How Jacquemus Became the Main Character of French Fashion

Simon Porte Jacquemus is about to tell us a secret. It’s early June and he’s with a small group of journalists in a villa perched on a cliff on the Italian island of Capri, where the French fashion designer is about to stage a runway show for his namesake brand, Jacquemus. There’s a fierce sun baking the runway outside, which is, in a way, very Jacquemus, synonymous as the label is with modern Mediterranean style. A few rooms over, models are getting their hair touched up and pulling on bright, leisurely looks. But first, an appearance designed to make the internet go wild will unfold. Porte Jacquemus knows he shouldn’t spoil it, but some names are too iconic not to drop.

“Gwyneth,” he says in his syrupy southern French accent. He pronounces the name like Gwin-nett, but there’s no mistaking who he’s referring to. Porte Jacquemus pauses and wiggles his eyebrows. “She is coming.”

From the window we can see the impossibly blue Tyrrhenian Sea stretching to the horizon. Somewhere out there is a speedboat ferrying Gwyneth Paltrow—the pure embodiment of holiday chic—to her front-row seat. One journalist lets out an astonished giggle. In the luxury fashion industry’s escalating war for celebrity cameos, brands go to enormous lengths to lock down top-tier names at their shows, sending private jets, cutting million--dollar checks, and dangling even more-lucrative endorsement deals. Porte Jacquemus doesn’t pay celebs to attend his events, even those held well off the beaten path, as most of them are, and yet he was about to pull off the coup of the season: Gwyneth Paltrow at the height of a Talented Mr. Ripley cultural revival and more widespread Goop-mania, sitting front row at his plucky indie label’s splashy destination show.

Porte Jacquemus, who grew up near Marseille, founded the brand in 2009 at the age of 19. He had just dropped out of fashion school, and subsequently lost his beloved mother in a car accident. Jacquemus was her name before marriage. Though he’s fond of discussing his love of couture and dressmaking, Porte Jacquemus is as much an image maker as a designer, harnessing social media hype to beat fashion houses with limitless marketing budgets at their own game. From the get-go, the brand’s most important product was Porte Jacquemus himself, who posted profligately about his life on Instagram—which he still actively helps run—painting a picture of his nascent brand with sun-kissed selfies and becoming almost by accident an early lifestyle influencer on the platform. The official Jacquemus account now commands 6.5 million followers, some of whom regularly complain that the founder doesn’t post enough anymore. “People love to see a personal thing,” he tells me. “My team always says, ‘Hey, people write to us. They say, Oh, we miss him.’ ”

“He’s cringe-free,” says Lamia Lagha, an early employee and one of Porte Jacquemus’s closest friends, who met him when they were both working on the retail floor of a Paris department store. “He believes so much in himself. It’s not even arrogance, it’s like: It’s going to happen. It’s just going to happen. And when you have this mindset, you have nothing to lose. People were judging him back in the day, they said he was making too much noise. He was like, I don’t care.”

With Jacquemus, noise is the point. My first memory of the brand is from around 2019, when Kylie Jenner teased a Jacquemus sun hat so big it looked like a flying saucer made of straw had landed on her head. The chapeau immediately went viral, which spawned a backlash that only increased its virality. In 2020 the designer applied the same blunt principles to a line of purses so tiny as to be practically useless, which again went supernova, becoming an indelible if polarizing product of the social media age that blurred the line between brilliance and absurdity.

“He brings joy, fun, and ease in an industry where many brands and designers are trying to be too serious, too intellectual, and too calculated,” says Beka Gvishiani, a.k.a. the fashion arbiter behind the Instagram account Style Not Com, of Porte Jacquemus’s popularity on social media. In the past couple of years, Jacquemus has steadily climbed the Lyst Index’s quarterly ranking of the industry’s hottest brands (calculated based on data pulled from e-commerce and social media platforms), leapfrogging mega-maisons like Gucci, Moncler, Balenciaga, and Louis Vuitton to the seventh spot on the leaderboard at the time of writing.

Models Dara Gueye and Mia Armstrong preview the Jacquemus spring-summer 2025 collection.

Once the room in Capri has settled down, I ask Porte Jacquemus how he landed his latest celebrity scoop. He has a way of bringing not just massively famous people into his world but doing so at the right time for the resulting photos to ricochet around the internet.

Gwyneth doesn’t go to many fashion shows, I note.

“Just mine!” Porte Jacquemus announces with a grin. “No, I mean, I think she loves the brand,” he says, before adding that they haven’t met. “Celebrities,” he says, “they see the fun and they probably want to be a part of it.”

Later, when I find Paltrow waiting for the show to begin under the shade of an umbrella and ask her why she decided to attend, her reply reveals that Porte Jacquemus was close but not quite right. “You know, my son is getting very into fashion—he’s obsessed,” Paltrow says. “I mentioned I got an invitation to Jacquemus, and my son said, Mom, you have to go. So I was like, Okay!” After the show, a beaming Porte Jacquemus embraces her like a lifelong friend while photographers snap away.

Once derided as a selfie designer, these days Porte Jacquemus is used to being embraced back. Fifteen years in, Porte Jacquemus says his brand is now the largest independent fashion label in Paris. In 2023 it did $280 million in sales, and the company is in the midst of an aggressive retail rollout that has landed flagship stores on primo boulevards in New York and London, with Los Angeles and Miami up next. “Everything seems to be going in the place that I pictured,” he says. “I always had the ambition, and I pictured this since I was 15 years old.”

The Jacquemus aesthetic is sunny and mellow, with a lighthearted spirit, as if a haughty French designer brand has been pushed into a pool. Porte Jacquemus describes the vibe of the brand as “welcoming,” and his clothes are affable and fun enough for Travis Kelce, for whom a beachy Jacquemus button-up has become a date-night staple. But they are also just close enough to the edge of fashion for the likes of Bad Bunny. It’s a clever and distinctly modern versatility. Jacquemus is fashionable, but it’s not particularly complicated.

The Jacquemus woman is based on his mother: a beautiful woman with brown hair and highlights from the sun. But who, I ask at one point, is the Jacquemus man?

“I mean, I think it’s very me,” he says. “I hate to say that…. But yeah, I think it’s someone very chic every day, but at the same time fun and fresh. Someone chic with a big smile.”

On a weekday morning early this September in Manhattan, Porte Jacquemus is standing on a street corner in SoHo. Behind him is his first Stateside retail store. He has a distinct glow about him, like he’s just stepped off a private jet straight from Saint-Tropez and brought along an elevated UV index. In front of him are two young women in a Jeep, who screeched to a halt immediately upon spotting the French fashion designer. He pretends not to notice them, mouths agape, pointing their phones in his direction. He is very popular in the US, where business, he tells me, has never been better.

With more fan encounters afoot, Porte Jacquemus suggests we duck into the store, a tangle of rebar and wires that would soon resemble a shoppable beachside bungalow when it opened in October. He loves interior design and is intimately involved in the look of his stores. “I never buy fashion anymore. Really, I’m more obsessed with art,” he says. Still, he’s lending his taste to his new Spring Street space, which will be filled with potted lemon trees, Pierre de Bourgogne stone tile, and furniture he’s shipping over from his own house. “The goal of this shop is to be a bit different than other stores, to feel more at home,” he tells me. “I don’t want it to feel like everything was designed to sell a bag.”

Porte Jacquemus prides himself on being a savvy storyteller, and he’s especially well-versed in his own narrative. The new store, he argues, carries a deep significance that transcends commerce. “Being here for five minutes, I’ve been stopped by everyone, like, ‘Oh my God. We can’t wait for the opening,’ ” he says. That’s because, as he puts it, “It’s not just an opening…. They’re following a person who is making his dreams come true.”

Perhaps, I point out, the United States has embraced his very French brand because in a way he represents an American story of self-made success. “Yes, it’s Ralph Lauren,” he replies, adding, “I was working in the grand magasin in Paris when I was 18 years old, so yeah, it’s totally that.” (Lauren famously sold his ties at Bloomingdale’s in the early days.) “The sales assistant who became the boss of his [own] company. For an American, it’s refreshing, I think.”

When Porte Jacquemus plowed a runway through a Provençal lavender field in June 2019 (left), it created a viral fashion spectacle. He almost outdid himself in Capri (right) for the brand’s 15th anniversary this June. BUREAU FUTURE AND BUREAU BETAK COURTESY OF JACQUEMUS

BUREAU BETAK COURTESY OF JACQUEMUS

The comparison might strike some as overripe, but as Ralph Lauren embodied the essence of his time, Porte Jacquemus just might embody something about our image-obsessed age. There’s the fact that he’s got rugby player limbs and a poreless, leading-man face. With the photogenic quality comes a charisma so strong that it jumps off a screen and can overwhelm in person. The stylist and editor Mel Ottenberg can clearly recall his introduction to Porte Jacquemus at a Paris showroom around the time of the brand’s first show. “I remember being like, Oh my God, you’re a famous fashion designer. You’re going to become really famous and successful. He had the bravado and the charm and the looks, and there was a language to the clothes that is still there. It was easy to walk in and see the full picture.” In Capri, a model who frequently works with the brand put it to me more bluntly: “It’s easy to forget when you’re a model, but Simon is hot.”

Today, Porte Jacquemus is wearing a blindingly white T-shirt, faded green jeans, white Top-Siders, and dark Wayfarers. In a blazer and tie, I look like I’m here to make sure the construction is up to code; he looks like he’s having lunch at Le Club 55. Though he’s much less eccentric than many famous fashion designers, his worship of the star at the center of our solar system is almost religious. At one point, he turns his face to the sky and the early-fall rays sparkle on his perpetually high-August tan. “Ugh, I am dreaming,” he whispers, exhaling like a meditation app narrator. In April 2024 he and husband Marco Maestri welcomed baby twins named Mia and, you guessed it, Sun.

I ask about his summer. I can only assume it was a perfect collision of boats and beaches and striped towels and Speedos, an endless wave of leisure, an embodiment of the brand’s luxury aspiration: a life as sexy as it is simple, surrounded by beautiful people and things.

To my surprise, Porte Jacquemus couldn’t be more excited that the leaves are on the cusp of changing. “It was quite a long summer,” he says, sighing. It turns out that he bristles at the notion, not exactly refuted by the brand image he’s carefully built, that he’s perpetually on holiday: “I love working, so I was quite bored. I prefer a long weekend to a long vacation.” This apparently does not apply to his friends, who packed the house in the South of France he shares with Maestri and their twins. At one point, they had 19 guests, and there was a lunch where Porte Jacquemus asked the table who was planning to leave that day. He mimics a large group of French people hemming and hawing and avoiding eye contact. “I’m like, ‘Please, guys, I can’t organize the cucumber salad for all of you!’ ” When people enter the world of Jacquemus, they don’t often want to leave.

Back outside, we look across the street at his new neighbor, a sprawling Chanel boutique that’s also being renovated. “I was happy to have Chanel in front of us, because it’s the most beautiful house,” he says.

Porte Jacquemus has long seemed destined to take over a bigger company in need of new energy. Ten years ago, when he would hardly have been recognized on a SoHo street corner, there was chatter that he would succeed Alexander Wang at Balenciaga, and more recently, rumors that he would parachute in to rescue Givenchy, each round of speculation more infuriating to his critics—and encouraging to his stans—than the last.

Porte Jacquemus grew up far from such Parisian luxury ateliers, in the humble hamlet of Mallemort near the French Riviera. His entire extended family lived along the same road in the farming community. Life was uncomplicated and pleasant. “I had a beautiful childhood,” Porte Jacquemus recalls fondly. But it was, as he puts it, “Totally countryside. Creativity on my side came from the fact that I was so bored.” Whether they believed it or not, his family assured young Simon that, sure, he could break into the faraway fashion world. “I was always trying to create a personnage, I was obsessed with doing fashion, and nobody ever told me it was impossible,” he says. When he was bullied at school for being gay, his mother assured him that his tormentors were simply jealous because he was a star. She would tell him that he was going to be the top fashion designer in the world. “She would say, You’re going to be the best one…the best one,” he says. His father was just as accepting. “I always had this figure of him like a farmer boy,” Porte Jacquemus says, but he was also in a cross-dressing punk band, a “star of the village” who sang and wrote poems.

Simon fashioned himself into a star as soon as he could. By the time he arrived at the École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de la Mode in Paris, he dressed like a Hedi Slimane model in Repettos, slim black jeans, and bold sunglasses. He still recalls exactly when he became the cool kid back home after he moved to a new school as a teenager. “I was like”—and here he exhales dramatically—“finally!” he says. “It was the best time.”

An intentional flyaway collar brings the signature Jacquemus insouciance to even the most formal looks, like this one from the spring-summer 2025 collection.

He entered university in September of 2009 with a head full of ambition. But in class, the curriculum seemed too old-school for a student obsessed with the minimalism of Jil Sander, so he left in October. A month later, his mother died in the accident. He went home for five days of mourning, then got right back on the train to Paris, despite his grandmother’s pleas to take more time. But not before he left a copy of Vogue in her casket. “I told her, ‘I’m going to be in Vogue,’ ” Porte Jacquemus recalls. “Crazy. When I think of that, I find it cute, but at the same time it was insane, the energy.” If he believed in himself before, now his focus was singular. He became, as he puts it, “a machine.”

At the time, the Paris fashion scene was not exactly hospitable to a dropout from the small-town south. “There were only the old houses,” recalls Lagha. “We called it la famille. It was really hard to get into fashion if you came from nowhere.” But he was also able to take advantage of the staid state of affairs. Paris was primed for newness, and Porte Jacquemus’s cheerful vision swam directly against the dark, conceptual currents coursing through fashion at the time. With few resources but a lot of ideas, he started making noise, taking his simple, chic early garments—the less construction, the cheaper—and putting them on an emerging crop of Paris cool girls like Jeanne Damas instead of on models. Rather than try to go through the institutional press, Porte Jacquemus and his friends shot twee short films and scrappy look books and published them on Facebook and Tumblr and Pinterest, where these refreshingly real fashion moments routinely went viral.

He discovered an aptitude for performance too. In 2011 the Givenchy Rottweiler tee was all the rage and Porte Jacquemus was frustrated with how difficult it was for him to get mainstream attention. So he and his friends put on their sunny daywear and crashed a Vogue festival on the ritzy Avenue Montaigne, marching and chanting through the street in a mock protest against, seemingly, the moody, exclusive status quo. A huge crowd, press included, joined them, and his confidence swelled. In the years that followed, when he started displaying his line in showrooms in Paris and visitors told him it looked good, he was known to reply with: I know.

Porte Jacquemus channeled his guerrilla instincts again when he launched menswear in 2018. “I decided the same way I decided to do my first show. [Back then] I called my grandmother and told her I was going to do a show in three weeks. She said, Okay, but you don’t have money.” Years later he drew on that same early energy and made a small collection of cargo shorts, muscle-baring knit sweaters, and floral-print shirts, dressed a gaggle of beefcakes, and paraded them down a beach on the outskirts of Marseille. Vogue—by this point very much on board—called the straightforward and lighthearted debut “a success, not just because Porte Jacquemus has already identified a persuasive, personal point of view, but because it seems to come so naturally to him.” From then on, he moved his shows off the official calendar and outside of Paris, into a jet stream of attention.

In a sign of confidence in his menswear business, he’s returning to the Paris Fashion Week men’s calendar in January. Men’s is the brand’s fastest--growing category. “There is something quite fresh about the men’s collection,” Porte Jacquemus says, adding that he thinks a lot of prominent fans are introduced to the brand by their girlfriends. “I’m mentioned in, like, 10 rap songs!” he crows.

While we’re together in New York, Porte Jacquemus is the focal point of one of the juiciest fashion rumors in some time. The digital news site Puck had just reported that Porte Jacquemus was heading to London to make a pitch for the biggest job in fashion: creative director of Chanel. The luxury behemoth that made close to $20 billion in revenue in 2023 had been searching for a new designer since Karl Lagerfeld successor Virginie Viard abruptly departed in June, and Porte Jacquemus’s name was floating to the top of the supposed short list.

Typically, Porte Jacquemus sniffs at reports that he’s on the hunt for a promotion, deflecting about how he is “not doing this so I can work at a big house,” as he told me when the Givenchy gossip was swirling in early 2024. “Jacquemus,” the line goes, “is my big house.”

But as we look at the expanse of boarded---up Chanel windows, and I start to ask if there is any truth to the rumors, he politely cuts me off: “I’m here,” he says. “There are always rumors about me, so I don’t know what to say. I’m happy that I’m hearing this rumor, and it’s a good sign as well for my brand and for my career. This means that I’m going in the right direction.”

Ultimately, it was announced in December that the Chanel job would go to Matthieu Blazy, the French-Belgian creative director of Bottega Veneta. Whether or not there was any truth to the rumors that Porte Jacquemus was also up for the job, he makes one final observation during our conversation that amuses him: Every time he has a speculated promotion, he notes, it’s bigger than the last.

Later in the fall, I meet Porte Jacquemus at his office in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. It’s the middle of Fashion Week and the city has been enveloped with a miserable gray drizzle, but in here the sandy walls and reddish clay parquet tiles and potted olive trees suggest an expensive destination spa.

He has a lot on his to-do list today: The NYC opening is a couple weeks away, and his nanny is out sick, so Porte Jacquemus is watching the twins later. He’s also assumed the duties of CEO of the brand, a position left vacant since the fashion exec Bastien Daguzan departed in December 2023, and is in the thick of designing the forthcoming spring collection. “I know designers that are not at work every day,” he says. “I’m at work every day. From Monday to Friday. A lot of times I arrive not first, but close.”

After his trip to New York, Porte Jacquemus and a small group of aides flew to San Francisco to attend the iPhone 16 keynote presentation at Apple HQ. Afterward, he met Tim Cook, which I only know about because I saw a photo of a nonchalant Porte Jacquemus posing with the grinning Apple CEO on Instagram. As he settles into an antique chair in his office, I ask him to tell me about the visit. He smiles and shoots me a wink.

The visit, he says, “was a dream. It’s almost surreal, the place.” A publicist sitting quietly nearby interjects to note that Apple had reached out to them. The only other brand there, Porte Jacquemus slyly adds, was Hermès. Porte Jacquemus and his team strolled through the apple orchard at the center of the company’s space-station-like Cupertino headquarters, and he explained to Cook that the iPhone changed his life. “ ‘I could do pictures of my models and of my life, and people could follow my journey,’ ” he recalls saying. “Of course, like everyone else. But I think I was the first brand to use it so strongly, and to become so popular.” Nowadays, even though he can hire just about any artful fashion photographer, Porte Jacquemus insists on having his campaigns photographed using iPhones. “People feel so much closer to it,” he says. And by extension, they feel closer to him.

I joke that I could imagine a sensational Jacquemus destination show right there in the center of the utopian tech garden—and then almost feel bad for chuckling. Why not? “I mean, it was made for us,” he replies.

I ask him if there’s an Apple project in the works. He tiptoes carefully around the question but can’t help dropping a few tantalizing hints. “I don’t know where we’re going to land, to be honest,” he says, “but we are on it right now. I’m sure I can’t really say, but we would love. And they love the brand. But let’s see, we are in discussion.”

Before I go back out into the rain, I ask him if he has an update on Chanel since we last spoke. As his PR rep jokingly squeals that the interview is over, Porte Jacquemus flings his head back in exaggerated exasperation.

“No, I have nothing to say,” he finally replies with a shrug. Of course, he doesn’t actually mind being asked. It’s a point of pride. “As I told you,” he continues, “it’s always a good sign to be in a rumor, and it’s flattering to see so many people talk about it. I think it’s the question of the Fashion Week. People really believe in that scenario.”

Okay, I say. Other people really believe it, but do you believe it?

This time, there is no performative protest. He looks away and then smiles, and doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The Jacquemus man believes in himself.

Samuel Hine is GQ’s senior fashion writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of GQ with the title “How Jacquemus Became the Main Character of French Fashion”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Fanny Latour-Lambert
Grooming by Ruben Masoliver
Hair by Anne Sofie Begtrup using Oribe Hair Care
Makeup by Kamila Vay Using Glossier
Manicure by Sylvie Vacca at Call My Agent
Produced by Agnes Bouille and Sasha Desrousseaux at Psychic Productions
Location: Jacquemus Headquarters, Paris