Jacquemus pour celles qui débutent

The Le Chiquito — a handbag no larger than a child's fist, too small to hold a phone, let alone a wallet — sold out within hours of its 2018 runway debut. One could dismiss it as a stunt. And it was, in part. But it also announced something that Simon Porte Jacquemus has understood from the start: that fashion, at its most effective, is not about utility. It is about desire, and the willingness to be in on the joke.

Jacquemus is not an old house. It has no atelier tradition stretching back to the Belle Époque, no archive of couture sketches preserved in acid-free boxes. What it does have is a founder who launched his first collection at nineteen, named the brand after his late mother's maiden name, and built a vocabulary around sun-bleached linen, oversized straw hats, and a particular shade of Mediterranean blue. The house turns fifteen this year. In fashion terms, that is adolescence. In cultural impact, it punches well above its age.

Founding and the Provençal myth

Simon Porte Jacquemus was born in 1990 in Mallemort, a village in the south of France where the light is relentless and the fields run to lavender. His mother died when he was eighteen. He moved to Paris shortly after, enrolled at ESMOD, dropped out within months, and staged his first show in 2009 with borrowed money and a collection stitched largely by his own hands. The clothes were raw, unfinished in places, and deeply personal. They sold almost nothing. He kept going.

The early collections — shown in cramped apartments, on rooftops, in borrowed gallery spaces — established the visual grammar that still defines the house. Asymmetry. Exaggerated proportions. A reliance on primary colours and natural fabrics. Above all, a sense of place. Jacquemus does not reference the south of France; it inhabits it. The straw hat is not a pastoral accessory but a recurring character. The linen shirt is not casual — it is structural, cut with the same attention one might give to a tailored jacket.

By 2015, the house had secured backing from LVMH's young fashion designer prize and begun to professionalise. The shows moved to official Paris Fashion Week slots. The production improved. But the aesthetic held: sun, simplicity, a kind of studied naïveté that walks the line between charming and calculated.

Defining era: Le Chiquito and the Instagram maison

If there is a single moment when Jacquemus shifted from insider darling to mass-culture phenomenon, it was the spring/summer 2018 collection, shown in a wheat field outside Paris. Models walked through golden rows of grain in oversized hats and tiny bags. The set was Instagrammable by design. The Le Chiquito — that absurdly small handbag — became a meme, a status symbol, and a bestseller in one stroke.

The house understood something that many heritage maisons were still resisting: that social media was not a marketing channel but a medium in its own right, with its own grammar and its own rewards. Jacquemus leaned in. The campaigns became events. A spring 2020 show staged on a lavender field in Valensole drew millions of views online. A pop-up vending machine in Paris dispensed Le Chiquito bags like cans of soda. The brand collaborated with Nike, then with Barbie. Each move was divisive. Each move worked.

The bags, in particular, became the house's calling card. Le Chiquito, Le Grand Chiquito (a marginally more functional version), Le Bambino (a top-handle style with a curved silhouette), and Le Bisou (a half-moon shape that reads as playful without tipping into kitsch). They are priced between €400 and €900, depending on size and material. That places them below Chanel or Hermès but above the accessible luxury tier occupied by Coach or Longchamp. The positioning is deliberate. Jacquemus bags are attainable enough to feel within reach, expensive enough to signal taste.

The ready-to-wear follows a similar logic. A linen shirt dress runs around €450. A knit top with an asymmetric neckline sits at €280. A structured blazer with exaggerated shoulders can reach €800. These are not impulse purchases, but neither do they require a mortgage. The quality is solid — good fabrics, clean construction, occasional hand-finishing — but this is not couture. It is contemporary fashion, made to be worn and photographed, not archived.

Current creative direction and what defines the house now

Simon Porte Jacquemus remains the sole creative force behind the brand. There is no design team in the traditional sense, no shadowy studio director shaping the collections while the founder takes bows. This gives the work a consistency of vision but also a certain predictability. The silhouettes shift season to season — one collection leans into sharp tailoring, the next into draped jersey — but the palette and the references remain fixed. Sun. Sea. Simplicity. One begins to wonder how many ways there are to say the same thing.

That said, the house has expanded its range without losing coherence. Menswear launched in 2018 and has grown steadily, offering the same sun-bleached ease in looser cuts and relaxed tailoring. Homeware arrived in 2021: linen napkins, ceramic plates, woven baskets. The pieces are expensive for what they are — a set of four napkins costs €120 — but they photograph beautifully, and that, in the end, is the point.

The collaborations have become more frequent and more high-profile. A capsule with Nike in 2022 sold out within minutes. A partnership with Barbie in 2023 produced a limited run of doll-sized Le Chiquito bags alongside human-scale versions in bubblegum pink. These moves risk diluting the brand, but so far they have done the opposite. Each collaboration brings a new audience, and Jacquemus has proven adept at absorbing them without losing its core identity.

What to know before you buy

If you are considering your first Jacquemus purchase, start with the bags. They are the house's strongest offering and the most recognisable. Le Bambino is the most versatile — large enough for a phone, keys, and a card case, structured enough to hold its shape. Le Chiquito is a statement piece, best understood as jewellery rather than function. Le Grand Chiquito splits the difference.

The ready-to-wear requires more caution. The fits can be extreme — cropped to the point of impracticality, oversized to the point of costume. Size up if you are between measurements; the cuts assume a lean frame and often run small through the shoulders and hips. The linen pieces are the safest entry point. A shirt dress in off-white or sky blue will work across seasons and pair easily with other brands. The knitwear is more divisive. The asymmetric necklines and cut-out details photograph well but can feel awkward in person.

Prices have climbed steadily over the past five years. A Le Bambino that cost €490 in 2019 now starts at €590. The ready-to-wear has followed the same trajectory. This is partly inflation, partly the cost of scaling production, and partly the house testing how far it can push its pricing before customers balk. So far, they have not balked.

Resale value is mixed. The bags hold up reasonably well on platforms like Vestiaire Collective, particularly the more unusual colourways and limited editions. The ready-to-wear depreciates quickly. A €600 dress will fetch €200 a year later if you are lucky. Buy the clothes because you want to wear them, not because you expect them to retain value.

Where the house stands now

Jacquemus is not a heritage brand, and it is not trying to become one. It is something else: a maison built on image, speed, and a founder's ability to tap into a particular fantasy of French ease. That fantasy is not false, exactly, but it is highly constructed. The lavender fields are real. The wheat fields are real. The light is real. But the version of the south of France that Jacquemus sells is one where no one sweats, no one works, and every linen shirt falls just so.

Whether that bothers you depends on what you want from fashion. If you are looking for craft in the traditional sense — the kind of atelier work that takes thirty hours and leaves calluses on the maker's hands — you will not find it here. If you are looking for a brand that understands how to make you feel something, even if that something is fleeting, Jacquemus delivers.

The house shows no signs of slowing. A flagship store opened on the Champs-Élysées in 2023, a bold move for a brand that built its reputation on irreverence. The collaborations continue. The shows remain spectacles. Simon Porte Jacquemus, now in his mid-thirties, has proven himself a master of the fashion moment. Whether he can sustain that over decades, the way Lagerfeld did or Alaïa did, remains to be seen.

For now, the Le Chiquito sits in museum collections and on the arms of teenagers in Tokyo and influencers in Los Angeles. It is too small to be useful and too expensive to be casual. But it is also, undeniably, a thing that people want. And in fashion, that is not nothing.