Self-Made

How Simon Porte Jacquemus, a 20-something with no formal fashion training, redefined French style.

WORDS: BETHAN HOLT

The notion of 'French chic' is the stuff of fashion legend – or of cliché. It's a phrase that typically conjures images of a woman in skinny jeans, a half-unbuttoned silk shirt and a sharp blazer; hair is insouciantly mussed-up, eyes smudged with kohl. The effect is elegant, casual and laced with sex and a soupçon of froideur - but it's also a tired stereotype that is just begging to be freshened up.

Enter Simon Porte Jacquemus, a smiling 29-year-old in jeans and Timberland boots, from the quiet town of Mallemort, just inland from Marseille. The Jacquemus look is all about sunshine, style and cheer, a jolly world of exuberant sass and sensuality that you want to be part of the moment you discover it. The designer's name crackled away on the fashion landscape for a few years thanks to some bright, playful conceptual collections that made him a promising part of Paris's burgeoning new talent scene.

Then there was some completely wantable shirting, which convinced that this was a label whose pieces you could actually, you know, wear.

But then last summer – pop! – any It girl worth her sea-salty hair was shaded beneath Jacquemus's enormous (1ft high, 3ft wide) La Bomba straw hat. Rihanna posed in it for Vogue Paris, and Danish model and actress Emma Leth even employed hers as an alternative to a veil for her wedding, styling it with a sheer lace Jacquemus dress.

By this point, Jacquemus was already in a class of his own, confounding preconceptions about the 'right' way to go about creating a modern fashion brand. But this was a moment that confirmed the fact he was probably on to something with his talkingpoint accessories and hot summer take on French style – despite having neither formal training nor any backing from a major conglomerate.

"It was important to me to remind people that France is not Paris," Jacquemus says when we meet at La Montgolfière, a Parisian members' club in an old hot-air balloon factory, where everyone is drinking flat whites and tapping away at Macs. "You can be from somewhere else and still say something in French. It was important to have a French identity but not Parisian."

Jacquemus's aesthetic and ideal come from a blend of being an early adopter of all things digital, and his adoration for his mother, Valérie, who was killed in a car accident when she was 42 and he was 18.

"She could be anything. One day, she might do a total look in pink, the next day she would wear a vintage linen "grandmother" dress," Jacquemus remembers. "She was really creative, so our house was full of surprises. I had a wall full of leaves from Cuba – she did art with whatever she had. We are from a farming family, but she was always super inspiring."

It's not only Valérie's look that Jacquemus draws on, but her joie de vivre, too. "She was always smiling and having fun. When I started, I wanted to do this childish woman, someone whose age you can't define. I grew up with this woman who was very naive. It has become more sophisticated as the label has grown, but you don't ever feel far away from the Jacquemus woman."

He admits that for a while he was so obsessed with paying tribute to his mother that he perhaps lost sight of other kinds of women, especially when it came to choosing models.

It took his half-sister Maëlle, who is half-French, half-Algerian, to ask why he never cast girls who looked like her for him to realise that he needed to redress the balance – "I'd just got so blocked," he says.

There's a jaunty vivaciousness to Jacquemus's approach; it's tasteful, but it doesn't take itself too seriously – qualities that can be rare on planet fashion. "It was not always easy to be this kind of designer in Paris – to design a happy brand and stay happy within myself," admits Jacquemus, who commissioned the artist Chloe Wise to paint sexychic-camp scenes of the south of France to 'celebrate the beauty and humour in bountifulness' for his spring/summer campaign.

It was not always easy to be this kind of designer in Paris – to design a happy brand and stay happy within myself"

"Some people were embarrassed by me, saying I was too happy. It's because I was so young and didn't know any rules, I just wanted to make it happen."

Although he briefly enrolled at the Paris fashion school Esmod, the sudden death of his mother prompted Jacquemus to get on with realising his own label rather than taking a well trodden path. "I passed a woman making curtains in Montmartre; I asked her how much a skirt would be and she said EUR150, I said, how about EUR100? And that's how I did my first collection. It was spontaneous," he says. "A year after arriving in Paris, I was doing fashion. I didn't know any rules but I didn't have any bad rules, which you can learn inside a big system."

Jacquemus, who runs his own Instagram account with 800,000 followers, had crafted his idea about what his label could look like through hours spent online, meeting muses such as Jeanne Damas, who is now part of a coterie epitomising a carefree, vintage-referenced French way of dressing (think Jane Birkin in the Serge Gainsbourg years).

"For me, the idea of what my website would look like was clear. Every collection would have a title referencing Jean-Luc Godard. I knew I had to tell a story, but on the rest, I was so naive," he reflects. "When I think about that period now, I think, wow. I was only 19. I had no parents who knew about the fashion business."

Snootiness doesn't appear in the Jacquemus mindset. The French can be dismissive of Côte d'Azur style – the penchant for white and fake tans – but it's a look Jacquemus has mined and reinvented of late. "I hope it's not vulgaaaaaire," he whispers, confident that he has the power to make it anything but.

"I had some hard reactions when I started to publish pictures on Instagram of Kendall Jenner wearing Jacquemus. People said, "It's killed the brand, blah blah..." I think it's because I was posting something less radical. But I was so happy. I just thought, "Wow, Kendall is wearing my hat on a yacht in Saint-Tropez, that's so mega,"" he says, laughing.

I didn't know any rules but I didn't have any bad rules, which you can learn inside a big system"

In the early years of the label, Jacquemus, who now employs 55 people, worked in the Comme des Garçons store, where he found a mentor in Adrian Joffe, president of the company (and husband of its visionary creative director, Rei Kawakubo) and of Dover Street Market. "

At 21, everyone was looking at me as the cute guy from the south of France; he just looked at me as a designer, which was so important to me. He bought the collection for Dover Street Market, which changed how people saw my brand; it's one of the most beautiful stores in the world."

"Simon started gaining our attention with his unusual use of architectural shapes, done in a very couture way but at surprisingly contemporary price," notes Elizabeth von der Goltz, global buying director at Net-a-Porter, where his alternative tailoring, draped dresses and detailed tops are all bestsellers. "It's no surprise that he has garnered a cult following," she adds.

Of course, there's a 2019 sequel to the La Bomba hat: the Le Grand Baci bag – an enormous frayed-edge raffia tote at least half the size of the models who carried it in his catwalk show (so plenty of room for towels and sunscreen). His strategy with these Insta-catnip accessories has always been to make them completely distinctive.

"When I started accessories, I was walking around Le Bon Marché and couldn't say which shoes were which brand. They all looked the same. I created an object – I did round or square shoes with a round or square heel. A bit unwearable, but to this day we haven't stopped selling them. Anything super identifiable goes insane; we sell pieces you can't find anywhere else."