This afternoon, placed one stiletto onto an Italian marina and imagined herself as the romantic lead in René Clément’s sun-drenched masterpiece. Dressed in an aqueous, pale blue column dress and matching sunglasses, the musician turned towards a camera and blew a film-star kiss at whoever was standing behind it. She was, after all, in Capri, readying herself to be chauffeured to Jacquemus’s latest show in a humble but luxurious yacht.
The designer–who is known for staging picturesque shows among the lavender fields of Provence, the salt mountains of the Camargue and, most recently, the Palais de Versailles–was celebrating the 15th anniversary of the brand he started as a floppy-haired renegade in Paris. This would be, he teased in an Instagram post in the days leading up to the presentation, “a cinematic moment.”
The glittering horizons, the bronzed legs, the tumbling hair of the designer’s Riviera girls were all correct and present: bodies framed in diaphanous bodycons, maquette-ish collars and quirked-up accessories like one sunhat-turned-handbag which will doubtless appear beneath the arm of Dua Lipa at some point soon. Mariacarla Boscono modeled a sculptural trench dress, Imaan Hammam wore a fire engine-red dress seductively draped from the shoulder, and Anok Yai clutched the nape of a hotel bathrobe. Meanwhile, Peggy Gou, Emily Ratajkowski, and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley were among the 40 guests present to watch Kendall Jenner –the Audrey Hepburn to Jacquemus’s Hubert de Givenchy–make her catwalk debut. She closed this afternoon’s show in a backless LBD with a pair of double-heeled mules and an aquamarine clutch.
It’s been 15 years and yet the dream Jacquemus sells is just as evocative as it was when he first started; to be young and free and living in an endless European summer is one worth bottling.
