Jacquemus presents Le Paysan, a Spring-Summer 2026 collection shot against Mont Saint-Michel for a campaign that is as much an act of preservation as it is of fashion. Memory, family and the rural landscapes of the South of France supply the raw material. The people who shaped a designer, and the ones he refuses to forget, supply everything else.
Linen breathes. Stone endures. A collection is neither, and both.
Jacquemus presents Le Paysan, a Spring-Summer 2026 collection shot against Mont Saint-Michel for a campaign that is as much an act of preservation as it is of fashion. Memory, family and the rural landscapes of the South of France supply the raw material. The people who shaped a designer, and the ones he refuses to forget, supply everything else.
Mont Saint-Michel was never taken. Tidal, windswept, almost monastic, it resisted and remained, and that resistance is the argument the campaign opens with. Placing Sunday-best linen against that ancient sea wall is a deliberate friction. One fabric lasts a thousand years; one is among the most perishable that exists. Jacquemus puts them at the same level, and the logic holds: endurance is not a question of material.
The collection’s name translates literally as “the peasant,” the most humble figure in rural French culture, chosen by one of the most discussed houses in the industry. The show was held at L’Orangerie de Versailles, a building whose sole purpose has always been to protect fragile living things through difficult seasons. That detail is not incidental. At the finale, Simon Porte Jacquemus and his grandmother Liline embraced on the runway. The campaign, the imagery, the location, all of it became an extension of that single intimate moment.
The campaign credit reads simply: “Shot by Oliver Hadlee Pearch.” No production house, no director title, no stylist credit. That restraint is a position. Oliver Hadlee Pearch, Jacquemus’s long-standing visual collaborator across more than five years and some of the house’s most personal chapters, has spoken of wanting to feel the picture, to feel the energy of a person before anything else. The collection demanded exactly that.
The cast is young, diverse and entirely non-celebrity. These are people who look as though they could have lived at Mont Saint-Michel a hundred years ago, who wear Sunday best as a lived ritual rather than a fashion concept. The linen moves with them, catches the wind and breathes against the stone. Everything in the campaign resists artifice, and Pearch’s lens, arriving almost without announcement, finds something that feels true rather than constructed.
The bag at the center of the collection is Le Valérie, named after Simon’s late mother. He founded his house at 19, months after her death in 2008, naming it Jacquemus using her maiden name. The bag is the most direct and explicit tribute in a lineage that started at the very beginning. Simon has consistently named pieces after the people who shaped him — Le Bisou, Le Chiquito, Le Bambino — but Le Valérie carries her actual name. He described it as “a reflection of her spirit, always with a touch of humour and poetry.”
Soft, folded and handmade in feeling, the bag arrives in calf leather and calf suede, its silhouette balanced between sleek precision and naive charm, as if shaped by hand rather than industry. Tiny leather charms in the shapes of fruits and vegetables hang from it, a quiet nod to family harvests and the land where all of this began. In the campaign stills it appears held against the wild grasslands of Mont Saint-Michel, camel suede against an overcast sky, the warmth of the leather echoing the skin of the person holding it. A commercial object placed deliberately outside of commercial logic.
Objects outlast people. A bag named after someone keeps their name in circulation long after they are gone, carried by strangers who know nothing of its origin. Simon gave his grandmother Le Valérie, the bag carrying the name of her late daughter. The object physically passed between generations. Whether that is grief or tribute is perhaps a question only he can answer. Most likely, it is both.
Simon Porte Jacquemus is only 35 years old and already building his own mythology, while the people who matter most to him are still alive to witness it. Where most houses construct a universe around formal heritage or pure craft, his is built around lived experience. Each collection carries a meaning that exceeds the commercial: together they form a quiet autobiography and with every new chapter the reader receives a piece of him. That intimacy is precisely what makes the work reach beyond its own context.
The industry around him continuously swaps creative directors and loses the personal vision behind a brand. His story remains intact and still unfolding.
He captioned the campaign simply: “Just a dream.” And the campaign delivers exactly that, not a collection, not a commercial exercise, but a dream about people and about keeping them close in the only ways available, through names and through places and through fabric that breathes against stone that endures. He is not asking us to buy into a fantasy. He is inviting us to remember alongside him, to hold his memories as gently as he does.
Credits:
Brand: Jacquemus / @jacquemus
Words: Viktoriya Georgieva Kacheva / @viktoriya.kacheva
