Meet Bladee, the Swedish Musician Who Stars in the New Heaven by Marc Jacobs Lookbook 

Marc Jacobs’s Heaven is rocking hard: The Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis is featured in the brand’s latest campaign. Heaven’s spring lookbook, meanwhile, showcases the Swedish musician Benjamin Reichwald, who works a gender-fluid style that evokes VW hippie vans, My Pretty Pony, and the early, taste-free aughts.

Reichwald—who is known as Bladee to his nearly 300,000 Instagram followers—is part of Stockholm’s Drain Gang, a creative collective closely aligned with Yung Lean (Jonatan Leandoer Håstad) and the Sad Boys. Once music industry outliers, the group of friends put their own spin on the American hip-hop they were obsessed by and catapulted themselves from basement recording sessions to fame. Now, it’s not just the recording industry that’s woken up to these cloud rappers. Leandoer fronted a Calvin Klein campaign in 2016, Yung Sherman (Axel Tufvesson) was cast for Our Legacy’s fall 2021 show, and Reichwald took to the Paris runways for Alyx’s fall 2019 menswear presentation alongside Ecco2K (Zak Arogundade), before landing the MJ Heaven gig.

“What was scary was everything surrounding the show; Paris fashion week was super intense,” remembers Reichwald. “But the actual show and walking, I quite liked because I [was] really focused on one thing, just walking. And I like clothes and someone doing your makeup and feeling fancy.”

Reichwald’s personal fashion odyssey began on a walk to school when as a teenager he encountered a latter-day punk. “I was really amazed and I wanted to be just like him,” recalls the musician. He started wearing makeup and customizing his clothes to the derision of many of his peers, but Arogundade, a fellow classmate, got it. At 13 the friends formed a band Krossad (Crushed), transitioning within a year or two from punk to graffiti. Both, Reichwald observes, were really great practices for learning how to express yourself. “Tagging,” he says, “is writing your name in a special style that’s reflecting who you are. You could recognize the tags and know that’s that person, and that’s pretty similar to how we do music, because music is also a personal language.”

Reichwald’s style has evolved as he and his bank account have. There was, he admits, “definitely a long, confused time where I didn’t really ever think about what my style was. I would just wear a white t-shirt and jeans and stuff like that. And we would get stuff from Nike.” Keep in mind that he and friends were still teenagers at the time, friends who were sharing clothes and shopping second-hand. The author of a song titled “eBay,” Reichwald recalls saving up for sneakers and trawling the e-commerce site for a North Face Denali fleece jacket he saw in a video.

Long before the pandemic Reichwald was wearing face masks as fashionable accessories, in part to cop an attitude, but also because that’s what he could afford at the North Face store. Key to Reichwald’s style, and that of Sad Boys more generally, he says, was “European style mixed with American.” There was also a time, not too long ago, that this Swede wore his hair short and was crazy for all things Prada Sport. These days he’s grown a bob and is deaccessioning. “I’m trying to kind of slim it down to just clothes that have a special value like a memory. That would be my ideal,” he explains.

A painter and graphic designer in addition to being a musician, Reichwald was once responsible for overseeing Sad Boys gear; he’s currently focused on Drain Gang merchandise, as well more high-end limited edition pieces, developed with Arogundade and Thaiboy Digital (Thanapat Bunleang). Recent designs include a wide-sleeved T, a fuzzy yellow bag, and a plastic wrapped-crossbody with custom graphics. “I’m into mixing extremes like trashy/classy, but the most important thing for me is that it’s always fun at least in some way,” observes Reichwald. “I dress how I feel, so I usually go between wanting to hide and being seen.” (Reichwald was in peacock mode on the day we spoke, wearing a Black Kray/Sickboyrari skeleton hoodie and Kurokami Nano t-shirt with a shark tooth necklace, which is pretty far from the old-school preppy Swedish look—J. Lindberg jeans and Lacoste shirts—that he was feeling over the summer.)

Unlike those of Leandoer and Arogundade, Reichwald’s lyrics aren’t very biographical; instead he tries to access states of being and feeling. “It’s not really about me,” states the musician whose voice is even partially masked by autotune. “My job is to express ideas. The important part of being an artist and a kind of public person is to share what you learn and inspire people.” Good Luck, the album he released in 2020 with the Berlin-based producer Mechatok (Timur Tokdemir), is his lightest ever. The video for a song titled “Drama” features balloons, suggesting that angst, a theme common to Drain Gang and Sad Boys productions, has been kept at bay.

At the outbreak of the pandemic Reichwald returned to Sweden after living abroad, and his turn toward the light seems to coincide with his rediscovery of home. “When I was a teenager I felt that everything not Swedish was cool, that Sweden was really boring and had nothing to offer,” he says. A year later, having enjoyed a Swedish summer of “strawberries and sun and little red houses,” he’s come around. “There’s just a feeling of nature in Sweden and it just feels really like home and like your childhood.”

Over the past year the artist has converted his apartment into a sort of playground, with areas devoted to music and to painting. (There are plans for an upcoming exhibition in London.) “My main thing is I have to create something. I try to do something every day or else I will feel a bit useless,” he explains. “I feel like always I come to a point and then something new appears and I get new inspiration, so I’m always working forward.”