His Mother's Name

Simon Porte Jacquemus grew up on a farm near Salon-de-Provence, in the south of France. His mother was killed in a car accident when he was eighteen. He went to Paris, left fashion school within a few months, and in 2009, aged nineteen, with about a thousand euros, started a label.

He named it Jacquemus, which was her maiden name.

Almost everything the brand has done since comes out of a very small set of things: the south of France, linen and cotton, the sun, the crops, a particular kind of light, and her. Not a mood board of those things. The actual ones.

Start with what that does commercially, because the story is true and the commercial reading is also true and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

A brand needs a reason to exist. Most of them have a market-shaped one: a gap, an underserved customer, a price point nobody was covering. Those reasons are perfectly good and they are all available to a competitor, because a gap you identified is a gap anybody can identify.

This brand's reason to exist has nothing to do with a market. It is not available. You can copy the palette, the linen, the cropped proportions, the light in the photographs and the idea of showing outdoors. There is no version of the underlying story that somebody else can have.

Then Provence itself, which functions exactly the way Queens functions for Aimé Leon Dore and Madrid functions for Scuffers, at a different price point.

A place you are genuinely from is an inexhaustible reference library that cannot be researched into existence. A competitor can go there. They cannot have grown up there, and the difference shows in the detail: which flowers, which hour of the day, what the tablecloths look like, what people actually wear when nobody is looking. Specificity of that kind is the thing that stops a world reading as a mood board, and it can only come from memory.

Now the two most copied decisions, both of which are cleverer than they look.

Le Chiquito, from 2018, is a bag too small to hold anything. That is not a flaw in it. A bag that cannot function as a container functions as a photograph, which is a completely different product with a completely different job. It was a joke you could own, it was instantly recognisable at any size on any screen, and it carried the name into rooms the clothes had not reached.

And in 2019, for the tenth anniversary, a bright pink runway cut straight through a lavender field at Valensole.

Consider what a show normally costs. You take a hall, and then you spend a great deal of money building a world inside it, because a hall is a hall. A landscape is already a world. The money goes into getting people there instead of into scaffolding, and what comes out is a single image that the audience distributes for you, worldwide, for nothing, because they want to.

That is the whole manoeuvre, and it generalises past fashion: find the setting that already means what you are trying to say, rather than paying to construct a version of it somewhere convenient.

The brand is still independent. A nineteen-year-old with a thousand euros and his mother's name built one of the few French houses of this generation that answers to nobody, and the thing it is built on is the one asset no competitor can acquire at any price.