Seemingly unsatisfied with its collaborations with M3GAN, The Deftones, Kiko Kostadinov, Wong Kar Wai, The Cocteau Twins, and 68 of New York’s microcelebrities, Heaven’s commitment to mining the most obscure margins of pop cultural history reached a new apotheosis this morning when Marc Jacobs and Ava Nirui released a redux of Linz’s the Cuffz bag. Beloved of the Blue Lives Matter community for its police-grade handcuff strap (this is a joke! haha) the nylon purse first surfaced on tabloid spreads when Paris Hilton was rumoured to have bought 10 colours of the bag in 2004.
It tracks, then, that the socialite should also star in an accompanying campaign shot by Harley Weir – just two weeks after she resuscitated Marc Jacobs’ 2005 Stam bag. The original “kinky little carriers” were designed by Liz Shelton (who also updated the model for Heaven) as a solution to leaving her handbag in the club – because with its babetastic shackles, users can quite literally lock their belongings onto their wrists. Once beloved by people like Courtney Love and Tara Reid, the Cuffz bag was already being revisited on TikTok by Y2K acolytes desperate to revive the forgotten fashions of the 2000s.
But it also sets up a direct line to a bygone era when DUIs were a status symbol, and a moment in time when Lindsay Lohan inspired Karl Lagerfeld to make quilted ankle monitors at Chanel. Of course, this isn’t about glamourisng the brutal tactics used by the police force, but honouring the pettiness of someone spinning their shame and scandal into aspirational fodder. In fact, it is the opposite of copaganda – it is a cocky and disobedient undermining of the judicial system. It is the celebrity mugshot transformed into cloth, made for people who repost Y2K mood board accounts onto their IG stories.
