The fitting room at Jacquemus smells like steam and bergamot

The fitting room at Jacquemus smells like steam and bergamot. Simon Porte Jacquemus stands barefoot on parquet, pinning a linen sleeve that refuses to sit flat. He's twenty-nine, maybe thirty — the math changes depending on which profile you read — and the garment in question will appear on a runway in Provence in eight weeks. He pulls the pin, repositions it half a centimetre south, steps back. "Voilà." The sleeve now does what sleeves are supposed to do, which is to say nothing at all.

This is the image the house has sold for a decade: a boy from the Var who named his label after his mother and built a business on the proposition that French fashion could be both sun-drunk and solvent. The first part is true. The second part is more complicated.

The Var, and what came after

Simon Porte grew up in Mallemort, a village of five thousand in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. His mother, Valérie Jacquemus, died when he was nineteen. He moved to Paris shortly after, enrolled at ESMOD, and left within a year. The official story, repeated in nearly every profile since 2012, is that he found the curriculum too slow. The less official story, which he mentioned once to System and never again, is that he couldn't afford the tuition.

He showed his first collection in 2009, at twenty years old, in a friend's apartment. The pieces were raw-edged, vaguely deconstructed, and made in quantities too small to be called production. By his third season, he had a showroom. By his fifth, he had a backer: Bastille Luxury Group, a Paris-based fund that took a minority stake in 2013. The terms were never disclosed, but the timing mattered. Jacquemus was no longer a bedroom project. It was a maison with payroll, fabric minimums, and a board.

The runway in a lavender field

What changed the trajectory was not a garment but a location. In June 2019, Jacquemus staged its spring collection in a lavender field in Valensole. The runway was a narrow strip of pale stone, the models walked in straw hats and linen shirting, and the whole thing was designed to be photographed from a drone. It was. The images circulated for weeks — not in trade publications, but on Instagram, where the house had been quietly building an audience since 2015.

The collection itself was competent but not radical: high-waisted trousers, cropped knits, a series of micro-bags that would become the house's most recognizable product. What mattered was the staging. Jacquemus had understood something that most French houses had not, which is that a runway show is no longer a closed event for buyers and editors. It is content, and content has a half-life.

The lavender field was followed by a wheatfield in 2020, a salt flat in 2021, a mountain pass in 2022. Each show was more logistically complex than the last, each generated more impressions, and each raised the same question: what happens when the location becomes more memorable than the clothes?

Le Chiquito, and the problem of scale

The house's commercial anchor is a bag the size of a deck of cards. Le Chiquito debuted in 2018, retailed for around €400, and sold out within weeks. It was followed by Le Grand Chiquito, which is merely small, and Le Petit Chiquito, which is functionally a charm. The design is simple — a top-handle tote reduced to its geometric minimum — and the proposition is equally so: a Jacquemus bag is a signal, not a carryall.

By 2020, bags and accessories accounted for roughly sixty per cent of the house's revenue, according to an estimate in Business of Fashion. Ready-to-wear, which is harder to produce and harder to margin, made up the rest. This is not unusual. Bottega Veneta, Loewe, and The Row all follow a similar model. But it does create a tension. A fashion house that depends on accessories is, by definition, not a fashion house in the way that, say, Lemaire or Dries Van Noten is. It is a lifestyle brand with a runway.

Jacquemus has navigated this tension by doubling down on both sides. The accessories expand — sunglasses, jewellery, shoes, a collaboration with Nike that sold faster than the house could restock — while the ready-to-wear becomes more refined. The spring 2023 collection, shown in Paris rather than Provence, featured tailoring in wool gabardine and shirting with hand-rolled hems. The pieces were well-made and, for the first time in the house's history, genuinely expensive. A linen blazer retailed for €1,200. A cotton poplin dress, for €800.

The question, which no one has answered yet, is whether the customer who bought Le Chiquito for its virality will also buy a blazer for its facture.

The next chapter, or the same one

In 2022, Jacquemus opened a flagship on the rue de Castiglione, a few doors down from Charvet. The space is white, minimal, and lit like a gallery. There are no logos on the exterior, no window displays, no indication of what is sold inside. It is, in other words, a store designed to look like it does not need you.

This is the aesthetic the house has been moving toward for the past three years: less Provence, more Paris. The campaigns still feature sun and stone, but the product has shifted. The spring 2024 collection included a leather trench coat, a series of tailored waistcoats, and a bag — not a micro-bag, but a structured tote in box calf — that retailed for €2,400. The house is, in short, growing up.

Whether it can grow up without losing the thing that made it legible in the first place is the question. Jacquemus built its identity on a very specific image: a boy from the south who made clothes that felt like summer. That image is still useful, but it is also narrow. You cannot stage a show in a lavender field every season. You cannot price a linen dress at €300 and a wool coat at €2,000 and expect the customer to see both as part of the same project.

The house now employs over two hundred people, operates in forty countries, and generates annual revenue estimated at €150 million. Simon Porte Jacquemus is no longer a boy from Mallemort. He is the creative director of a mid-sized luxury brand, and the work ahead is not romantic. It is operational: supply chain, margin, market segmentation, the slow grind of turning a moment into a business that lasts.

In the fitting room, the sleeve still refuses to sit flat. He pulls the pin again, repositions it, steps back. Close enough.