There is no corner of subculture that Marc Jacobs and Ava Nirui will not mine for a Heaven collab. Be that Brian Molko, The Deftones, Teezo Touchdown, or Christina Ricci, each and every campaign that surfaces on the feed is nothing if not an attempt to charm a niche, online audience that trades in off-the-wall pop cultural references. Its latest target? M3GAN: a neurotic AI doll who engages in unboundaried and coercive relationships with young school children.
The plucky little robot (and It girl of the moment) stuns in a pair of platform boots, an oversized hoodie, and a denim mini skirt, knees bent into a coquettish pose – making her a haunted replica of all those who piled into Heaven’s new London outpost when it opened last Friday. Shot by Harley Weir (who also photographed the latest Dazed cover) and styled by Danielle Emerson the truth of that image feels unsettling – the bluish glare of an iPhone screen transformed into a blood-red wash. Even more so than Nicki Minaj’s turn as model (which sent the Barbs into meltdown) this is a campaign specifically cooked up for homosexual Twitter – M3GAN is, as gay social media users like to repeat to each other, “mother”.
“The human brain isn’t meant to comprehend this,” one person commented under Heaven’s Instagram upload, which is precisely the point of the campaign: so hyperspecific and so memeable that it feels like a shit post. That it was shot by a world-class fashion photographer makes it all the more camp. “The fact that y’all had Megan before miss piggy is kinda upsetting,” another person on Instagram said, which tells you the kind of humour Jacobs and Nuiri are working with. All this is to say: perhaps it’s not so horrendous if AIs did take human jobs after all. Click through the gallery above to see the rest of the shoot and revisit our interview with M3GAN here.