Simon Porte Jacquemus is having quite a year. While his rivals suffer a global luxury slowdown — Gucci’s revenue fell 25 per cent in the last quarter alone — his Jacquemus label is an outlier. He’s developing a fragrance and beauty line with L’Oréal, which in February took a minority stake in his brand. He opened a new store in New York last October and hired a chief executive, Sarah Benady, away from Celine in March. This week, he opens a boutique in Los Angeles, teasing it with a tongue-in-cheek old-timey pair of videos — conceived by him, not an ad agency — that remind us that he is the Wes Anderson of the fashion industry.
The privately held brand has expansion plans virtually the world over, Benady says. After Los Angeles, there’s a Miami Design District store opening planned for 2026. That city was chosen as a gateway to wealthy shoppers from Mexico and South America, she says. There are plans to expand into Japan and China, as well as further inroads into Spain and Italy. France remains Jacquemus’s largest market. Ready-to-wear is its fastest-growing category.
A new handbag will launch in October, and it’s a big one, planned to be a permanent icon of the brand. You know he means it because the designer has named it the ‘Valerie’, for his beloved late mother, whose death spurred him to launch the label when he was 19.
Then there’s the just-launched collaboration with Timberland, in which he took his favourite South of France boat shoes and hued them in his brand’s signature sun-baked banana yellow. They’ll be sold at the LA boutique, as well as online and in Jacquemus and Timberland stores, while supplies last, which often isn’t long. Jacquemus aims to produce in quantities that sell out in days. Because, as Hermès also knows, luxury is scarcity.
On the morning of the collaboration’s 23 April launch, the $250 yellow boat shoes were already sold out at Jacquemus.com, according to the website. More will be available soon.
The brand will re-open its St Tropez store in a few weeks, and there are pop-ups coming to Monaco, Ibiza and Mykonos — places where the wealthy play, and which “allow us to speak to our core clients”, Benady says.
“We are really speaking to a woman with no price resistance,” she notes.
Every brand wants those clients, but success lies in selling luxury-priced fashions to the uber-wealthy while fleshing profits out with aspirationally priced goods that bask in the glow. Jacquemus may not boast of it, but its wares include items produced in Portugal, Bulgaria and Romania — European countries with relatively low labour costs. The $890 polka-dot La Spiaggia mini dress, for instance, is affordable luxury aimed at youthful clients. The risk for Jacquemus lies in avoiding offending the clients who have no price resistance with those more affordable looks.
The brand generated around €280 million in 2023, according to estimates by Yann Kretz, a principal at consulting firm Laurent Berger, after saying it had surpassed €200 million in 2022 and €100 million in 2021.
The brand isn’t concerned with Trump tariffs, which have thrown much of the fashion industry’s planning into disarray. “We don’t produce in China,” Benady says. “And we’re still very new to the US customer.”
The Los Angeles boutique offers an opportunity to examine the choices that have made Jacquemus one of fashion’s most defiant growth stories. The breezy look is of a house in the south of France – very unlike the brass-and-glass designs of so many luxury boutiques. The signature banana yellow is a theme throughout.
The store sits on a corner of Robertson Boulevard near locally iconic businesses including Chrome Hearts and Maxfield’s indie multi-brand store, a spot Benady says she’d been eying while still working at LVMH because it’s so threaded through local Angeleno shopping habits. Unlike Rodeo Drive, which is mainly a tourist shopping district, Robertson is one of LA’s fashion districts that draws locals. “Whenever you have a chance to speak to the local customer, you should take it,” she says.
A scroll through Jacquemus’ Instagram feed is to dive into a series of choreographed vignettes, cleverly staged with the precision and off-kilter humour of Wes Anderson, if that filmmaker had grown up in the South of France and briefly studied fashion in Paris, as Porte Jacquemus has.
One of his qualities is to laugh a bit, even at himself, and also to reveal more than most brands. In the early years of his label, rumours abounded that this brash newcomer couldn’t possibly be selling much actual product. So Jacquemus invited reporters to meet him one Paris Fashion Week, and revealed his then-single-digit millions in revenues at the time, noting that his business was profitable. It began his tradition of openness about revenues for a privately held company.
At that time, many fashion editors were at a loss as to how to pronounce his name, and he rarely bothered to correct them. Back to Wes Anderson. When I watched the two teaser videos for the Los Angeles store opening, my mind went straight to The Royal Tenenbaums and The French Dispatch. The precision-choreographed vignettes poke fun at their own scenes, awash in brand iconography like banana yellow and a sun-washed sensibility. In one, the voiceover repeatedly, ridiculously pronounces the brand “Yawk-uh-muss”.
Did they direct the actor in his pronunciation? Nope, Benady says, that was the actor’s own. “We wanted it to sound like a radio announcement from the past,” she says. With maybe a gentle poke at Americans’ interpretation of French savoir-faire, as the brand attempts an aggressive expansion in the US.
Benady’s hiring as chief executive is something of a coup for Jacquemus. After the sudden and unexpected departure of former CEO Bastien Daguzan in December 2023, Simon Porte Jacquemus resumed the role himself for more than a year as he searched for a replacement. Benady says several people introduced them, and the intros feel to her like serendipity. She was not looking to leave New York, her home of a decade.
“I would not have come back to Paris for an opportunity other than this one,” Benady says. “I was very happy in New York, but working alongside Simon … I feel like I’ve joined Hubert de Givenchy or Yves Saint Laurent back in the time when they had that vision.”
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