French chic is back! And a young dude from the South of France, called Simon Porte Jacquemus is to blame! At least partially. Simon is living the dream of every young fashion designer: he resides in Montmartre and sells his collections to Opening Ceremony and to the hyped online-shop L’Exception. When we ask him what it takes to be the new name on everybody’s lips, he thoughtfully answers: “There is a lack of new passionate people in the fashion industry. Young designers are afraid to break through with their ideas, and often simply copy paste the style of big fashion houses. It’s almost like working with engineers instead of creative people! My attitude got me in trouble when I was studying fashion in Paris, so I decided to leave school and do my own thing.”
Simon founded his eponymous label Jacquemus two years ago, when he was a mere twenty-years-old and bored with his fashion assistant job at a magazine. Born in the early 90s, he wanted to express the fashion codes of his decade by fusing bourgeois chic and pop authenticity, naming Isabelle Adjani as an inspiration. “I’m rather fascinated by Isabelle Adjani, I don’t like the word muse, as I don’t have any. In all her television appearances in the 80s, she never overplayed her role as a celebrity. She was presenting herself in a very natural way and then she went back home to take care of her children. A real woman; charismatic and simple. That’s how I want my collections to be like.”
With this in mind, he started to work on a first small Autumn/Winter collection entitled Hiver-Froid and promptly continued with Les Filles en Blanc for the last spring/summer season, both girly yet minimalist collections that captivated the attention of the Parisian fashion scene. He didn’t want to tell his stories on an usual catwalk and made some attempts at happenings instead: with his last collection at the entrance of the Dior show, and lately with the new one at Vogue’s Fashion Night Out in Paris, simulating a fashion strike on the night of the big shopping event. “I like the concept of happenings, but I have not thought about it more than that, I just gathered some friends and dressed them up in my collection”, explains Simon. “My models are always girls I personally admire, they’re more likely to be type faces, than to be on the pages of glossy magazines. And I must admit, I like this Gainsbourg-ish touch, being surrounded by beautiful women!”
Getting positive feedback–French Vogue’s Emmanuelle Alt already interviewed him–he started to commercialize his new Autumn/Winter 2011/12 collection, called L’Usine. Simon teamed up with French artist Bertrand Le Pluard in order to create a video that would narrate the story behind this collection: the monotonous life of girls at work in a factory.
Maybe it’s his naïve yet sarcastic vintage aesthetics or his endless love for sensual women that make his style so special, we don’t really know. But what we know for sure is that he perfectly expresses that certain french je-ne-sais-quoi, without overloading it. “I never considered to change and do something else, designing is the only thing I can do,” he tells us.
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