Portrait: the creative director at Jacquemus

Simon Porte Jacquemus is kneeling on a white floor in his Paris showroom, pinning the hem of a linen dress that barely skims the model's thigh. He adjusts the fold twice, steps back, shakes his head, and starts again. The gesture is unhurried. He has been doing this, in one form or another, since he was eighteen.

That was 2009. No formal training. No atelier apprenticeship. No ESMOD degree. Jacquemus — he dropped his given surname, Porte, early on, taking his mother's maiden name as his label — moved to Paris from the village of Mallemort in Provence with little more than a sewing machine and what he has since described, in a 2019 Business of Fashion interview, as "an image in my head of the women I grew up with." His mother had died the year before. He enrolled at ESMOD, lasted a few weeks, and left. The curriculum felt, he said, irrelevant.

What followed was not the usual trajectory. Jacquemus began making clothes in his apartment, showing them to friends, then to a handful of boutiques. His first collection, shown during Paris Fashion Week in 2009, was staged in his flat. Thirty people attended. The pieces were simple — oversized shirts, cropped trousers, straw hats the size of cartwheels. The palette was sun-bleached: cream, ochre, faded blue. The silhouette was his own, but the references were legible. Provence. Summer. A certain idea of French girlhood that had little to do with the polished, bourgeois Paris that dominated the runways at the time.

The Pivot

For the first few years, Jacquemus operated on the margins. The clothes sold, but not widely. The press coverage was polite. Then, around 2015, something shifted. Jacquemus began leaning harder into proportion — exaggerating it, warping it, making it the point. Sleeves ballooned to absurd widths. Hats grew until they became architecture. A handbag, the Chiquito, shrank to the size of a lighter. It was, on one level, a joke. On another, it was a provocation: how small can a bag be and still function as a bag? The answer, it turned out, didn't matter. The Chiquito sold regardless.

The pivot was not just formal. Jacquemus began treating his shows as events — not in the traditional sense of spectacle, but in their staging. In 2018, he showed in a lavender field in Valensole. In 2019, in a wheat field in the same region. The clothes were secondary to the image: models walking through crops, sun overhead, the landscape doing half the work. It was canny. The shows photographed beautifully, and in the age of Instagram, that mattered more than the clothes themselves. Jacquemus understood this earlier than most of his peers.

By 2020, the house was generating over €100 million in revenue. The Chiquito had spawned a dozen variations — the Grand Chiquito, the Petit Chiquito, the Chiquito in raffia, in leather, in canvas. The straw hat, Le Chapeau Bomba, became a fixture on fashion-week front rows. Jacquemus had become, in the span of a decade, one of the most commercially successful independent designers in France. He had done so without a conglomerate backer, without a business-school pedigree, and without the traditional atelier training that still defines much of French fashion.

The Signature

What, exactly, is the Jacquemus signature? The easy answer: Provence. The more accurate answer: a kind of stylised, sun-soaked femininity that borrows from the south of France but isn't beholden to it. The clothes are not rustic. They are not folkloric. They are, instead, a fantasy of simplicity — the idea that one could live in linen and straw, that one could be both chic and unbothered, that summer could be a permanent state.

The construction is straightforward. Jacquemus does not work in complex draping or hand-finished seams. The fabrics are good but not extravagant: linen, cotton poplin, occasionally silk. The tailoring is clean. The details — an oversized button, an asymmetric neckline, a slit that runs higher than expected — do the work. It is, in that sense, democratic. The clothes are not cheap, but they are not incomprehensible. One can look at a Jacquemus dress and understand how it was made.

The bags, however, are another matter. The Chiquito, the Bambino, Le Chiquito Moyen — these are not functional objects. They are, instead, logos. The Chiquito can barely hold a phone. The Bambino, slightly larger, manages a cardholder and little else. But function is beside the point. The bags are recognisable from across a street. They photograph well. They signal, without subtlety, that the wearer is in on the joke. Or perhaps that they are not, and that the joke is on them. Either way, Jacquemus profits.

What Comes Next

In recent seasons, Jacquemus has begun to complicate the formula. The spring 2023 collection, shown in a salt flat in Camargue, introduced darker tones — charcoal, rust, deep green. The silhouettes tightened. The straw hats were absent. In their place: leather bucket hats, shearling coats, boots that rose to mid-thigh. It was, one suspects, an attempt to broaden the vocabulary. To prove that the house could do more than summer.

The question is whether the market wants that. Jacquemus has built his business on a very specific image: ease, sun, a kind of aspirational simplicity. To move away from that risks alienating the customer base that made him successful. On the other hand, to remain locked in that image risks irrelevance. The straw hat, the tiny bag, the lavender field — these are effective, but they are also finite. At some point, the trick becomes predictable.

Jacquemus himself seems aware of this. In a 2022 interview with Vogue, he said, "I don't want to be the designer of one thing." Whether he can be the designer of many things, and still retain the clarity that made him legible in the first place, remains to be seen.

For now, he is kneeling on a white floor, adjusting a hem. The dress will be photographed, posted, sold. The system he has built is efficient. Whether it is durable is another question entirely.