Yes, Jacquemus Made Giant Straw Hats for Men
But the real Jacquemus Man will carry the tiny women’s bags.
Photograph via Getty Images.
Today, in Tender Is the Night country, Ken doll-handsome French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus debuted his much-anticipated menswear line. Why? Because menswear is big business! Because menswear is the biggest trend in womenswear! And because, as Jacquemus said when he announced his Man Plans in February, Jacquemus is in love!
The Jacquemus Woman has one of the most consistent identities produced by a young designer. She pairs comically oversized hats with impossibly high slits, and kooky earrings with sensual bustier dresses, and teeny-tiny bags with carnally plunging necklines. A dress can be basically transparent and it looks eccentric rather than tarty. She’s sexy, she’s weird, she’s now.
So who is the Jacquemus Man? The Sexiest Man Alive! Wait—that’s a People magazine thing. The Jacquemus Man is sexy, though, in slubby knits and swim briefs (ooh la la!) and unbuttoned shirts, like the pool boy of your rich lady dreams, or an Absolut Hunk for our era. “Le Gadjo,” Jacquemus called it—a term for the provincial Provençal guy. “He can be the kind of guy you see jumping from the rocks in Marseille, or the guy who goes to a wedding in his perfect white shirt, a bit chic but Marseille-chic, with too much jewelry,” Jacquemus told WWD. In these trying times for masculinity, when John Galliano is literally using fabric to yank at the seams of gender identity, Jacquemus showed us un-ironic oily hunks. Where is that streak of whimsy?
On their heads, it turns out. These hunks came bearing an important Jacquemus signature: a giant straw hat. We do not know what it looks like on the head, actually, because the show took place on a beach on the French Riviera and I am blogging at a dynamic open-plan office space in the fast-paced borough of Brooklyn, but I have no doubt they look as incredible on a hunk’s head as they do in his hunky grasp. Also notable were the tiny little bags, slung around the neck like a coin purse, or the ID badges we’ve been seeing since Prada’s Fall 2018 menswear. But let’s be real: it’s the age of the Male It-bag. The true Jacquemus Man will just carry the tiny women’s purse in his hunky fingers.
