Portrait : le directeur artistique de Jacquemus

The fitting room in the Jacquemus atelier overlooks a courtyard in the Marais, and on a Tuesday in late spring, Simon Porte Jacquemus is pinning a sleeve that refuses to behave. The sample is linen, off-white, cut so close to the body that the model's breathing becomes part of the equation. He steps back. Frowns. Unpins. Starts again.

This is not the image one associates with a designer who built his name on sun-drunk tableaux in Provence — wheat fields, pink salt lakes, oversized straw hats the diameter of café tables. But Jacquemus, now in his mid-thirties, has always worked closest to the garment itself. The spectacle, he has said more than once, is a frame. The clothes have to hold.

A formation built on instinct, not institution

Simon Porte Jacquemus was born in 1990 in Mallemort, a commune of fewer than six thousand in the Bouches-du-Rhône. His mother ran a fruit farm. He did not attend the École de la Chambre Syndicale. He did not apprentice under a storied couturier. At eighteen, he moved to Paris with little more than a sketchbook and a surname he would later append to his given name, forming the label that now turns over an estimated €200 million annually.

The early collections — shown in borrowed spaces, styled with whatever he could afford — were raw in the way only genuine naïveté permits. Spring 2013, his official debut, featured forty-three looks. Most were separates in natural fibres, boxy and unadorned, shown on friends rather than professional models. The press was polite. The business was nonexistent.

What changed, and quickly, was his understanding of desire. By 2015, Jacquemus had begun to distil his references — the Midi, his mother's wardrobe, the particular quality of light in the south — into pieces that felt both specific and open to projection. A linen shirt with sleeves that ballooned at the cuff. A skirt hemmed asymmetrically, as though caught mid-stride. The Le Chiquito bag, introduced in 2017, measured nine centimetres across and could hold a lipstick, perhaps two keys. It was, by any practical measure, absurd. It sold relentlessly.

The breakthrough: scale as theatre

One does not stage a runway on a lavender field by accident. The Spring 2020 show, held in Valensole, was Jacquemus at his most operatic — a long wooden platform cutting through purple rows, the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in the distance, models walking in near-silence save for the wind and the cicadas. It was not the first time a designer had taken fashion outdoors, but the images circulated with a velocity that felt new. Instagram, of course, played its part. So did the clothes: simple, sculptural, confident enough to let the landscape do some of the work.

The collection itself leaned into proportion. Trousers sat low and wide. Tops cropped high, often asymmetric. The palette — cream, terracotta, sage, that particular shade of sky blue the south does better than anywhere else — felt inevitable rather than chosen. Jacquemus has a knack for making his references feel universal, even when they are deeply personal. His mother, who passed away when he was nineteen, remains a recurring presence in his work. He has never been coy about it. "Elle est partout," he told Vogue Paris in 2019. She is everywhere.

The lavender show was followed by a wheat field (Fall 2020), a salt flat in Camargue (Spring 2022), a motorway rest stop outside Paris (Fall 2023). Each location chosen not for novelty but for the way it reframed the work. Jacquemus understands that a garment exists in space, and that space — its scale, its light, its cultural charge — can be as articulate as any seam.

Signature: the handbag as icon, the garment as evidence

If one had to locate the commercial centre of Jacquemus, it would be the handbag. Le Chiquito, Le Grand Bambino, Le Petit Bambino — the names alone suggest a designer who is not above a wink. The bags are sculptural, often impractical, and priced to move. A Bambino starts at around €590. A Chiquito, depending on the season, can be had for less. This is not Hermès. It is not trying to be.

What the bags do, and do efficiently, is announce. They are recognisable from across a room, across a feed. Jacquemus has spoken openly about his admiration for the way certain houses — he has cited Prada, Balenciaga — build objects that function as signs. His own approach is less conceptual, more immediate. A bright yellow Le Bambino against a white linen dress is not a riddle. It is a choice, and a legible one.

The ready-to-wear, meanwhile, has matured without losing its nerve. Recent collections have introduced tailoring — blazers with exaggerated shoulders, trousers with a clean front pleat — alongside the louche shirting and abbreviated knits that made his name. The fits are precise. The fabrics, increasingly, are worth examining up close. A cotton poplin from this past spring had a hand closer to silk; a wool used in the fall suiting carried a subtle slub that caught the light just so. These are details one notices only in person, which is perhaps the point.

What comes next: expansion, and the risk therein

Jacquemus opened his first standalone boutique in Paris in 2019, on rue Saint-Honoré. There are now shops in Marseille, Milan, London, Seoul. A New York opening is planned. The brand has launched beauty (a lip oil, a body mist, both in packaging that feels like an extension of the runway). There are collaborations — Nike, most prominently — that extend the vocabulary without diluting it.

The risk, as with any designer who scales quickly, is repetition. Jacquemus has built a language that is highly recognisable, and recognition can calcify into formula. The question is not whether he can continue to produce desirable objects — the sales figures suggest he can — but whether the work will continue to surprise. The lavender field was a moment. The fifth lavender field is a format.

In conversation, Jacquemus tends to deflect questions about legacy or influence. He is more comfortable discussing fabric weights, the mechanics of a particular drape, the challenge of translating a sketch into something a human body can wear. This is, one suspects, not modesty but preference. He is a designer who thinks through making.

The sleeve in the Marais fitting room eventually behaves. The model exhales. Jacquemus steps back, nods, moves on to the next piece. Outside, the courtyard is bright, the afternoon stretching long. There is more to pin.