It started with a little boy – barefoot, cherub-like, clad in milky poplins. He darted down the full stretch of the L’Orangerie at Versailles, triggering a domino-effect of swivelling heads, before swinging open the looming, oak doors at the other end to let the models in. And then it began.
The boy embodied a juvenile version of designer Simon Porte Jacquemus – who hails from Salon-de-Provence – when he dreamed of translating the world around him through fashion. That youthful aspiration is what he had in mind when he took to the design table this season, and the result was his most personal outing yet with pages torn from childhood harvests (his family comes from a long line of farmers), the smell of Sunday linens and family photo albums.
Women floated by in jupons shaped like calissons (a type of French sweet), frothy tulle dresses stitched with 700 metres of cord and aprons spun from inverted tulle – rusticity made luxury. Men, as if plucked from a Pagnol novel, wore cropped jackets, breezy herringbone trousers and shearling with the offhand grace of village fête-goers. Everywhere, there were nods to shepherdesses, artisans and Van Gogh’s farmers – berets, kerchiefs, shawls, peasant skirts, smocks, cotton, linen, broderie anglaise – rendered with a playful, oh-so-French wink.
Accessories delighted with a Provençal trompe l’oeil: garlic garlands, strings of fish, strawberries and leeks rendered in leather; panelled raffia baskets; tomato and bread clutches; handbags named for Porte Jacquemus’s mother. Even espadrilles tied jauntily around calves, grounding it all with sun-kissed nonchalance.
Le Paysan closed a circle – the designer’s rural boyhood blossoming at Versailles. Proof, perhaps, that beauty rooted in earth and family can wander anywhere, still tender, still wild, still unmistakably Jacquemus.
Photography courtesy of Jacquemus.
