The fitting took place in a bright room above rue Saint-Honoré, mid-afternoon light pooling on white oak

The fitting took place in a bright room above rue Saint-Honoré, mid-afternoon light pooling on white oak. Simon Porte Jacquemus stood behind a young woman in a cream linen dress, pinching fabric at the small of her back. "Moins," he said. Less. The dress already skimmed her body like water, but he wanted it closer still. This was 2018, just before the Le Lavandou show, and the woman — one of several who would walk that July afternoon in Provence — embodied a type the designer had been chasing since his first collection: sun-drenched, unfussy, a little bit feral.

Jacquemus has never hidden his references. He speaks openly about his mother, about growing up in the South of France, about the women who shaped his vision of beauty before he ever touched a pattern. But three figures in particular have come to define the house, not as passive subjects but as active collaborators in an aesthetic that blurs autobiography and commerce with unusual candour.

Valérie Porte Jacquemus

The first is his mother. Valérie died in 2007, when Simon was eighteen. He had already left home for Paris, already enrolled at ESMOD, already begun sketching the life he wanted. Her death pulled him back to Mallemort, to the funeral, to the sudden understanding that he would not have time to make her proud in the way he had imagined. He dropped out of school weeks later and named his first collection after her.

This is well-trodden ground in profiles of the designer, but it bears repeating because the influence is not sentimental — it is structural. Valérie appears in the house's visual language as a kind of ghost, or perhaps more accurately as a recurring motif. The straw hat. The oversized shirt worn as a dress. The way a woman might look at the end of a long summer day, salt on her skin, lipstick faded, still beautiful. Jacquemus has said in multiple interviews that he designs for a version of his mother he never knew: younger, freer, less burdened by the smallness of provincial life.

What makes this more than nostalgia is the specificity. He is not designing for an archetype of motherhood but for a particular woman at a particular moment, which gives the work its charge. The SS16 collection, 'La Riviera', featured dresses in shades of apricot and pale yellow, colours he associated with the kitchen in Mallemort. The bags — those tiny, impractical bags that became the house's commercial engine — were named after places in the South: Le Chiquito, Le Pitchou. Geography as intimacy.

Gigi Hadid

The second muse is more straightforward, though no less consequential. Gigi Hadid began wearing Jacquemus in 2017, at a moment when the house was still considered niche, a designer's designer with a cult following but limited reach. She wore the tiny Chiquito bag to a street-style appearance during Paris Fashion Week. The image circulated. Within a season, the bag was sold out globally, and Jacquemus had crossed from insider favourite to mass-market phenomenon.

Hadid's influence is not merely about visibility, though visibility matters. It is about type. She is Californian, blonde, athletic, perpetually sun-kissed — a version of the South of France fantasy that translates to American and Asian markets without losing its Frenchness. She is also canny about image management, which aligns with Jacquemus's own social-media fluency. The two have worked together repeatedly: campaigns, front-row appearances, the sort of symbiotic relationship that benefits both parties without either losing face.

What Hadid gave the house, beyond sales, was permission. Permission for women who did not grow up in Provence, who had never heard of Mallemort, to inhabit the fantasy anyway. She made the clothes feel aspirational rather than exclusionary, a fine line that many French brands fail to walk. Jacquemus, for his part, understood this instinctively. He cast her in the SS20 campaign, shot in a field of lavender, and the resulting images looked less like fashion advertising than like a holiday album from someone's impossibly chic older sister.

Laetitia Casta

The third muse is older, more enigmatic, and arguably more essential. Laetitia Casta walked for Jacquemus's FW20 show in Paris, the last before the pandemic, and her presence felt like a coronation. Casta is French in a way that cannot be manufactured: Corsican, a former face of Chanel and L'Oréal, the kind of beauty that makes other women look slightly unfinished. She was forty-one at the time, which in fashion years is both ancient and irrelevant.

Jacquemus has spoken about Casta as the embodiment of a certain French ease, a quality he chases in every collection. She does not try. Or rather, she tries in a way that is invisible, which is the entire point. The clothes she wore in that show — a long wool coat in camel, a white shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, wide-legged trousers that pooled at the ankle — looked like they belonged to her already. This is the Jacquemus trick: making new clothes feel like old favourites, making luxury feel like simplicity.

Casta's involvement also signalled a shift in the house's trajectory. After years of courting the Instagram generation, Jacquemus was reaching for something more enduring. Casta is not a social-media personality. She is a film actress, a mother, a woman with a life outside the image economy. Her presence suggested that the house could grow up without losing its playfulness, could appeal to women in their forties without alienating the twenty-somethings who made it famous.

What comes next

Jacquemus is now in his early thirties, no longer the wunderkind but not yet the elder statesman. The house has expanded into menswear, homewares, beauty. The muses have multiplied: Kendall Jenner, Dua Lipa, a rotating cast of faces that keep the brand in the feeds. But the original three — Valérie, Gigi, Laetitia — remain the foundation. They represent past, present, and future, or perhaps more accurately, memory, commerce, and aspiration.

The risk, as with any brand built on a founder's biography, is that the story becomes the product. Jacquemus has so far avoided this by keeping the work itself compelling: the cuts are sharp, the colours are specific, the proportions are just off enough to feel considered rather than safe. But one suspects the next chapter will require a new set of references, a new cast of women to define what the house can be when the founder is no longer young, no longer the boy from Provence with something to prove.

For now, the muses hold. They appear in lookbooks and campaigns, in the way a sleeve is cut or a hemline falls, in the persistent sense that these clothes are for someone in particular, even if that someone is, in the end, a composite. A fiction. A woman who exists only in the designer's mind, assembled from memory and longing and the hard commercial realities of running a fashion house in the twenty-first century.