The fitting room in Jacquemus's Pigalle workshop smells faintly of steamed linen and espresso

The fitting room in Jacquemus's Pigalle workshop smells faintly of steamed linen and espresso. Simon Porte Jacquemus — he dropped the first name professionally years ago, though the paperwork still reads both — stands barefoot on the parquet, pinning a sleeve that refuses to fall the way he sketched it. He is thirty-three. The brand he started at nineteen now turns over an estimated two hundred million euros a year, sells handbags in Shanghai, and dresses actors who attend festivals he once watched from the cheap seats in Salon-de-Provence.

He tugs the muslin tighter at the shoulder seam, frowns, lets it go. "Encore," he says to the petite main beside him, who nods and reaches for her shears.

Salon, Not Paris

Jacquemus grew up in a village of five thousand in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the son of farmers who sold produce at the Saturday market. His mother, Valérie, died when he was eighteen. He has said in interviews — Vogue Paris, 2016; System, 2019 — that he named the label after her maiden name as a kind of monument. The gesture is both sentimental and shrewd. A French surname carries a certain weight in fashion, even if the atelier is a rented room above a Marais café and the designer has never formally studied pattern-cutting.

He did not attend Studio Berçot or the Chambre Syndicale. He enrolled at ESMOD for a term, left, moved to Paris with a portfolio of sketches and no contacts to speak of. What he had instead was a distinct point of view: southern light, straw hats the size of bicycle wheels, shirts cut so wide at the armhole they slipped off one shoulder. The silhouette was part Bardot, part paysan, entirely his own.

His first collection, shown in 2009, was called L'Bomba. Eighteen looks. A budget he has described, perhaps generously, as "nothing." The clothes were shown on friends in a borrowed showroom. Women's Wear Daily did not cover it. But the images — shot in harsh sun, models squinting, fabrics bleached nearly white — circulated online. They looked nothing like the sculptural minimalism then dominating Paris, and that was precisely the point.

Le Chapeau, La Robe, Le Sac

Jacquemus built his signature in pieces, not all at once. First came the hats: oversized, architectural, more sculpture than millinery. Then the dresses, often asymmetric, always short, frequently backless. By 2015, the accessories arrived — the Chiquito, a handbag so small it could barely hold a phone, became the house's first genuine commercial hit. It was, depending on whom you ask, either a joke or a stroke of genius. Likely both.

The bag measured twelve centimetres across. It retailed for around four hundred euros and sold out within days of each restock. Jacquemus understood, earlier than many of his peers, that in the age of the Instagram grid, an object need not be practical to be desirable. It need only be photogenic. The Chiquito was that, and more: it was witty, French in affect, and just expensive enough to signal taste without requiring a second mortgage.

He followed it with the Le Grand Chiquito, which was larger but still impractical, and then a parade of variations — woven raffia for summer, patent leather for autumn, versions with bamboo handles, versions with chain straps. The formula was consistent: take a recognisable shape, simplify it to near-abstraction, render it in a single saturated colour. Jacquemus bags do not whisper. They announce.

Les Défilés Comme Spectacle

If the bags were clever, the runway shows were something else: full-blown productions staged in fields of lavender, on salt flats in Provence, in wheat fields at harvest. For the Spring 2020 show, he commandeered a lavender farm in Valensole and lined the rows with benches. Models walked between the purple stalks in straw hats and linen slip dresses, and the images — drones, helicopters, every editor's iPhone — flooded the internet within minutes.

Critics called it gimmicky. Others called it genius. Jacquemus himself seemed unbothered by the debate. "Mode is spectacle," he told Le Figaro in 2020. "If you are not making people feel something, what is the point?"

The shows worked because they were not merely backdrops. They were coherent extensions of the brand's mythology: the south, the sun, the idea of a French summer distilled into forty looks and twelve minutes of footage. They also worked because they were expensive. Renting farmland, transporting a hundred guests to the countryside, building temporary seating in a wheat field — none of this comes cheap. But Jacquemus had, by then, the revenue to support it. LVMH had taken a minority stake in 2022, a deal that valued the business north of two hundred million euros and gave the house access to the conglomerate's production and distribution apparatus.

Homme, Enfin

Jacquemus launched menswear in 2018, after years of insisting he had no interest in dressing men. The reversal was pragmatic. The market was there; his aesthetic — easy silhouettes, bold colour, a certain Riviera louche-ness — translated readily to shirts, trousers, and ovoid leather jackets. The first men's show, staged in a Paris parking garage, featured models in pastel suiting and shirts unbuttoned to the navel. It looked like a Slim Aarons photograph remade for the TikTok generation.

The move paid off. Menswear now accounts for roughly thirty percent of revenue, according to analysts at Bernstein. The clothes are not groundbreaking — a Jacquemus linen shirt is, in construction, a linen shirt — but they carry the house codes legibly: the colour, the ease, the suggestion that one has just returned from a month in Cassis and plans to return shortly.

Ce Qui Reste

Jacquemus remains, at thirty-three, both the creative director and the public face of the brand. He appears in his own campaigns, posts daily on Instagram, and conducts fittings in person. Whether this model is sustainable — whether any designer-founder can maintain that pace past forty — is an open question. For now, he shows no sign of stepping back.

The next chapter, one suspects, will involve further expansion: more categories, more markets, possibly a beauty line. LVMH does not acquire minority stakes in order to preserve the status quo. But Jacquemus has so far resisted the obvious moves — no logo T-shirts at ninety euros, no diffusion line, no flagship on the Champs-Élysées. The maison remains, in affect if not in scale, a small southern label that happened to grow very large very fast.

In the Pigalle atelier, the sleeve finally falls the way he wants it to. Jacquemus steps back, nods, and the petite main begins to pin the seam properly. He pulls on his sneakers, checks his phone, and heads downstairs for a cigarette. The next collection shows in three weeks. There is, as always, more work to do.