Jacquemus : les artisans qui font le travail

The atelier sits in a converted warehouse north of the Marais, light falling through steel-frame windows onto worktables scattered with fabric swatches and half-pinned muslins. Simon Porte Jacquemus moves between them, gesturing at a sleeve that isn't sitting right. He's animated, specific — "Non, non, comme ça" — but the woman with the pins, Mireille Dufour, has already anticipated the correction. She's been here since the second collection, when the studio was three people in a borrowed room.

One forgets, in the rush of Instagram campaigns and collaboration announcements, that someone still has to make the clothes.

The invisible roster

Jacquemus has built a reputation on sun-drenched imagery and architectural silhouettes — the Chiquito bag dangling from a fingertip, the asymmetric neckline that became a uniform for a certain kind of French girl. The brand's output feels effortless, which is to say it conceals effort with some skill. Behind that illusion: a roster of artisans whose names rarely surface outside trade circles.

Dufour, now head of the atelier's womenswear division, trained at the Chambre Syndicale in the late nineties. She spent a decade at Chloé before Porte Jacquemus recruited her in 2013, back when the maison was operating on a budget that wouldn't cover a single look today. "Il cherchait quelqu'un qui comprenait la coupe," she told Madame Figaro in 2019. Someone who understood cut, yes, but also how to translate a sketch made on a phone screen into something that wouldn't collapse on the body.

The bag atelier is a separate operation, overseen by Laurent Kessi, a Swiss-trained leather specialist who previously worked under Marc Jacobs in New York. Kessi's team — nine full-time artisans, plus contract workers during pre-collection crunch — handles everything from prototyping to final assembly. The Chiquito, that micro-bag that became a phenomenon in 2018, required eleven iterations before Kessi signed off on the structure. The challenge wasn't making it small; it was making it small and functional, with a turn-lock that wouldn't jam and a strap anchor that could bear weight without tearing the leather.

"People think it's a joke bag," Kessi said in a 2020 panel at Première Classe. "It's not. It's engineered."

The Provençal mythology and the Parisian reality

Porte Jacquemus has always leaned into his origin story — the boy from Mallemort, the wheat fields, the mother who died when he was nineteen. The narrative is both genuine and carefully maintained, a through-line that gives the brand its emotional register. But the actual work happens in Paris, in ateliers that look like every other atelier in the third arrondissement: white walls, cutting tables, the faint chemical smell of sizing and dye.

Élodie Cartier handles fabric sourcing, a role that has grown more complex as the brand scales. Early collections relied heavily on deadstock and Italian mills willing to work with small minimums. Now Jacquemus orders in volume, but Cartier still pushes for specificity — a linen-viscose blend from a Piedmont weaver, a particular weight of cotton poplin that takes dye a certain way. She works three seasons ahead, which means she's currently selecting cloth for Spring 2026 while the atelier finalises looks for the next runway show.

"Simon veut que ça ait l'air simple," Cartier explained in a rare interview with Les Échos last year. He wants it to look simple. That requires fabric with enough body to hold a sculptural line but enough drape to avoid stiffness. Not simple at all, in other words.

Then there's the question of the runway presentations themselves, those images that circulate instantly and set the tone for each collection. Jacquemus works with set designer Benoît Luyckx, who has created the wheat field, the salt flats, the lavender rows — tableaux that function as both backdrop and conceptual anchor. Luyckx's team includes riggers, lighting designers, and logistics coordinators who spend weeks preparing sites that will be used for twelve minutes of runway time.

One suspects the budget for a single show now exceeds what the entire maison operated on in its first three years.

Signature and its discontents

The asymmetric cutout — one shoulder bare, the opposite side extended into a sleeve or strap — has become Jacquemus shorthand. It appears in nearly every collection, varied but recognisable, the kind of detail that editors can spot from across a showroom. Credit for refining that signature belongs partly to Dufour, who solved the engineering problem of how to keep the garment stable without visible boning or excessive lining.

The solution involved a combination of internal taping and strategic seam placement, techniques borrowed from corsetry but adapted for lighter-weight fabrics. It's the kind of detail that matters intensely to the person wearing the piece and not at all to the person photographing it.

Accessories have become the maison's commercial engine, which is true for most houses at this scale but particularly pronounced here. The Chiquito, the Bambino, the Grand Bambino — these are the pieces moving units, underwriting the more experimental runway work. Kessi's team has expanded accordingly, and the atelier now occupies a separate building in Pantin, where leather cutting and assembly happen in climate-controlled rooms that smell of tannins and saddle soap.

Each bag still passes through multiple hands. A single Bambino involves a cutter, an edge-painter, a stitcher, and a finisher, with quality control checks at each stage. The hardware — buckles, logo plaques, chain straps — comes from a supplier in Tuscany that also works with Gucci and Bottega Veneta, though Jacquemus specs are proprietary. The turn-lock mechanism, for instance, uses a slightly softer spring tension than standard, a detail Porte Jacquemus requested after testing prototypes himself.

What comes next, and who makes it happen

The maison is at an inflection point. Revenue has grown rapidly — estimates put it north of €200 million annually, though the company doesn't disclose figures — and there's been expansion into menswear, beauty licensing, and a collaboration pipeline that includes Nike and Barbie. Scale brings its own pressures. Maintaining the handmade ethos while producing enough volume to meet wholesale commitments requires either compromise or significant investment in atelier capacity.

Jacquemus has chosen the latter, for now. The team has grown to just over a hundred full-time employees, with additional contract artisans brought in seasonally. Dufour now oversees a structure that includes junior pattern-makers and assistant fitters, roles that didn't exist five years ago. Kessi's leather atelier has similarly stratified, with senior artisans training newer hires in techniques that take months to internalise.

There's also the question of succession, though Porte Jacquemus is only thirty-three and shows no sign of stepping back. Still, the infrastructure being built now — the documented processes, the trained personnel, the relationships with suppliers — suggests a brand thinking past its founder's direct involvement in every seam and buckle.

Whether that's pragmatic or melancholy depends on one's view of fashion's industrial realities.

The fittings continue

On a Tuesday in March, the atelier is midway through finalising the pre-fall collection. Dufour pins a sleeve while Porte Jacquemus watches, arms crossed. The model shifts her weight slightly. The sleeve pulls. Dufour adjusts. This happens four more times before the designer nods.

Across the room, a junior pattern-maker named Anaïs Moreau drafts a bodice block, her pencil moving in confident arcs across brown paper. She's twenty-six, trained at ESMOD, and has been with the maison for eighteen months. In five years, she might be the one directing fittings. Or she might move to another house, carrying techniques learned here into someone else's atelier.

The work continues either way. The wheat fields and salt flats make for compelling imagery, but the actual making happens here, in fluorescent light, with pins and chalk and the small corrections that no camera catches. One can argue that this is the least romantic part of fashion. One can also argue it's the only part that matters.