Season after season designer Simon Port Jacquemus presents a vision of masculine dandyism that is so alluring — so refined and yet so insousient — that it makes me wonder why anyone who could wear Jacquemus would choose to wear anything else. It’s just so damn sexy!
Take his latest menswear collection, which the designer showed alongside his women’s collection under the blazing sun at the Phare de la Pietra on the Île-Rousse in Corsica: it’s so loose, so casual, and so incredibly seductive. While other designers insist of restricting the body in skinny jeans or layering on sweaters and overcoats even as Europe continues to experience record-breaking heat waves year after year, Jacquemus offers the kind of breezy, easy-to-move-in (and easy-to-live-in) clothes that people actually want on their bodies at the height of summer. The kind of clothes that look as if they might tear away from the body and float off with the next gust of wind.
Jacquemus has truly mastered the art of covering up while still maximizing sex appeal. Part of it is the styling — the way he tucks jackets into pants to accentuate the waist while fuller volumes above and below exagerate the hidden musculature of broad shoulders and thick thighs. But it’s not just that. He has a way of draping and constructing his garments so that air itself seems to be an integral part of the design. To the point where you can almost imagine air touching the wearer’s body even more than the fabric of the clothes themselves. Everyone is naked under their clothes, but men seem especially naked under Jacquemus.
And those colors! Sea foam green, sunshine yellow, tomato red, and those pink pants with the terracota cuff! It’s all so beautiful, so lush, and adds such a sense of play and panache to the deceptively simple silhouettes that are so essential to the unfussy and elegant glamour of Jacquemus menswear.
The women’s wear this season follows a similar line, but feels slightly less successful in places than what is on offer for men’s. The leather suits are a downer as are some of this season’s takes on the oversized white menswear-shirt-turned-dress that so often make appearances in Jacquemus’s shows. Fortunately, there’s still lots of beachy sex appeal and billowing fabric to balance out the less exciting looks in the collection. It would be nice though to see the Jacquemus woman developed a little further. Prints, pleating, and embellishments always sing in Jacquemus’s collections and this time around is no different, but there is not as much of these things as there might have been.
It’s still lovely, though. It’s just that where the men’s looks left me hungry for more, the women’s left me simply wanting more. And that might sound like the same thing, but it’s definitely not.
Check out the rest of the collection below.
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