Les codes de Jacquemus qu'on a oubliés

The first collection shown in Paris — autumn 2012, staged in a friend's apartment — included a single-breasted coat in camel wool, cut long through the body, sleeves pushed to three-quarter length. The coat closed with one button. One. Placed high, just below the sternum, so the lapels fell open in a deep V that framed nothing but air and whatever the wearer chose beneath. No branding, no hardware worth mentioning, no detail that announced itself. Just proportion, and the space it carved.

That coat has aged better than much of what followed. Not because it was prescient — though it was — but because it encoded something Simon Porte Jacquemus understood early and has, at intervals, chosen to forget: that a gesture can be as loud as a logo, provided the gesture is clean.

La Bomba and what came before

Jacquemus built its first wave of recognition not on bags but on silhouette. The house showed in Paris for five years before Le Chiquito arrived. In that span, the work centred on cut — asymmetric hems, one-shoulder tops, trousers cropped to mid-calf and held at the waist with a single hook-and-eye. The palette leaned into wheat, sky blue, poppy red. Fabrics were plain: linen, cotton shirting, occasionally a technical knit. The atelier was small. Porte Jacquemus worked with a handful of pattern-cutters in the 10th arrondissement, adjusting toiles himself, often the night before a show.

The shows themselves were staged as tableaux. Spring 2015 took place in a disused salt warehouse in Salon-de-Provence, models walking between mounds of coarse white crystal. Autumn 2016 unfolded on a lavender field outside Valensole, the house inviting fewer than fifty guests and seating them on hay bales. These were not performances. They were framings — ways to locate the clothes in a landscape that felt specific to the designer's biography. Porte Jacquemus grew up in Mallemort, a village of fewer than six thousand, and the work in this period read as an argument that a garment could carry that scale without shrinking it to kitsch.

The signature, such as it was, lay in reduction. A shirt without a collar. A dress without a back. A skirt that wrapped once and stopped, held by a single tie at the hip. The pieces asked the wearer to finish them — to supply the body, the posture, the willingness to let a hemline fall where it wanted rather than where convention placed it. That ask has largely disappeared from the house's output, replaced by shapes that announce themselves before the wearer does.

The bag era and its consequences

Le Chiquito launched for spring 2018. Measuring eleven centimetres across, it could hold a lipstick, a card, and little else. The joke was obvious. The execution was not. The bag used the same construction as a full-sized tote — double-stitched seams, metal feet, a structured base — shrunk to absurdity. It photographed well. It moved fast. Within a season, Jacquemus had become, in the trade press and on resale platforms, a bag house.

Le Bambino followed. Then Le Grand Bambino. Then Le Chiquito Long, an elongated version of the original, and Le Petit Bambino, a size between the two. The naming convention — French diminutives stacked on Italian ones — became a house tic, one that now extends across the accessories line. The bags are well-made. They are also, on balance, the least interesting thing Jacquemus produces.

What the bag boom obscured: the house's facility with construction. A spring 2019 dress, shown in lavender cotton, featured a bodice cut on the bias, grain running diagonally so the fabric clung without darts or boning. The skirt attached at an angle, wrapping the hip and falling to mid-thigh on one side, ankle on the other. No zipper. No closure beyond a single snap at the waist. The dress required a wearer who understood how to move in it — how to sit, how to walk, how to let the asymmetry work rather than fighting it. It sold poorly relative to the bags. It was also a better piece of design.

What remains, quietly

Certain elements persist beneath the logo'd swimwear and the Instagrammable pop-ups. The house still cuts trousers with a low rise and a wide leg, the waistband sitting just above the hip bone, the hem pooling slightly over the shoe. These trousers appear each season in linen, in wool, in a crisp cotton twill. They are not marketed. They do not appear in campaign imagery. They sell, steadily, to a client base that predates Le Chiquito and has stayed through it.

The one-shoulder top, too, remains. Jacquemus showed the first version in 2013 — a ribbed knit that bared the left shoulder and wrapped across the torso, fastening under the right arm. The shape has reappeared in silk, in jersey, in a quilted nylon that made no sense on paper and considerable sense on the body. It is a house code in the truest sense: a formal idea, repeated and refined, that carries no branding and requires no explanation to those who know the work.

Colour, likewise. The house palette — sun-bleached blue, terracotta, cream, a specific shade of yellow that reads as wheat rather than canary — has held more or less constant since the early collections. These are not trend colours. They are landscape colours, pulled from the Provence light that Porte Jacquemus returns to, collection after collection, whether the setting is a field or a studio or, as in autumn 2022, a mountainside covered in pink salt.

The question is whether these elements can survive the scale Jacquemus now operates at. The house opened a flagship on the Champs-Élysées in 2023. It shows to an audience of several thousand. It produces multiple drops per season, timed to social media cycles rather than the traditional fashion calendar. The atelier has expanded, though Porte Jacquemus still works with pattern-cutters directly, still adjusts toiles, still — one is told — makes last-minute changes the night before a show.

The coat, again

A version of that first coat appeared in the autumn 2023 collection. Same single button, same three-quarter sleeve, same deep V at the chest. The fabric was heavier this time — a double-faced wool that held its shape without stiffness — and the colour had shifted from camel to a darker tobacco brown. The coat was shown over a ribbed tank and wide-leg trousers, both in cream. No bag. No jewellery. No detail that competed with the line.

It did not photograph as well as the logo'd pieces. It did not generate the same volume of press. It was, by the house's current standards, a quiet garment. But it carried the same logic as the 2012 original: that a coat could be a frame, and that the frame mattered more than what filled it. Whether Jacquemus continues to make space for that logic, alongside the bags and the branded swimwear and the pop-up stands shaped like oversized fruit, will determine not whether the house survives — it will — but whether it remains, in any meaningful sense, the same house that began in a friend's apartment with a single button and a long fall of wool.