All clothing worn throughout, Vintage
Model – Peter Dupont | Stylist – Karlo Steel | Men’s Contributing Writer – Jonathan Shia
Groomer – Kazuto Shimomura | Photographer’s assistant – MiMi Hong
In the spring of 2020, with their modeling careers on pause, Peter Dupont and his partner Breanna Box turned to an unexpected new hobby to fight off lockdown boredom. In a London workshop, the amateurs picked up the ancient craft of glassblowing and took to the art form with relish, producing a range of bulbous carafes and vases, most of them cheekily adorned with devil horns. When they decided to begin to sell them and needed a name for their line, Heven was the obvious choice. “We were blowing glass and then we were like, ‘We want to blow more glass, let’s sell some of it,’” Dupont laughs, “because it’s so damn expensive to rent the studio. It was like, ok we’ll just do this to finance doing more.”
“I think that fragility actually brings a lot of the luxury to the product because if you had the same shape but in acrylic or plastic, it wouldn’t have been the same. I think the luxury of something being that fragile adds a lot to it.”
Two years later, the pandemic pastime-turned-startup is responsible for one of the season’s most in-demand accessories, a glass version of Coperni’s Swipe shoulder bag first carried by Gigi Hadid at the brand’s Fall 2022 show before appearing on the arms of both Doja Cat and Tinashe at the Grammys a few weeks later. After Kylie Jenner was photographed with one, the bag’s It status was cemented. Dupont admits to a bit of savviness in using his industry connections to place the collaboration in just the right hands but says he never predicted the obsessive attention it would receive. “It’s amazing to see the response and see how people react to something that we feel is ours and something we made and something where you’ve been physically involved,” he says. “That’s so much fun.”
What originally seemed like a visual flex destined only for runways and red carpets will soon be available for customers worldwide as Coperni prepares to launch the bag in a range of colors, some of which are adorned, of course, with devil horns. For those who question its practicality, Dupont is quick to note that the bags weigh only a few pounds, are surprisingly comfortable to carry due to the curved handle, and are big enough to hold a smartphone. Dropping it on concrete would shatter it, but a wooden floor might not. “It’s like a bottle of wine,” he says, before admitting that they are not, of course, for everyday use, something that he recognizes adds to their appeal. “It’s more of a visual object than it is a practical object—and it’s fun,” he adds. “I think that fragility actually brings a lot of the luxury to the product because if you had the same shape but in acrylic or plastic, it wouldn’t have been the same. I think the luxury of something being that fragile adds a lot to it.”
All clothing worn throughout, Vintage
Against the hype of Heven, Dupont’s other pandemic project is rethinking luxury in a completely different and more substantive way. As one of the founders of the fashion cooperative Andel alongside Oscar Miles and Weronika Banas, he is working to transform the structure of the industry from the ground up, carefully considering every aspect from material sourcing to profit distribution and labor rights, pushing the conversation about sustainability and all that freighted term encompasses further than many others are willing to. “The whole idea around it is to build a brand from scratch with sustainability and ethics as the main focus, so it’s more like an experiment,” he explains. “It’s not us being like, ‘Ok we want to build a brand and make so much money and scale it and sell it for millions.’ It’s very much, what would happen if we actually did this right?”
All clothing worn throughout, Vintage
Andel released its first collection in January, and Dupont, who studied geography with a focus on climate at university, says the response has been promising, with other brands reaching out for advice and to learn more about the pros and cons of the cooperative system, in which every employee shares both equal ownership of the company as well as an equal voice in major decisions. He admits that, given the buzz surrounding the Coperni collaboration, Heven is his focus at the moment, but Andel is where he has set his sights for the long run, with the goal of helping reform the industry into a more responsible, ethical, and equitable one. “Hopefully we can scale up to a point where we can employ a lot of people and we can grow the company because if the company grows we can employ people and we can ensure that those people have jobs in production and fashion that make sense,” he says, “and that the experiment is working.”
