Portrait: the creative director at Jacquemus

Simon Porte Jacquemus stands in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo on a June afternoon, surrounded by thirty-odd models in straw hats the size of cartwheels. The hats are absurd. They photograph beautifully. This is the tension he has spent fifteen years exploiting.

He is forty now, or near enough, and the house that bears his surname — technically his mother's maiden name, adopted when he was eighteen — has become shorthand for a particular strain of French optimism: sun-drenched, formally playful, unencumbered by the weight of heritage. One forgets, or perhaps never knew, that Jacquemus began with almost nothing. No atelier training. No family capital. No contacts in the Sentier. He had a name he liked the sound of and a conviction that fashion could be joyful without being frivolous.

The Formation

Simon Porte grew up in the village of Mallemort, population four thousand, in the hills north of Aix-en-Provence. His mother ran a fruit stand. His father worked in construction. He has spoken of this in interviews — Le Figaro, System — not as hardship but as context. The South, he has said, is where he learned about light. The rest he learned by looking.

He moved to Paris at eighteen, enrolled at ESMOD for a single term, and dropped out. The official story is that his mother's death brought him home; the practical story is that he could not afford the fees. What followed was a year of what the French call la débrouille — making do. He worked retail at Comme des Garçons. He sketched. He saved. In 2009, aged nineteen, he showed his first collection in a friend's apartment. Thirty pieces. No buyers. The press, to its credit, noticed.

The early work was raw in the way that self-taught work often is: ambitious in gesture, uncertain in execution. But the gestures were specific. Oversized shirting in bleached linen. Asymmetric hems that read, from a distance, like wind damage. A preoccupation with the body in motion rather than the body at rest. He was not interested in armour. He was interested in air.

The Pivot

For the first five years, Jacquemus was a critical darling and a commercial question mark. The clothes were clever. The business was fragile. He showed during Paris Fashion Week — often in unconventional venues, a strategy born as much from necessity as vision — but distribution remained limited. A handful of boutiques in Tokyo, a corner at Colette, not much else.

The pivot came in 2015 with a bag.

Le Chiquito, as it would later be named, was barely large enough to hold a lipstick. It was, by any functional measure, ridiculous. It was also immediately, wildly viral. Rihanna carried one. Kendall Jenner carried one. The waiting list stretched to four months. What Jacquemus understood, ahead of the broader industry, was that Instagram had rewritten the rules of desirability. A bag no longer needed to be practical. It needed to be photographable.

The success of Le Chiquito funded the next phase. He expanded into accessories — hats, jewellery, shoes — and began to build a proper atelier. The ready-to-wear remained central, but the business model had shifted. Jacquemus was no longer a clothing brand that made bags. It was a lifestyle proposition anchored in a very particular aesthetic: Provençal modernism, one might call it, though he would likely resist the term.

The Signature

If there is a through-line in Jacquemus's work, it is a kind of studied informality. The cuts are precise, but they suggest ease. The palette skews toward sun-bleached neutrals — ivory, sand, terracotta — punctuated by the occasional jolt of cobalt or fuchsia. Proportions shift season to season, but the silhouette tends toward the elongated and the exposed: a bare shoulder, a high-cut hip, a hem that trails asymmetrically behind the body.

He has a gift for the arresting image. The Spring 2017 show, staged in a lavender field outside Valensole, remains one of the decade's most-circulated fashion moments. The clothes themselves were secondary to the spectacle: models walking a long pink runway through purple rows, the Alps in the distance, the whole thing lit by late-afternoon sun. It was, depending on one's disposition, either a triumph of brand-building or a masterclass in distraction. Perhaps both.

Critics have occasionally accused him of prioritising the 'gram over the garment. The charge is not entirely unfair. But it misses the extent to which Jacquemus has always understood fashion as theatre. The clothes are props in a larger production, one that trades in fantasy but remains tethered, however loosely, to a real place. He is selling the South. Not the South as it is — hot, crowded, increasingly expensive — but the South as one wishes it to be: empty beaches, long lunches, linen that never wrinkles.

The tailoring has improved markedly in recent years. He hired a head of atelier in 2018, a former Chanel première whose name he has declined to publicise, and the construction now holds up under scrutiny. A blazer from the Spring 2023 collection, cut with a single-button closure and an exaggerated shoulder, is as well-made as anything from the Rue Cambon. Whether it is as interesting is another question.

The Expansion

Jacquemus now operates at a scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The company reported revenue of three hundred million euros in 2023, up from thirty million in 2017. There are flagship stores in Paris, London, and Los Angeles. There is a beauty line in development. There are collaborations — Nike, most recently, and before that a capsule with Barbie that sold out in minutes.

He has spoken, in recent interviews, about the tension between growth and identity. "I don't want to become a big machine," he told Vogue last year, though one suspects the machine is already well underway. The question is whether the work can sustain the velocity. The shows remain visually arresting, but the collections themselves have begun to feel repetitive. How many iterations of the strapless mini dress can one house produce before the gesture loses its charge?

There is also the matter of succession, or rather the lack of it. Jacquemus is a one-man operation in a way that few contemporary houses are. He designs, he art-directs, he approves every image. It is both the brand's strength and its vulnerability. What happens when he tires of the South?

What Comes Next

The most recent collection, shown in December at the Château de Versailles, suggested a shift in register. The palette was darker — charcoal, navy, deep olive. The silhouettes were more structured, less about ease and more about authority. Whether this represents a genuine evolution or a momentary detour remains to be seen.

One suspects Jacquemus is aware of the risk. He has built a house on a very specific fantasy, and fantasies, by their nature, are difficult to sustain. The South will not stay golden forever. The hats will eventually stop photographing well. What remains, if the work is strong enough, is the craft. He is not there yet. But he is, arguably, closer than he was.