Simon Porte Jacquemus stands in the back room of his Paris showroom, pinning a linen shirt onto a mannequin

Simon Porte Jacquemus stands in the back room of his Paris showroom, pinning a linen shirt onto a mannequin. The fabric pools at the waist, gathers at one shoulder, and he steps back. "C'est pas ça," he mutters, and starts again. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that the shirt, a prototype for his Spring 2019 collection, has been cut to the proportions of a specific woman — not a model, not a fit sample, but his mother.

She died when he was nineteen. He has been dressing her, in one form or another, ever since.

Jacquemus is a house built on muses. Not the borrowed celebrity kind, flown in for a season and photographed in a borrowed coat, but three women whose lives and bodies have shaped the silhouette, the palette, the entire vocabulary of the brand. His mother, Valérie. His wife, now ex-wife, Marco Maestri. And Gala González, the Spanish stylist who became the face of the brand's first explosive growth. Each left a mark. Each, in turn, receded.

Valérie, or the South

Valérie Porte Jacquemus ran a farm in Mallemort, a village in the Bouches-du-Rhône where the Durance River bends south. She wore linen shifts in the heat, cotton scarves knotted at the neck, and espadrilles until they split. Her son has said, in various interviews over the years, that she dressed for practicality, not fashion. That may be true. But practicality in Provence — sun, stone, thirty-eight degrees by noon — produces a certain aesthetic whether you intend it or not.

When Jacquemus launched his namesake label in 2009, aged eighteen and newly arrived in Paris, the clothes looked nothing like what was showing that season. No drape, no avant-garde volume, no reference to Antwerp or Tokyo. Instead: shirts with one sleeve. Straw hats the size of cartwheels. Skirts cut on the bias in heavyweight linen, hemmed raw. The palette was wheat, clay, cerulean, and that specific shade of sun-bleached pink you see on shutters in the Luberon.

Critics at the time called it naïve. They were half-right. The work was unschooled — Jacquemus had dropped out of design school after three months — but it was not accidental. He was dressing the women he knew. Or rather, the one woman.

Valérie appears throughout the early collections, sometimes literally. For Spring 2012, he showed a series of cotton day dresses printed with a photograph of her, standing in a field, arms crossed. It sold poorly. The press found it mawkish. But Jacquemus kept the image in his studio, pinned above his desk, and continued to cut for her frame: narrow shoulders, long torso, a waist that sat high.

By 2015, that silhouette had become the house signature. The "Le Petit Sac Chiquito," a handbag so small it could barely hold a lipstick, launched the following year. It was, Jacquemus told Vogue Paris, inspired by the way his mother used to carry a single key in her palm when she walked to the village. Whether or not that is literally true matters less than the fact that he believed it enough to build a product line around it.

Marco, or the Shift

Marco Maestri is a stylist, a DJ, and for five years, she was Madame Jacquemus. They married in 2019, a small ceremony in the Camargue, and separated quietly in 2024. In between, she became the second body the house was cut for.

Where Valérie's influence was pastoral, Marco's was urban. She wore the oversized blazers, the asymmetric knits, the sculptural denim that began appearing in the collections around 2017. She had a different frame — broader shoulders, longer legs — and Jacquemus adjusted accordingly. The waistline dropped. The trousers widened. The colour palette, which had been relentlessly sun-soaked, began to admit black, navy, shades of grey.

This shift coincided with Jacquemus's move into ready-to-wear that could function in a city, not just a fantasy of the South. The Le Chiquito bag had made the house financially viable; the clothes that followed had to justify the attention. Marco, who was dressing herself for Paris, Milan, and New York, became the test case.

She also became the face. Not officially — Jacquemus has never named a muse in a press release — but she appeared in the lookbooks, the campaigns, the behind-the-scenes footage that the brand released with increasing frequency. She was not styled as a model. She moved like someone who had other things to do, which she did.

The marriage ended, as marriages do, and the Autumn 2024 collection showed the aftermath. The cuts were sharper. The fabrics were stiffer. The show notes, usually filled with references to Provence and childhood, mentioned neither. One suspects the next chapter will be written in a different hand.

Gala, or the Audience

Gala González is not family, not a partner, but she may be the most important of the three. She is a stylist and creative director based in Barcelona, and in 2015, when Jacquemus was still a cult label worn mostly by French editors and the occasional actress, she began posting photos of herself in his clothes. Not campaign images. Just her, in a Jacquemus linen dress, walking through Gràcia or sitting at a café in Vallcarca.

The effect was immediate. González had a following — mid-six figures at the time, now well past a million — and her audience was not the Paris fashion set. They were women in their twenties and thirties, living in Madrid, Milan, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, who wanted to dress like they were on holiday even when they were not. Jacquemus, with its straw bags and its resort-weight knits, offered exactly that.

González became the template for what the brand calls its "Jacquemus girl," a term the house uses in mood boards and casting notes but never in public. She is not French. She is not a model. She has a life that exists outside the frame of the photograph, and the clothes have to work within it.

This is a different kind of muse. Valérie shaped the aesthetic. Marco shaped the fit. González shaped the customer. She demonstrated, in real time and across multiple platforms, that you could wear a Jacquemus hat in Barcelona in August and not look like you were in costume. That the tiny bag, absurd as it was, could become a signature if you committed to it.

Jacquemus has said, in interviews, that he does not design for influencers. That may be true in the literal sense. But he designs for women who move through the world the way González does — quickly, publicly, with a camera always somewhere nearby. That is a choice, and a commercial one.

What Remains

The Spring 2025 collection, shown in Capri this past June, featured none of the three. No family snapshots, no casting that nodded to Marco, no obvious play for the Instagram set. Instead, Jacquemus presented a series of tailored separates in shades of ivory, sand, and slate, modelled by women in their thirties and forties, walking slowly.

It is possible this is a new chapter. It is also possible that the muses have simply receded into the architecture of the house, their influence now so embedded that it no longer needs to be stated. The high waist, the oversized hat, the linen that wrinkles by design — these are not references anymore. They are the house codes.

Jacquemus is now thirty-three. His mother has been gone for fourteen years. His marriage is over. González still wears the clothes, but she is no longer the story. What comes next, one suspects, will be determined by whoever he is dressing now — and whether he is willing to name her.