Jacquemus’s 155 guests had been seated along the narrow, winding trail that leads up to the Phare de la Pietra, overlooking the infinite blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The lighthouse, first lit in 1857, marks the entrance to Corsica’s northwestern coastline and was created to guide sailors safely through these unpredictable waters. It was a wonderful location for the mise-en-scène Simon Porte Jacquemus had imagined around this colorful, feel-good collection of Mediterranean minimalism.
Emerald lizards darted through the beige-to-ochre spectrum of the fragrant scrub around us. Across the bay, the mountains rose in a jagged, hazy line. Halfway through the show, a small skiff came around the headland towing a line of dinghies whose sails spelt out the designer’s surname. The complex geographical fierceness of the rocky cliffs reminded me of Hergé’s illustrations in The Black Island. The livestream drone swooped. Smartphones were raised by almost every spare hand. We were content.
Our location was only 320km from the designer’s Provence birthplace: we were much closer to that home, in fact, than his HQ in Paris. This first traveling show since 2024 was a return to the formula that made Jacquemus so fashion-famous: an act of curated lifestyle immersion in which the collection was represented as the buyable key to a way of being. The collection was entitled Le Bonheur: happiness.
This was a location designed to be breathtaking, but which proved inadvertently risk-making too. The wind whipped up to tug at the long line of picnic parasols that had been brought in to shelter the trail from the mid-morning sun. One toppled maybe 15 seats to my right. At the finale, a second, more determined gust lifted another parasol clean free from its base. Skewing in midair, its wooden pole clipped Loïc Prigent a fair crack to the head before tumbling onwards, just as Athena Accorsi, making her fashion show debut in the final look, swerved smartly around the runaway runway sunshade. Thankfully, this split-second of jeopardy passed without further injury: not long after our return to the mainland, Prigent was sharing the Face with Tears of Joy emoji on WhatsApp when asked for an update.
“Corsica is a very happy memory for me,” said the designer, who once visited here with his late mother. He said a core inspiration for this collection was being a parent himself. “I wanted to return to something very light and colorful, like ice creams. In a way it’s my children, I think, who give me that strength and that desire to use yellow, red, stripes, polka dots, the little slippers that are easy to wear into the water and so on…”
The collection blew between elevated rusticity and apparently naïf sensuality. Folky headdresses, full skirts in richly colored cottons, drop-waist bubble skirts, azure budgie smugglers and bikini bottoms, marinière-striped organza gowns, white suiting in seersucker, and swoopy beach robe coats were all ingredients in Jacquemus’s many breezy looks.
The water-ballerina slippers were a great Jacquemus proposition. Extra-light and made to fold in two, they were worn by both men and women. A white dress skirted in a red haze of some 2,700 scarlet ostrich-feather bunches was highly striking, as was some baggy nylon tailoring whose color combinations were deeply dreamy. There were a lot of crop tops for women, part of a conscious return, the designer said, towards his earliest phase of womenswear.
Jacquemus said one challenge had been “to come back to something so Jacquemus, with the savoir-faire of today,” and to make something “quite fresh, unique, but at the same time easy to look at.” This resulted in an interesting push and pull between beachy ease and polished construction. And as well as looking back, he was also looking forward: the designer said that this collection was shaped while considering a category in which he will soon compete for the first time: beauty.
