LIFE in the SUNSHINE
Earlier this summer, Simon Porte Jacquemus brought his tenth-anniversary fashion show to the middle of a lavender field in Provence. He cheekily titled the collection “Le Coup de Soleil,” or “The Sunburn,” and sent out bottles of branded sunscreen in the invitation. A 1,600-foot-long brightfuchsia runway was cut through rows of flowers, streaking across the groomed hillside like a neon highlighter. If you search #provence on Instagram, you will find 3.4 million photos of basically the same field, but without the hyperreal pink, which was inspired by both an iPad painting by David Hockney and the work of artists Christo and Jeanne Claude. The effect was FOMO-gasmic on social media—an enchanted image of France by an adorable young French designer who embodies the beguiling ideal of a carefree and well-tanned garçon.
Summer is at the heart of Jacquemus, the designer and his brand. As a child, he was nicknamed Mr. Sun, and this anniversary show was timed to what is still called “cruise” season. And it was you’d-betternot-be-wearing-much hot: On the day of the show, it was over 90 degrees without a cloud in the sky. Models were falling. Cell service was scarce. Same for bottled water, briefly. Celebrities like Emily Ratajkowski, editors like Emmanuelle Alt of French Vogue, and the designer’s entire extended family were all given more sunscreen and parasols upon arrival. Actually, wait a minute … Where is la grand-mère de Jacquemus? Someone forgot to pick her up. The show started about an hour late, just as the sun began to fade.
“It was really like Fyre Festival,” Jacquemus told me afterward with a laugh. “But only for, like, ten minutes.” His skin was the color of a baguette, and his shirt unbuttoned to reveal a bountiful patch of chest hair. “Everyone was like, ‘Ahhh!’ But me, I was like—” He theatrically inhaled and exhaled. “I went for a walk in the lavender.” Later that night, pizza and bottomless rosé were served, and he danced under the stars with his boyfriend, Marco Maestri, who looks rather a lot like him and is the brother of the French rugby player Yoann Maestri, halfnaked star of the recent Jacquemus menswear campaign.
Better to not think too much about how this glorious heat wave was also evidence of climate change. “Sun in your face, sun in your face, sun in your face,” the designer told me, clapping his hands like a windup toy for emphasis. “I’ve been like this since the beginning. I’m not doing, like, an end-of-the-world show.”
Jacquemus, 29, was raised in the village of Mallemort—population around 6,000—not far from here. He likes to say that his barefoot country upbringing instilled in him a sense of “naïveté.” He uses that word a lot. Even his Instagram bio—he has 1.3 million followers and was a Tumblr native before that—reads like it was written by a 10-year-old: “My name is Simon Porte Jacquemus, I love blue and white, stripes, sun, fruit, life, poetry, Marseilles, and the ’80s.”
Critics sometimes roll their eyes: He’s been called both “pretentious” and a “bumpkin,” strong on pithy branding but short on craft. The Financial Times recently mulled whether Jacquemus should be better thought of as a designer or an influencer and decided maybe he’s … both, and that’s very right-now of him. Certainly, he’s a person who makes fashion for influencers, including Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber, formerly Hailey Baldwin. (A recent campaign was done in collaboration with the Instagramfamous artist of louche, yet somehow innocent, self-display Chloe Wise.) However much it is part of his authentic self, or just the discipline of a young man raised on the mantra of having a “personal brand,” his social-media optimism is what sets him and his clothing apart. He doesn’t take things too seriously, or seem to suffer for his art. Even in person, he’ll tell you how he’s “realizing his dreams.” How he’s “very in love.” And how his “only goal,” in work and in life, is “being ’app-ee.”
His parents were farmers—his mother specializing in carrots, his father spinach. But Jacquemus was clearly too charming, too ambitious, and too cute for the non-hashtag version of life on the farm. (He was cast in a Carambar’s-candy campaign as a kid, and Karl Lagerfeld once called him “rather pretty” on the subject of his work.) Instead, Jacquemus dreamed of glamour, obsessing over French cinema and studying copies of Italian Vogue. At the age of 8, he wrote a letter to Jean Paul Gaultier asking to be his stylist, arguing that it would make for good press. On weekends, Jacquemus sold vegetables on the side of the road. He learned to spot tourists from Paris, who were his frequent customers. It’s a lesson he’s held onto.
Soon he made his way to the city to attend the École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de la Mode, at 18, in 2008. He quickly learned that the Parisian woman didn’t seem to enjoy herself much. “I was like, Okay, not at all,” Jacquemus remembers, scrunching his nose. “Not. At. All. They don’t have the smile. I have no interest in people who don’t have a smile.” Maybe his mission has been to change that.
three days before the Jacquemus anniversary show in Provence, a gaggle of casually dressed employees could be found laughing and smoking cigarettes outside his new studio on Rue de Monceau in Paris. He moved to the new location from Canal Saint Martin a few weeks earlier in June—coincidentally on his late mother’s birthday, which he only realized the morning of.
The door to the Jacquemus operation is a classic French blue but more teal than others on the block. I entered to find a
lemon tree thriving inside the large white atrium. The secretary also had one on his desk and fondled it like a stress ball. Jacquemus was upstairs in the middle of a model fitting and excused himself to hit play on a pop-lullaby soundtrack via his iPhone. Sunlight poured in through large windows, bouncing off his gold jewelry as he gestured with his large, thick fingers. Did I mention he has blue eyes?
“I didn’t choose this location; I had a crush on the location,” he tells me with a grin. “I visited, and I saw all the little balconies and the garden, and I was like: This is not Paris.” When I ask him if the grand staircase and high ceilings give his operation gravitas, he scoffs. “No! Lightness!”
Over the past few years, Jacquemus has doubled his staff from 30 to 60. Almost everyone, he says, has remained since the beginning, including his ex-roommate, Fabien Joubert, who now serves as the brand’s commercial director. Sales have doubled every year since 2017 as well and are supposedly on track to hit $20 million by the end of 2019.
Things are going so well that rumors of Jacquemus being acquired by a larger conglomerate, like Puig or LVMH, circulate every so often, along with theories of a secret backer. But when I ask about them, he maintains he’s still independent and is “not looking” for any investors, or for that matter looking to helm a bigger label (there was also a rumor he was being considered for Celine). It’s possible no one is knocking on his door, or he’s been passed up for other, more experienced names. But Jacquemus seems focused on keeping it in the family. “If you want to do everything sincerely, how can you leave your own building?” he asks. “It’s not about more, more, more. My generation is going to take care of themselves.” When things get stressful, he does karaoke: “Any song by Céline Dion,” he tells me.
Which isn’t to say he doesn’t let his brand slip sometimes: He admits that “there’s always something melancholic about my work.” But he wouldn’t go into it.
Because Jacquemus refuses outside help, the company is still a relatively scrappy operation—one that used to fulfill orders to its 300-something global retailers “quite late within the delivery window, which commercially is not ideal,” a forgiving Moda Operandi buyer told me. Runway producer Alexandre de Betak explained that they kept the budget for his anniversary show “exceptionally small.” His team spent the weekend before clearing the wheat and lavender fields themselves, and there was “absolutely no plan B” to account for bad weather.
“If the creativity of the way we show is good enough, then it’s fine that we’re far away, at the wrong time, with a very small audience, because it will go viral,” de Betak added. “I think that’s what happened with the show in Provence.”
“There’s an expression in France, saying that you put the donkey before … Uh, no, you put the donkey after … Do you know this?” Jacquemus asks.
The cart before the horse?
Something like that. “I always think that way,” he continues. “For me, it was the ten-year anniversary, so it was important to say loudly: I have a big house, and it’s Jacquemus. It’s not anything else, and I own it. I’m here.”