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SIMON PORTE JACQUEMUS

He is young, talented and charming. He describes himself as “happy, excited and impatient”. He loves blue and white, the washing lines, the fruits of Marseille and the 80s. Meet the former child model who moved to Paris from Southern France, worked for Comme des Garçons, taught himself to be a designer, and set up his own label to become one of Paris’s most feted emerging designers.

Simone Porte Jacquemus was born in 1990 and grew up in Mallemort in southern France.  At the age of 8, he made his first skirt out of a curtain and gave it to his mother, who has been a source of inspiration and admiration.  He moved to Paris when he was 18 and there he enrolled at ESMOD. He left school and worked briefly for Citizen K. after the sudden death of his mother months later.
He launched his eponymous label at the age of 19 while simultaneously working retail at a Comme des Garçons boutique. Twice nominated for the LVMH Prize, picking up a special jury award of 150,000 euros and a mentorship for one year in 2015,  he has gained a reputation for his fresh, deconstructed, surrealist designs and his highly poetic shows.
What he does feels free and uncompromising. He works on instinct and intuition because he figures that he’s dressing a whole new generation who feel exactly the same way. 

His Fall 2017 collection entitled Pour l’Amour d’ un Gitan, is a tale of an “impossible love story”, while channels ’80s Parisian couture. In his words, “It is about this Parisian girl who wears couture who falls in love with a gypsy in the south of France. She tries to be like a gypsy, but she cannot—she is too couture!”.
The campaign of this collection features a nude couple on the beach. Shot by David Luraschi, with whom he’d already collaborated at the OpenMyMed Festival, the campaign, imbued with poetry, is more about offering a glimpse into the designer’s world than reflecting on the collection and his creations: “I wanted to create a timeless image of two people embracing each other. With no clothes or accessories, just two bodies under a parasol, on a chair”, the designer explains.
Simone Porte Jacquemus is obsessed with not having clothes in his campaigns which are often edgy but never shocking. He prefers to communicate philosophy, not fashion. 

Still, there’s something special about Jacquemus and the way he portrays Frenchness. Though his tales are about women, they are also, ultimately, about the designer and his sun-kissed and free childhood. “I grew up in the fields, barefoot, free to play with clothes. That gave me a certain energy”, he says. Jacquemus wants to create his own universe. He’s not really interested in playing the game of fashion as it is known by now. He’s an independent designer who deeply values his independence.

CREDITS:

Issue:
the NEW ESSENTIALS – Fall 2017

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