SOFT POWER
Chez Porte Jacquemus and cozy couch hangs coexist. Models Devyn Garcia and Deva Cassel wear Jacquemus. Photographed by Théo de Gueltzl
Simon Porte Jacquemus, much like his label, resonates with the sunny, breezy French South—but behind the good life, as Nathan Heller discovers, is a laser focus and a shoulder-to-the-wheel work ethic.
At a friend’s birthday dinner in Paris not long ago—a long banquette in a small neighborhood restaurant—I arrived late, sat, and was questioned by my tablemates about what brought me to France, where I don’t live. With the dismissive vagueness that writers learn to cultivate for work in progress, I told them I was working on a piece about a fashion designer. “I hope it’s Jacquemus,” someone across the table cut in. “Yeah, Jacquemus,” another guest agreed. From there, to my surprise, the sentiment echoed around. The guests at this table mostly weren’t fashion people; they were movie people, business people, people with kids, lawyers. But they had views about the brand. “Jacquemus is really exciting,” someone insisted to me. “You have the sense they’re doing something new.”
Strictly speaking, there is not so much new about Jacquemus, which was founded 15 years ago—an eon in fashion—by a 19-year-old then known as Simon Porte, who gave the label his mother’s maiden name following her death in a car accident that year. But recently the house has achieved such dazzling feats of growth and public notice as to attain a glow of authority rare among even long-coveted luxury brands. Just a decade ago, Jacquemus had a devoted but small following and sold its wares—exuberant, tightly edited collections of breezy, bold colors—largely online. Five years ago, having splashed into menswear, it had crossed $10 million in revenue and was eyeing the prospect of a shop in France. Now that looks like minor success. Jacquemus’s retail sales are today about double what they were a year ago, with its most ambitious expansion plans to date just barely underway. In the spring, it opened stores in Dubai, Capri, and Saint-Tropez. This fall, it opens stores in both New York and London; Los Angeles is on track to appear next year. Without budging from its distinct and unlikely appeal, Jacquemus may be closer than any brand in new luxury fashion to becoming a household name. To be a fan is usually to be an obsessive, with the rabbit hole opening, as many now do, on social media, which centers on the imaginative life of the founder himself.
“It’s the first time in a long time that a brand has been written in the first person,” Loïc Prigent, the fashion documentarian and journalist, who has followed Jacquemus closely since its start, says. “There’s a sea of really interesting brands that are logos, but Jacquemus is one of those that are more than interesting branding—people see Simon’s personal story behind everything.” (Also, to a sometimes startling extent, behind its public face: “If I DM the Jacquemus Instagram account, I get an answer in minutes—from Simon,” Prigent says.)
Today, Porte styles himself Simon Porte Jacquemus: a hybrid of man and brand and, conveniently, in French, a promotional pun (“Simon wears Jacquemus”). And he does wear his wares, not just on runways and red carpets but across the glamorous-seeming daily rhythms of his life. People feel they know him from his 300,000-follower personal Instagram feed (to say nothing of the brand’s much larger but also intimate-seeming account), which functions as one part personal diary, one part global marketing platform, and four parts window display for, as he puts it, “the Jacquemus world.” “The models, the photographers, everything we work with can be very elevated,” Marco Maestri, his husband, a viral marketer who does consulting for the brand, says. “But everyone can feel part of the Jacquemus story.” Designers traditionally present themselves in public as preening demigods or fussy, difficult eccentrics, but neither is the vibe that Porte Jacquemus gives off. He grew up in the South of France and comes across, on his feeds and platforms, as laidback, sun- drenched, semiamphibious, and buoyed by human charm. An architect I know, also not especially a fashion person, described becoming aware of the brand after being struck, on Instagram, by Porte Jacquemus’s “very impressive chest hair.”
In person, Porte Jacquemus at first seems true to Insta-filtered form. He is of medium height and built like a tumbling gymnast, with a brown brush of beard, a wide toothy smile, and, even in Paris, where he works, the mood of a breezier place. When I meet him for the first time, at Jacquemus’s new 8th arrondissement headquarters (a geometric minimalist building, of his own interior design, with terra-cotta floors and other emblems of the warm French South), he guides me to a private terrace trimmed with lemon trees. “Sometimes I’m here on the terrace, and I’m like, oh, Simon, enjoy this moment, because you never know what will happen next,” he says, gazing at the trees. At a time when Paris fashion and French fashion are often believed to be interchangeable, the windows of the Place Vendôme standing in for the tastes of a nation, Porte Jacquemus insists on something else. Rather than trading in chic fragrances and powerwear, the label is emblematized by striped beach towels and bags in Jacques Demy hues. Porte Jacquemus is dressed today in a big white T-shirt, black shorts, and lemon yellow Chuck Taylor high-tops, as if himself ready to grab a towel and head—well, where? “Sous les pavés, la plage,” went an old May ’68 slogan: beneath the paving stones, the beach. In Jacquemus’s Paris, one almost believes it’s true.
To produce his first collection in 2009, he bought some yards of fabric and approached the local seamstress—“I said, ‘How much for doing a skirt?’ She was like, ‘A hundred fifty.’ I was like, ‘A hundred, and I’m coming back tomorrow’—and designed his own website, and, voilà!, the brand’s laid-back sparkle was set. For a while, he ran his brand while working at Comme des Garçons—not as a designer but as a salesman, seeing close-up how merchandise connected with shoppers. As his profile rose, Jacquemus and its creator, with their chillaxing mien and swaggering Fauve-print shirts, were described as “himbo”; in caricature, the label is a brand of sun bums, cliff divers, voluptuaries, and the sorts of people who party on boats, with its founder as ringleader: “He’s just so there for a good time and such a free spirit,” says Dua Lipa, one of Porte Jacquemus’s close friends and muses since they met on a French TV show in 2018. “He’s someone I know I can lean on in the everyday—but also on the dance floor.”
The carefree, sun-washed Jacquemus ethos is so finely tuned across the label’s outward showings that it can be startling to find that, offline (and off the dance floor), Porte Jacquemus is a focused, relentless company man, more than a little worried about missing targets for his growing brand.
“I need to make noise. Not every six months but every 15 days, every week, with something that’s going to get people’s attention: a good campaign, a new pop-up, celebrity dressing,” he tells me in the office, sprawled in an armchair draped with yellow cloth. “A lot of up-and-coming brands have disappeared after two years because it’s hard to keep up a constant presence.”
Over the past months, Jacquemus has expanded its collections and increased its prices, aiming to secure permanent territory in the traditional luxury market. Did he worry that with this growing corporate operation—once a one-man brand, the company now employs 300 people in five countries—Jacquemus risked losing its defining point of view? “That is,” he says exhaustedly, “my nonstop job.” More than even most creative directors in Paris, he keeps his fingers on all aspects of the label, from the art on its office walls (a selection that includes Miró and the Southern French artist Aristide Maillol, both of whom he collects) to its balance sheets and daily sales. Not long ago, Porte Jacquemus also became the brand’s acting CEO. “I understood from the start that it wasn’t enough to be a designer; I also needed to be an entrepreneur,” he explains. His drive for prominence is almost fragrant in most rooms. When, a few years ago, there began to be consensus that Porte Jacquemus had proven his capacities, people wondered whether he might want a top job at one of the big French houses. “I am at a big French house,” was his bumptious retort. “I am at Jacquemus.”
This vision and bluster have generated astonishing returns. In the spring, Porte Jacquemus became the youngest designer ever named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s cultural knighthood. His brand’s retail expansion follows revenues edging past $250 million in 2022: a figure that no one except Porte Jacquemus might have fathomed a decade ago. And then there is his private life: He and Maestri, who married in 2022 (Instagram: “I SAID YES”), this past April celebrated the birth of their twins, Mia and Sun, and undertook the renovation of a grand house on the Southern French coast. (“A lot of the houses on the coast have been destroyed, with marble all over and AC and bad renovations,” he says. “This house is so simple in a way— you can imagine Peggy Guggenheim being there on a summer vacation in the ’30s, and nothing has changed. There is the smell. Even as we renovated it, we kept it as it was.”) The property is a statement of prosperous success, but it’s also partway between the towns where he and Maestri grew up. “Nothing has changed, and a lot of things have changed,” Porte Jacquemus muses. “What I’m living right now is exactly what I dreamed of, what I always wanted. It can be hard in our job, because we always want more and more, but sometimes you have to say to yourself: You are happy.”
If it is always summer in the Jacquemus world, it is especially summery in summertime, which is the brand’s high season for retail. The long days of 2024 marked the brand’s 15th anniversary: an occasion for retrospection and, for Porte Jacquemus, new ambitious goals. At last year’s Met Gala, he wore, with Bad Bunny, twin black and white backless suits of his own design in tribute to Karl Lagerfeld, with whom Porte Jacquemus had worked in 2015, when he won the LVMH special prize and received a year’s mentorship with Lagerfeld and the LVMH owner Bernard Arnault. For the red carpet, Porte Jacquemus paid intimate tribute to the designer by embroidering on his jacket a photograph that Lagerfeld had taken in 1997 from the roof patio of the Casa Malaparte, in Capri: the eccentric red wedge-shaped architectural icon on a bluff over the Mediterranean, bestknown from its appearance, decked in camera equipment, as the setting for a film-in-film (directed by Fritz Lang) in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterwork Le Mépris (in English, Contempt). The house, designed for the reclusive mid-century novelist and intellectual Curzio Malaparte, has since been closed to the public. But Malaparte’s descendants saw Porte Jacquemus’s quiet allusion to the Casa in photographs of the Met Gala that night and invited him to visit.
“I was 15 when I saw Le Mépris,” he recalls. By then, he was publishing a popular fashion blog and making occasional trips to Paris to scoop up issues of Vogue and buy what he could afford at the sales: a piece from Colette, a sneaker by Hedi Slimane. “My mother and father were, like, paysans—can I say that?” he says. “We were a farmer family. It was out of the box to be into fashion, but at the same time we were a family that loved beauty.” (He was encouraged: “No one in my family said, Oh, it will be impossible; my mother told me, Yes—you will be the most famous.”) Ultimately, their eye became his: “I wanted to talk about the French woman—not the cliché Tour Eiffel and the Parisian exoticism, but a woman in a field, a woman working in a factory, something quiet, brute, raw.” Amid his efforts to find a language for this beauty, Godard’s film, with its bold sans serif title cards and process glamour, was a revelation. “If you look at the Le Mépris trailer, you can see clearly the full Jacquemus vision,” he says. “I told the owners of the Casa Malaparte, ‘I’ve been obsessed with this house for 15 years.’ When I went there, I started to send my team pictures, and I said, ‘I want to do a show here.’ ”
And so it happens that, one day in June, not long after Jacquemus opens a small boutique on Capri, a select subgroup of the fashion world converges there to fulfill Porte Jacquemus’s Mediterranean dream. The show is of exceptional intimacy—just 40 seats—and guests are borne to the Casa, too, by the sea route, conveyed by boat around the periphery of the island to a landing so small and rocky as to be unnavigable in stormy seas. At the top of a long, uneven staircase to the house wait glasses of water, parasols for shade, and a Steadicam, swirling in, to film the guests’ arrival for the online reels.
“Benvenuto a Malaparte,” somebody says, as the lens looms close.
Inside, the corridors of the villa thrum with final preparations for the show. Maestri presides over a makeshift media command center at the top of the stairs. In the study—Malaparte’s own, with a library of French paperbacks, Giraudoux and Hölderlin and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, disintegrating in the sea air—Porte Jacquemus speaks of his visions for the brand. “When I was younger, I was just trying to do a new thing, but now I’m thinking about longevity,” he tells a few reporters. “That’s probably because I’m a dad.” Outside, on the villa’s stairs and rooftop patio, film equipment is assembled in a TikTok-era update to the scene that ended Godard’s film.
One of the last arrivals is Gwyneth Paltrow, invited by Porte Jacquemus, who had not yet met her. On this hot, humid afternoon, she has the mixed fortune of having been dressed in an impressive solid black long-sleeve below-the-knee Jacquemus culotte suit. “Gwyneth?” an attendant summons her. “So what they’re going to need you to do…” He describes a path up the Casa’s big staircase.
Paltrow says, “Good,” and, sweeping her hair behind one ear, begins slowly, majestically (for she is wearing Jacquemus heels), to mount the stairs. A melody from Le Mépris sweeps from nearby speakers. Halfway up the staircase, Paltrow turns all with the authority of a star.
“You can look straight at the orange square!” the director shouts to her. “I’m going to say ‘Action!’ and you can say ‘Bonjour.’ Okay?” She glances around.
“Camera rolling… Sound rolling… Action!”
“Bonjour,” says Paltrow.
For a moment, there is what could be described as an awed pause, before a vaping assistant breaks the spell.
“We’re going to need it louder!” he yells.
Paltrow nods and resets herself; a hush of expectation falls again.
“Bonjour,” she says, with feeling.
The show begins an hour later. Just as everyone has been seated and led to believe they’re about to see the first look, Dua Lipa races down the runway in a slim, light blue dress and, offering a wide, operatic shrug, throws her arms around Maestri, who rushes up from his seat to meet her in the camera frame—a choreographed moment that, before the audience of seated editors and grandees, silenced and studying their cuticles and phones, has an air of fulsome inauthenticity, but that plays beautifully and naturally on social media. With a swell of strings and a pale yellow dress inspired by Brigitte Bardot’s bathrobe in Le Mépris, the collection finally appears. The pale yellow dress turns over to Jacquemus’s signature single-color leisure suits and then to diaphanous draped dresses. There are cowl-like lapels and animal prints, peplum dresses and head scarves and shirts with the brand’s distinctive asymmetrical plackets. The collection, in the Jacquemus way, traces an unusual path between classic, silhouette- driven luxurywear and busy sportswear—the connoisseur in the high street and the popinjay in the club—and follows the vivid color palette of Godard’s film, whose swelling theme music plays over the final looks and the reprise parade. (“Simon’s clothes and his bags and his shoes are so distinct that you can see them from a mile off and know it’s him,” Dua Lipa notes later.) After the show, Dua Lipa embraces Gwyneth Paltrow, who embraces Porte Jacquemus, who proceeds to tell the influencers and fashion press people who surround him, “My house was built 15 years ago, not a hundred, so I’m proud.”
In person, life on the bluff had more earthbound aspects. The Casa Malaparte and its stone patios were oven-like in the humidity and the harsh midday sun, which beat directly down through stretches of not even a slight breeze—unhappy weather for those with lingering mal de mer from a choppy ride over. Paltrow spent much of the hour after her arrival rooted under the single branch of a pine tree, one of the few spots of shade in sight, and when the Jacquemus team confiscated parasols and water glasses—believed to look ugly on camera—guests began to feel like movie extras on a desert shoot. As the crowd dispersed, and I dashed off to find a cold-water tap with which to revive myself, I noticed that I was not the only audience member beating a hasty retreat. The easy life, it turns out, is hard work.
“Sometimes I’m here on the terrace,” Porte Jacquemus says, “and I’m like, Oh, Simon, enjoy this moment, because you never know what will happen next.”
That night, Jacquemus held an after-party on the Lady Adriana, a boat moored off the Capri coast, and on the shuttle bus to the docks and the speedboat bearing guests out to the vessel, a young fan in a sleeveless shirt commandeered the PA system to lead rabble-rousing cheers.
“When I say ‘Jacque-,’ you say, ‘-Mus’!” he yelled. “Jacque-!” (“-Mus!” cheered the other passengers.) “Can you give to me the J! Can you give to me the A!” And on and on, like a raucous 1 a.m. wedding shuttle—one more reminder, if anybody needed it, that, for this brand, everything was intensely felt and far beyond luxury norms.
Long before Porte Jacquemus designed his first collection, he knew the aesthetic of what he’d go on to create. “It’s, like, a tomato and a sunset, an architectural house—all those things I repeat without knowing it,” he says. But he was surprised at how quickly his audience caught on. “Even when the brand was not that famous, people were screenshotting a car, a building, or a landscape, and saying, ‘This is very Jacquemus,’ ” he says one day in Aubervilliers, to the north of Paris, where he was overseeing the shooting of a look book.
Aubervilliers itself is in some ways a tomato-and-sunset sort of place, not conventionally counted among the Île-de-France’s romantic sites: a mixture of utilitarian housing blocks and workers’ cottages interspersed with overgrown lots. But on a clear day after rain, the dooryards and the narrow streets are fragrant with summer lilacs; the overgrown grass by the river, where people of all backgrounds pause to rest, blows on the approach to a high, arcing bridge; and startling moments of bright, simple beauty emerge. Today’s photography centers on four models. Porte Jacquemus is sprawled in the corner of a blackleather couch with a fan blowing across him. He spent the previous night at Dua Lipa’s concert in Nîmes and returned to Paris on the early train with three hours’ sleep.
“Exactly the lifestyle I don’t want,” he says. “It can happen one time a month or once every two months, but not more.” Despite his party-hardy image, he’s a creature of habit: up with the babies by 7:30 a.m., on to exercise, into the office soon after, and home by evening, when he chides Maestri for keeping his laptop open. Lights are out by 10. (“I need nine hours for bed,” he says—something made possible by a complement of family and hired childcare.) Now, surrounded by staffers, he asks for a coffee.
“Just look at me,” he laments, curling into the couch.
The look book in progress is for Jacquemus’s next collection, which is already designed but won’t be unveiled to the public until January—an unorthodox lead time in the fashion industry, which doesn’t traditionally pull collections from the design studio half a year before showing them, but one that Jacquemus adopted three years ago in an innovative ploy for “see-now-buy-now”: By the time a collection is shown for the first time, all of its production, distribution, and advertising have been preloaded, allowing the brand to flip a switch and start selling the clothes online and in its shops from the moment the last model leaves the runway. (Or sooner—in the days leading up to the Capri show, Jacquemus’s shop on the island quietly teased garments and bags that would officially debut at the Casa Malaparte.) As the model Long Li—a tall, thin, clean-cut young man—walks on set in a black suit and an asymmetrical white shirt, Porte Jacquemus frowns.
“Can we do something with the collar?” he asks.
Guillaume Semerciyan, the brand’s head of creative concepts, whose job is to give depth and cultural sophistication to the Jacquemus world (“For example, for the Casa Malaparte show, I offered Simon influences from Le Mépris”), inspects the asymmetrical collar, then pops it. “Like this?” he says.
“Closed,” Porte Jacquemus says with a judicious shake of the head. “It’s just better.”
Almost from the start, Jacquemus relished opportunities to stand apart from the fashion throng. One of its first big accessory hits, in 2019, was the Le Chiquito mini bag—a purse scarcely the size of a wallet that was both admired and lampooned. The brand won’t show at the usual times and places. “He didn’t want to see the fashion people who are at all the shows at his shows,” Prigent says. Instead, Porte Jacquemus exhibits outside Fashion Week and invites his childhood idols and his grandmother. “He’s not really ‘on trend,’ ” Prigent adds. “He’s doing his thing, and there’s a certain naivete about it— like, let’s not be afraid to be kitsch.”
During a break in the shoot, Porte Jacquemus wanders the collection racks, inspecting the wares.
“It’s quite hard for me to see the product in this environment,” he says with a frown: The hangar-like studio is dimly lit and unlovely. He shrugs and takes up another men’s piece.
Over the past year, Jacquemus’s demographics have seemed to grow more adult and affluent. “It’s fun how suddenly our customer went from a one-bag customer to a ready-to-wear, big-ticket customer,” Porte Jacquemus says, glancing around the buzzing studio with satisfaction. “It’s a big change for the company.”
The next morning, a Saturday, finds Porte Jacquemus at the puces of Saint- Ouen-sur-Seine, just past the highway overpass that marks the outer edge of Paris. These famous flea markets are a village unto themselves, traced out by endless rows of stalls whose wares range from designer knockoffs (not least phony Jacquemus) to rarer vintage clothing and antiques. Unlike many prosperous and busy people, he keeps no art advisers or decorating surrogates. Prowling on his own every weekend, he now confines himself to the fancier corridors of the puces, always tracing the same path: starting with vintage clothing, moving through to furniture, stopping for a cappuccino at Van Hoos & Sons, and progressing to an indoor space for homewares. By virtue of his regularity and his compulsion to amass collections of collections (“My problem is, I love so many different styles”), he has emerged as something of a flea market celebrity whom vendors hail as he goes—to apprise him of a piece they have coming in, to commend him for a recent Jacquemus show, to give him gifts to take home to the twins. Sometimes random shoppers recognize him, too, and ask for photographs.
“I’m here so often that the market has invited me to create my own boutique,” he says. “I—ooh!” His gaze suddenly lights up. “I love this chair!”
The piece in question is a stout wicker armchair fitted, perhaps inevitably, with yellow floral cushions: the most Jacquemus-y non-Jacquemus thing in sight. Porte Jacquemus is dressed in his Saturday-morning best—white boat shoes, loose-fitting bright white trousers, and, over a heather gray hoodie, a billowing white tracksuit jacket trimmed with blue. A few minutes earlier, he made his first purchase: a striped orange jersey, 65 euros. (“Very expensive,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “But I’m obsessed with these stripes.”) “My biggest obsession is sports, in general,” he explains as he continues wandering the stalls. “I think they are the superstars of this world.” It was through efforts to sport-ify his brand that Porte Jacquemus first met Maestri, whose brother, Yoann, a French rugby player, Porte Jacquemus photographed for one of his campaigns in 2018.
“We had a super connection, and he told me about Marco,” Porte Jacquemus recalls. “So I decided to text Marco and say, ‘Hey, do you want to eat pasta tonight?’ ” Not a euphemistic come-on: Porte Jacquemus likes to cook and to eat pasta. “He said no— he was too tired, apparently. Then two or three days later, I said, ‘Okay, come in front of my building. We are going to eat pasta.’ ”
It happened that Porte Jacquemus’s 18-year-old cousin from out of town was staying with him that weekend, so he ate pasta too. “In a way, it helped, because this easy conversation with a teenager built something,” Porte Jacquemus says.
Maestri recalls, “I knew he was in fashion, and I thought, Okay, this kind of boy will be out all the time, always with 90 people at some party, somehow fancy. So I was surprised about what a simple guy he is, very connected to his family and old friends. It was the first thing that made me think: I’m into it.”
“I grew up eating every day at my grandparents’ place,” Porte Jacquemus explains. “My grandmother, my aunt, my brother, my sister, my father, and my other grandparents are all on the same road. In seven minutes, I can kiss my whole family, and except for my little cousin, who came to join my company, no one has really left the village.”
That village, Mallemort, a commune halfway between Avignon and Marseille, is the region in which his family has had roots for a long time. Porte Jacquemus and Maestri were clear about their family orientation from the start. “I think a week after we met, we spoke about whether we wanted kids,” Maestri says. “I said, ‘It’s my dream.’ He was like, ‘It’s my dream too.’ ”
The surrogacy process took three and a half years and ended in Lake Tahoe, where they spent spring for the delivery of their twins. The long road to fatherhood made Porte Jacquemus and Maestri emblems of a particular sort of persistence and parental joy—“It makes my heart grow 10 sizes when I see them with their kids,” Dua Lipa says—especially in France, where surrogate births to gay couples are still relatively uncommon.
“We brought them back and slept for 28 hours,” Porte Jacquemus says. “You realize how quickly they are changing.” In theory, it is hard to care for infants in the rush of the busiest professional year of his life, but to him it hasn’t felt that way.
“These are weird years for the fashion industry,” Porte Jacquemus says. “But being a father has brought me to something easier, because, when you have them on you, nothing else matters, in a way.”
We are in the indoor stalls, which center on fine antiques; after exclaiming over yellow and green dishware, vintage crystal, and a worn brown armchair with a loud, hard-to-love chevron pattern, he heads into one of his favorite spaces, a stall specializing in vintage handbags and Vuitton trunks. Outside, a vendor buttonholes him to ask about the twins.
“Bring them back. I love babies!”
“With pleasure!” Porte Jacquemus replies.
“My friend chides me, ‘Women don’t want children, they want babies!’ ” she adds with a laugh. “Kisses to yours.”
A certain familial intimacy shapes Porte Jacquemus’s company. “Alice, our first intern, is now head of the studio. Fabien, who sold the first collection, is now our image director. Of the first 10 people at the brand, six are still here,” Porte Jacquemus says. “I’m not going to lie and say we are a big family of 300 people—I sometimes meet people in our canteen I’ve never seen—but I still feel we can keep something very healthy in the world of fashion.” He furrows his brow. “When I hear that some new designers are so dramatic, yelling at people, I don’t understand how they do it. When I was 20, I was praying for people to help me.”
That period, when he launched his label, was perhaps the most intense of his life. His mother was 42 when she died in the car accident. He had arrived in Paris as a fashion student at the École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de la Mode a month earlier; she had been about to sell the car to finance his tuition.
“It was a dream—it was a big dream,” he says. “Suddenly, when I lost her, I understood that time was running. I became obsessed with that idea: Time is fucking running. I need to realize my dream. And instead of staying in the South with my whole family for weeks after her death, four or five days later I took a train back to Paris. My grandmother was like, ‘Simon, what are you doing? Are you okay?’ I was like, ‘I’m going back.’ I had such intense energy.” He snaps his fingers. “That was the click. I went to the fabric market and bought fabric.”
Designing was just half the work. “I imagined a campaign. I published it on Facebook and said, ‘Hello, this is my first collection, L’Hiver Froid!’ and it started to be shared, shared, shared. On Tumblr, it was shared a million times. The French press called me three or four weeks later and said, ‘We want to do an interview.’ I was like, What? This is how it started. It’s a film in a way—it was so beautiful. I wanted to have the attention of everyone. I was obsessed. I was in front of the Dior show manifesting with my friend. I was at a Vogue festival in the Avenue Montaigne with my first collection, screaming in thestreet, ‘Hey, watch my work!’ I didn’t have any other option. I needed to be seen and in this world.”
We are nearing the end of Porte Jacquemus’s path through the puces. He has slowed his pace slightly with the weight of memory. “I always say, I didn’t lose my mother; she’s with me. That’s why I left so quickly and I had such a strong energy—I didn’t feel alone.” At his mother’s death, he says, he’d left her just one thing: an issue of Vogue.”
In September, Porte Jacquemus visits New York to oversee final renovations to his first American storefront, housed within a clapboard edifice on the corner of Spring and Wooster streets. “It’s a weird building, but it’s full of daylight, and I love the area,” he says, with a glance around. The ground floor, which will show mostly Jacquemus accessories, is still a dusty mess of exposed steel infrastructure and dangling wires. The more intimate upstairs salon, where clothes will be browsed and tried on, is still jammed with ladders. But a vision has been planted—as surely as a lemon tree. There will be Pierre de Bourgogne limestone on the floor; a cutaway window along the Wooster side of the building, for light; and a hand-hammered iron banister tracing the swirl of the staircase—a wink, as Porte Jacquemus puts it, to the mid-century Mediterranean architect Jacques Couëlle. “It’s going to look like a mix of the South of France and New York,” he says. The first piece of banister has just arrived, and, finding harp music on his phone, he video-records himself strumming the slender iron balusters to match the sound of the plucked strings. The video, which took him seconds to make, is fit for social media.
This New York visit is the first time Porte Jacquemus has been away from his twins for more than a day. The morning is breezy and temperate, and he wanders out onto an access ramp on Wooster Street, hoisting himself onto the banister: the perfect position from which to enjoy both the passing SoHo foot traffic and the pleasures of self-advertising in a fashion neighborhood far from home. Three young women stop to pay tribute (“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m such a big fan of your work—you are literally such an inspiration”), and others display the New York City tick of rearranging their faces and speeding up as they pass: a tacit, unobtrusive recognition of his growing fame.
“I’ve never thought that someone in Seoul is thinking differently than someone in Paris, because we’re all watching the same media now,” Porte Jacquemus explains. “But Americans love my story and get it—in America, it’s very appreciated when you’ve done everything by yourself.”
For years, he told the press that opening a storefront was foolish for a young brand, an invitation to be swallowed up by overhead commitments and pointless in an age of digital ordering and the grands magasins. He still thinks that, but now feels big enough to face the risk. “I didn’t want a cute, cool store in Le Marais,” he said. “I wanted Avenue Montaigne”— the center of high fashion in Paris. He got it. Now a SoHo boutique, expensively designed and expensive to maintain, is the next step. “Since I was 18 years old, I’ve stuck to my position,” he says. “I’ve said no to so many things in life, because I have something else in mind.”
At the moment, interior-decorating the SoHo shop, he feels caught between the goal of homey Mediterranean taste and the imperatives of a high-functioning retail space.
“I want to make it more personal—like an old wood table next to a vintage couch,” he says and knits his brow. “I’m still not happy. There’s work to do.” He observes the construction in process, dusty and imperfect but, from the crisp carpentry to a set of Jacquemus-green dumpsters by the door, touched by curious beauty. “I need to show my product in my environment,” he goes on, focusing his gaze. “It’s about making people feel they’re in my house.”
In this story: hair, Diego Da Silva; makeup, Niamh Quinn; tailor, Chris Grison; produced by Tann Services; set design, Hella Keck.
Interiors throughout photographed by Matthieu Salvaing; for photos by Matthieu Salvaing: creative consultant, Sophie Pinet.
