From Jackie O Clone To Jacquemus Muse... Charlotte York’s Fashion Moment Has Arrived

In 2011, Simon Porte Jacquemus – a rakish, floppy-haired fashion school dropout – crashed Vogue’s Fashion’s Night Out party on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne. Then a sales assistant at Comme Des Garçons, the ascendant designer staged a fake “We want Jacquemus!” protest, casting his friends as faux dissidents in boiled sweaters and miniskirts. These early collections – which first hit the catwalk in 2014 – were an expression of naïveté, a rolling back of his own childhood memories in the South of France, and Provençal folk culture. The clothes were more like stiff geometric cut-outs, finished with oversized buttons and enormous beach hats. But as the brand evolved into one of Paris’s most commercially successful, Jacquemus bent further and further towards the mainstream: now functioning as a barometer for whatever trends are considered to be permeating the zeitgeist.

It tracks, then, that the Jacquemus muse is no longer a mini-skirted rebel but Charlotte York Goldenblatt: someone who spent the duration of her thirties squeezing herself into the default mould of an Upper East Side tradwife, even when its sides produced painful welts. See: the teaser video for the brand’s upcoming autumn/winter 2024 collection, which features Kristin Davis gleefully ironing and folding a cashmere sweater. It is perhaps the first time that Davis has starred in a high-end campaign, and the first time that Charlotte’s style has been positioned above Carrie’s. About time, perhaps. She was always the rock to Carrie’s chaos, her clothes classic and ordered and rooted in the past when the thing she feared the most was an unmoored future. The cerulean blue cardigans that she draped around her shoulders, the pearl necklaces, Stepford Wife headbands and Ralph Lauren sweaters. The plaid waistcoats, button-front dresses and tennis skirts.

If Jacquemus is going to call on the spirit of Charlotte York when he stages his autumn/winter 2024 catwalk on 29 January – as this trailer would suggest – revisiting the character’s most memorable looks feels timely.