Simon Porte Jacquemus pulled off one of his resort spectaculars today, this time in Capri—a vividly sun and color-drenched co-ed production which he said his team had been privately calling “the impossible show.”
It’s been Porte Jacquemus “biggest dream since starting 15 years ago” to show at the Casa Malaparte. The French-cultural significance of the place: Jean Luc Godard filmed Le Mepris, his 1963 New Wave classic, including unforgettable scenes atop the terracotta terrace of the modernist Italian villa, an architectural feat perched on vertiginous cliffs to the east of Capri.
The catch: the house is only accessible by boat—when the weather allows. Some of the kit needed to be helicoptered in as they prepared for the 40 guests who could fit onto the rooftop space. And just for once, in a season when so many summer resort shows have been buffeted by storms, the weather gods smiled. “There is no beauty without risk!” Porte Jacquemus had declared a day earlier.
So Gwyneth Paltrow and Dua Lipa were there to witness a Jacquemus collection that marked a creative rite of passage for the designer. “We are evolving into something new. A new kind of sexiness. Realistic but also minimal; almost two-dimensional,” he said. “As pure as I can be.”
Surrounded by drones shooting footage over the Mediterranean and boats plying to and fro far below, models stepped up the long open-air staircase and onto the rooftop. The entry of the opening look, a creamy-pale tufted bathrobe coat, nodded subtly to the famous Brigitte Bardot Le Mepris scene shot on that very terrace. Following were Jacquemus-recognizable silhouettes: his shawl-collared Provencal-derived jackets, now carved in vermillion, yellow, stark black, or white, smoothly matched with high-waisted A-line below-the-knee skirts, full tailored pants, or bermudas.
Walking amongst them, came the menswear: tops derived from sailor’s smocks, over asymmetrically-collared shirts, smartly color-coordinated with pleat-front trousers. With every look, a bag; soft fold-over clutches, top-handled bags, and shopping totes in pops of color: turquoise, leaf-green, pink, or yellow.
Cineasts will know that the plot of Le Mepris involves a meta-theme of a movie within a movie—Fritz Lang plays an auteur making a version of Homer’s Odyssey. Porte Jacquemus’s departure into sinuous draped chiffon or jersey dresses—swooping in the back, or slit at the sides to reveal bodysuits—seemed to touch off that reference. Plenty of skin-show has been part and parcel of the Jacquemus brand until now. It’s not that this resort collection abandoned it—bared shoulders, backs, and the side-exposing narrowness of his halter dresses said that. But in the nuance, there was something more sophisticated going on here. “I wanted it to be surprising, sensual, more ‘woman’” is the way he framed it.
More revelatory on the creative—and the commercial—front is the fact that Porte Jacquemus, the most dynamically successful of young independent designers, is consciously growing up with his audience. He has listened, he said, to criticism that, though stylish, his past work hasn’t always met the benchmark of quality he wants to hit. “I’m ambitious to work every day and make things better and better,” he said. “It’s taken time, and it’s a fight with factories, to work with a new savoir faire.”
His prices are still in the ‘reasonable’ range, compared to sky-high luxury brands. The link to the pre-orders for this collection made immediately available today is proof of that. He’s already seeing the reaction to focusing more effort into his ready-to-wear, he said. “We have never sold as much. Our stores used to be full of people buying one bag. Now we have people spending 15,000 [euros] on clothes. Perhaps,” he reflected, “it’s because I’ve changed a bit. I’m a dad now, and I’m thinking about the next generation, and having constancy. But what I do know is that I will be doing this, the same, for my whole life.”
