Simon Porte Jacquemus stands in the back room of his Paris showroom, pinning a sleeve on a mannequin

Simon Porte Jacquemus stands in the back room of his Paris showroom, pinning a sleeve on a mannequin. The fabric — a linen so fine it catches the light like gauze — belongs to a dress he's been reworking for three days. He steps back. Adjusts the shoulder seam. Steps back again. The room is silent except for the hiss of steam from an iron in the corner. This is not the Jacquemus of the viral campaigns, the oversized hats, the pink lakes in the Camargue. This is the part that happens before the image.

But the image matters. It always has. And for Jacquemus, the image has often been a woman.

Not muses in the tired sense — not girls on mood boards or names dropped in press notes. These are women whose presence, literal or remembered, shaped the house's vocabulary. Three in particular: Valérie, his mother. Gaia Repossi, jeweller and early champion. And Kendall Jenner, who became the face of a brand at the exact moment it needed one.

Valérie, or the Origin

Valérie Porte died when Simon was nineteen. He has said, in interviews with Vogue and System, that she is the reason he makes clothes. Not in the vague, elegiac way designers sometimes invoke a parent, but in the structural sense. The silhouettes he returns to — the square neckline, the puff sleeve, the dress that skims rather than clings — are hers. Or rather, they are his memory of hers.

She worked in a farm in Mallemort, a village in Provence where the light is relentless and the dress code is not. Jacquemus has described her wardrobe as practical, unfussy, occasionally surprising. A white shirt. A pair of espadrilles. A red lip on a weekday. The kind of woman who understood that style is not about abundance.

When he launched his first collection in 2009, he named the house after her maiden name. He was twenty years old, had no formal training, and was staging his show in a friend's apartment. The clothes were simple to the point of severity: cotton poplin, raw hems, shapes that suggested the body without outlining it. Critics were polite. Orders were minimal. But the point of view was there.

Valérie appears throughout the archive. In the straw hats that became a signature. In the way a dress falls from the shoulder with no visible construction. In the recurring motif of the open back, which Jacquemus has said reminds him of summer, of heat, of a woman who doesn't need to announce herself. She is the house's foundational text.

Gaia, or the Endorsement

Gaia Repossi is a jeweller. More precisely, she is the creative director of Repossi, a Turinese house known for architectural gold and a client list that does not require validation. When she began wearing Jacquemus in 2012, the brand was still operating on the margins — showroom appointments, small stockists, the occasional editorial placement. Repossi's endorsement was not loud. It was consistent.

She wore his pieces to dinners, to her own events, to the kind of gatherings where fashion editors take note. She spoke about him in interviews, not as a discovery but as a peer. This mattered. Jacquemus was young, self-taught, working without the infrastructure of a major backer. Repossi's support — visible, repeated, unforced — gave him a foothold in a milieu that does not easily admit outsiders.

The two became friends. Jacquemus has cited her as an early influence on his understanding of proportion, particularly in accessories. Repossi's jewellery operates at the scale of millimetres; a ring sits just so on the knuckle, a cuff ends precisely at the wrist bone. Jacquemus began applying similar rigour to his bags. The Chiquito, released in 2018, is a top-handle bag so small it can barely hold a phone. It became one of the most photographed accessories of the decade. The logic is Repossi's: make the gesture, not the object, monumental.

She also introduced him to a network. Through Repossi, Jacquemus met other designers, editors, buyers who operated at a level he was still reaching for. It is not incidental that his first major stockist, Colette, came shortly after. Or that his runway shows, beginning in 2015, began to draw the kind of front row that signals arrival.

Repossi no longer appears in Jacquemus campaigns. She does not need to. The work is done.

Kendall, or the Amplification

Kendall Jenner walked her first Jacquemus show in 2017. By then, she was already one of the most visible women in the world — a fixture on runways, in campaigns, across social media platforms where her follower count eclipsed the circulation of most fashion magazines. Jacquemus cast her not despite this visibility but because of it.

The show took place in a lavender field outside Valensole. The set was minimal: a long runway, purple in every direction, no seats. Guests stood. Jenner opened, wearing a straw hat the width of a car tyre and a butter-yellow mini dress. The image circulated immediately. Within hours, it had been screenshotted, reposted, memed, and discussed on platforms far outside the fashion press. Jacquemus, who had spent years building a reputation among insiders, became a household name in a single afternoon.

Jenner has since appeared in multiple campaigns for the house. The most notable: a 2019 image in which she poses nude, holding a micro Chiquito bag over her chest. The photograph is absurd and knows it. The bag is comically small. The styling is minimal to the point of non-existence. The whole composition teeters on the edge of parody. And yet it works. It was shared millions of times, generated endless commentary, and moved product. Jacquemus understands what many heritage houses do not: that virality and craft are not opposed.

Jenner's presence did something else. It positioned Jacquemus as a brand that could move between worlds — the rarefied and the popular, the editorial and the algorithmic. She brought an audience that does not read System or attend Paris Fashion Week. That audience now buys his bags, books his pop-up experiences, follows his every move on Instagram. Whether this is good for fashion as a discipline is debatable. Whether it is good for Jacquemus as a business is not.

What Remains

The spring 2025 collection showed in December. The setting: a beach in Capri, models walking on sand, the Mediterranean behind them. No lavender fields this time, no oversized props. The clothes were quieter. Tailoring in biscuit linen. Slip dresses with asymmetric hems. A handbag — new, structured, larger than the Chiquito — in a shade of terracotta that photographs like sun on stone.

Jacquemus is now thirty-three. The house employs over a hundred people, operates standalone boutiques, and generates revenues that place it among the most successful independent labels in France. He no longer needs a muse in the traditional sense. The brand has its own momentum.

But the women remain. Valérie in the cut of a sleeve. Repossi in the precision of a clasp. Jenner in the understanding that an image, if it lands correctly, can rewrite the terms. Jacquemus has always known this. He learned it early, in a village in Provence, from a woman in a white shirt who never thought of herself as a muse at all.