves (a black t-shirt with yellow text) have very little to do with either his, or the Harajuku, aesthetic? Why did a thoughtful reference to a past fashion movement turn into logomania, the logo in question now outsourced to a different artist instead of the brand itself?

The short answer is that this is the way the market (and thus the brand) functions. The explicit engagement with the influence of Heaven’s early collections may have manipulated consumers into believing in the good intentions of the brand. Instead, Heaven’s entire existence is predicated on cashing in on rapid-fire online fashion trends, and with shifting trends comes a shifting brand. But there is something more going on. tions with figures or brands that largely serve a hyper-specific, but dedicated, niche (cloud rap artist Bladee, designer Kiko Kostadinov, recently)—it’s hard not to look at this disproportionate frequency of Asian-ness as indicative of a similarly disproportionate aestheticization and subsequent commodification of that very same identity. And while this propagation of Asian artists largely appears to be a moment to celebrate—Heaven is platforming (and compensating) artists that otherwise might not get such a public profiling—there remains something nebulous about the whole concept.

A quick glance at the past collaborations that Heaven has churned out reveals a disproportionate number of Asian, almost all East Asian, artists as part of their repertoire: Wong Kar-wai, but also Hideyuki Tanaka, Kiko Mizuhara, and niche artists like @tomikono_wig and Eri Wakiyama. Heaven, of course, is not unique in its centering of East Asian artists—the brand is, rather, part of a rapidly growing trend in which East Asian culture finds itself at the forefront of so many Western artistic and cultural movements. Think of the prevalence of K-Pop and anime culture, or, less obvious, Bong Joon-ho or Japanese city pop.

In Heaven’s case, however, which features an actively curatorial presence, these artists aren’t included just because they are popular or because they fit within the Harajuku aesthetic (most don’t). Rather, these artists appear to be connected primarily by the category of their East Asian identity—they come from diverse fields, and almost all bear little to no relation to Heaven’s apparent Harajuku influence.

In many ways, maybe this could have been expected. Even in past historical eras where blatant racism toward Asian people was more widely accepted than it is today, as Asian populations were looked down on as primitive or unsophisticated, there has always existed a certain visual fascination with these cultures.

Orientalism, the representation of the East by the West as defined by Edward Said, has trafficked above all in aesthetic intrigue, in aesthetic difference. What is fascinating about the orientalized subject, as opposed to other forms of the racial other, is its maintenance of a distinctively privileged (as opposed to disparaged) aesthetic identity. Even as writers historically defined Asian cultures as primitive or inferior to their own, they remained fascinated by their visual representations—captivated by elaborate Japanese palaces or Chinese ceramics, commenting on their precision, their intricacy Literary scholar and cultural theorist Anne Cheng coins the term “ornamentalism” to describe this conflation between the “oriental” and the “ornamental” that she observes within Western culture. She asserts that, historically, Orientalist thinking has always associated Asian cultures with excessive embellishment or decoration, an association that conflates “persons with things”—reducing complex individuals or identities to the objects that they produce.

Heaven’s appropriation of East Asian aesthetics, then, can be understood not as an independent, contemporary development, but instead as the same ornamentalism—appropriating this stereotypical link between East Asia and embellished representations in order to further consumers’ engagement and attention to their own aesthetic brand image. While Heaven’s clothes do not directly reference traditional East Asian objects or architecture in the way a historically Orientalist representation might, there are nonetheless key connections between the two— Heaven’s use of loud, flashy colors and textures, for example, can be seen as contemporary forms of the embellishment and decorative instinct that Cheng identifies.

Even the Japanese language itself has become associated with its aesthetic appeal— in addition to their clothes, Heaven has sold old Japanese magazines featuring artists like Nobuyoshi Araki, or even old Twin Peaks flyers produced in Japan. The latter has, notably, nothing at all to do with Japan, or Heaven more broadly, save for the presence of the Japanese written language—as if, to Heaven, the complexity or difference of written Japanese characters themselves exemplifies East Asia’s ornamental aesthetic. Continuing a historical tradition, these examples of contemporary ornamentalism suggest a conflation between Heaven’s products and the East Asian identities that they emerge from.

In Asian-American studies scholar Leslie Bow’s recent book Racist Love, she uses the framework of fetishization as a way to further interrogate this relation/conflation between Asian objects and identity—using the term “fetish” in its anthropological sense, where an inanimate object is worshiped as though it has lifelike or animate powers. Bow chooses to target her analysis specifically on what she deems fetish objects—objects that function as “repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to ‘Asianness,’” operating in much the same realm as Heaven’s clothes and designs. This positivity, however, is not benevolent—rather, it is formed in avoidance of a repressed anxiety spurred on through this racial difference.

Bow’s focus on objects, specifically, as the location of this fetishistic content, is notable— she does so because objects, for her, are imbued with a sense of “racial abstraction,” where the real or aesthetic racial stereotype is reduced to metonymic signs, both reductive and exaggerated. To reduce a racial relation to a fetish object is to familiarize it, to push away the complexities of difference into stereotypified safe ground. Bow suggests that the alternative, without the familiarity of fetish objects, is a deep-seated, Freudian easier to reduce East Asian culture to ‘Harajuku style,’ or the films of Wong Kar-wai, then have to force oneself to come face-to-face with a real Asian person?

While tempting, I am not so sure that this argument entirely works for me—I find it hard to convince myself that such a form of anxiety toward otherness functions actively in the production and reproduction of these vaguely Asian images. Rather, I think this psychoanalytic perspective only works when considering Heaven’s clothes as outwardly tangible objects On the digital interfaces where the bulk of Heaven’s marketing and sales occur, it is hard to conceive of Heaven’s clothes as objects at all. Instead, they seem to be an amalgamation of different aesthetic references—runway shows, magazine spreads, Pinterest boards—concentrated into coherent, commodifiable, images of clothes.

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One way of understanding the difference between Heaven’s clothes and strictly material objects is that what Heaven produces transcends the corporeal, entering into the hazy realm of images and “commodities.”

In Karl Marx’s foundational theory of commodity fetishism, under market capitalism, what is “mystical” about the commodity is ultimately that it seems to take on economic and social agency of its own, disguising the real labor relationship underpinning the production and circulation of these commodities.

In the era of fashion collaborations, products take on a greater life than ever before. What defines many a piece of designer clothing, for example, is not the labor that went into the making of it, but the relationship between designers who have their names embroidered on the front. These clothes combine formulated, separate aesthetic principles, each of which seems invested with a life and power of its own. Labor, moreover, is less visible than ever. The luxury market is no longer demarcated by the precision and quality of manufacture, or the use of rare and expensive raw materials—instead, it is sublimated into a network of esoteric associations and names. These clothes are not valued for their function as objects, but instead for their social-cultural value.

Marx’s concept is transferred into perhaps a more timely formulation in French theorist Guy Debord’s polemical fourth thesis in The Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Debord’s claim, which evolves out of Marx’s fetishism (spectacle = capitalism, images = commodities), suggests that the commodity form has morphed into that of images, of sequences of representations circulating meaninglessly, creating a distance between images and their referents. Above all, the purpose of the spectacle is to turn active participants of society toward passive acceptance of this mode of circulation—to the advantage of those in power who control the mechanisms

The spectacle, then, becomes what sublimates those anxiety- and terror-induced desires that Bow suggests exist—they remain hidden because rather than circulate fetish objects, brands like Heaven largely spread fetish images. The rapid-fire popularity of Heaven did not come from individual possession—that is to say, from people actually buying the clothes—rather, it came from the feeling of collective possession of a property from the dissemination of images of the clothes. To see or to circulate the aesthetic, is to aspire to it—to become a part of it, to possess it, without actually owning it. This collective possession, when placed in the context of Heaven’s co-opting of East Asian images, suggests a shared belief in the stereotypes of ornamentalism—and thus reinforces the legibility of the spectacle.

Here, it becomes quite debatable as to what extent these referential images actually represent Asian culture when diffused into the broader scheme of this nebulous spectacle. It is much easier to circulate (and mediate, manage, or sublimate) Asian identity by re-framing its expression in the form of an image, by forcing it to participate in an inherently exploitative and reductive terrain. It also presents the possibility of a rift between real Asian identity and the myriad ways in which it is represented—the terms of identity have shifted away from reality.

In 1970, film theorist Laura Mulvey and activist Margarita Jimenez declared, maybe prematurely, that “the spectacle is vulnerable,” speaking about a largely successful feminist demonstration against that year’s Miss World competition in which they threw flour bombs at the stage, literally obscuring the competition’s visual presence. They suggested that despite the intricacies of the Miss World organization, they were able to break through the spectacle, which, they claimed, “isn’t prepared for anything other than passive spectators.”

Today, such a polemic feels, at best, hollow. The subsequent development of the internet and social media has changed the way in which images circulate so drastically that it is hard to imagine being anything but a passive spectator— to define oneself in opposition, or in concert to what you see online (the result is the same). Mulvey and Jimenez’s form of protest at Miss World is entirely unfeasible when an aesthetic is as broad-ranging as Heaven’s. There are no flour bombs that can affect the dissemination of Heaven’s images—there is no place, even, to begin throwing them.

Case in point: While doing research for this article, I came across a piece on Entrepeneur. com titled “Why South Korea is the God of Culture Marketing.” The article argues that South Korea’s successful merging of Western & Korean influences in their cultural exports made it a “masterclass for every brand that desires to be both culturally relevant and economically potent”—and here’s how you can do it, too!

Debord comments that the spectacle is not limited to an instrument of the ruling establishment—say, the media—but that even debate around the spectacle is organized within the spectacle itself. It’s hard to look at an article like this one and not feel a sense of futility regarding the whole thing—the impossibility of a successful refusal of this image-centric commodification of Asian-ness when these very ideas are propagated and celebrated in the same breath, when an entire nation becomes indistinguishable from the way that they present themselves.

Even when cracks in the armor emerge, there remains a built-in, sinking feeling of hopelessness. The announcement of Heaven’s Wong Kar-wai collaboration, while initially met with excitement, turned rapidly to a general discontent with the collection, largely based on the sentiment that these pieces were overpriced and hardly contained any original design. But while such a sentiment is legitimate, I’m not convinced as to how effective it is in creating real change. Rather, the sentiment is aimed largely toward the design (an image) rather than the structure imposing these images upon consumers. How does one revolt against a spectacle when the only option we seem to have (this article, for example) is to answer it with new images, new objects, new referents until infinity? Where is the future in this?

At the beginning of this article, I presented the idea that Heaven’s initial collection operated as a continuation of a sort of respectful, historical/ stylistic dialogue between East and West, merely the latest term in an ongoing sequence of inspiration and evolution. It was rather the recent collections, which have dispensed with that original Harajuku influence and now just feature artists based on their identity, that highlight how Heaven commodifies and fetishizes East Asian-ness.

This frame of thought requires a bit more nuance. Because while, undeniably, the more recent collections are more explicit, one can’t help but feel as if the very same concepts continue to apply to the original one—Heaven’s clothes have always, by concept, played up the ornamentalism and embellishment of their design, and have thus always been an object of the various forms of fetishization contained within that structure.

The problem with suggesting Heaven as a mere continuation of a dialogue is that it is impossible to separate ornamentalism—or any form of aesthetic appropriation, for that matter—from its greater context. Marc Jacobs’ appropriation of Harajuku style, especially in the light of its economic profitability, necessarily plays into the historical aesthetic appropriations of Orientalism (and ornamentalism), and the imbalance of power and influence present within those frameworks. Rather than function in the same way as Hysteric Glamour’s ironic use of American iconography, Heaven (in all its collections) instead replicates, in a new age, those very same historical legacies—this time, disguising their true form as part of the contemporary spectacle.

The entire project/brand of Heaven, moreover, was designed intentionally to participate and profit off of this spectacle. Heaven was a way for Jacobs’ brand to profit by appealing to a younger generation—a generation that operates and disseminates their ‘style’ primarily within the image-centric realm of the internet. The spectacle is a mode that allows for the implicit usage of objectification and fetishization, all ideas that can be put in service of money-making—a way to harness these otherwise publicly unacceptable forms of reduction.

Any sort of solution, then, or a way forward, to combat Heaven’s strategic appropriation, must work within—or refuse—this spectacle, and the myriad ways in which it manifests itself. Part of that spectacle, perhaps, is the strictly dichotomizing form of East and West, which I admit to perhaps sticking too close to. Said’s original work on Orientalism, too, dealt solely with a form of spectacle—he analyzes ways in which representations (images or texts) portrayed a distorted perspective of Asia.

I like, instead, how Cheng treats it—she asserts that her definition of ornamentalism “gives us an unprecedented opportunity to reconceptualize the very notion of ‘racial embodiment,’” to “work through that intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing.” To combat the spectacle, it is perhaps worth embracing a new form of “objectification”—a way of navigating the inextricability of identity, object, and image that is not mediated by histories of appropriation, if such a thing exists. Perhaps the path out of the spectacle is to first take up, in paradox, the objectified identity.

DANIEL ZHENG B’25 desires to be both culturally relevant and economically potent.

Jacquard and

Night is the time to imagine and transform. With the communion of embellishment and paint, themes of wistful melancholy and sinister adornment emerge. Traditions of craft and the history of painting are set at the same stakes through non-hierarchical means of making. My work functions as a lullaby that keeps the viewer stirring awake. The song is in minor key, the moon is dead, and memory is as bitter as it is sweet.