Simon Porte Jacquemus, 34, last night became the youngest fashion designer ever to be named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest French ministerial award for cultural achievement.
Vogue’s Anna Wintour presented Jacquemus with his freshly minted medal at a ceremony held at his new 8th arrondissement, 7,000-square meter company headquarters. Alongside the designer’s husband, family, friends, and colleagues, guests included Christian Dior’s CEO Delphine Arnault and actress Laetitia Casta.
In her speech to that audience Wintour praised Jacquemus’s dynamic entrepreneurialism, recalling how in 2011 he arranged a guerrilla “Jacquemus on Strike” fashion presentation opposite Christian Dior’s Avenue Montaigne HQ. “Although I know he wouldn t dare do that now that you’re there,” Wintour added to Arnault to a roomful of laughs.
Paying tribute to his knack for designing virally desirable accessories, from outsized summer hats to the minuscule Mini Chiquito bag, Wintour said, “if any of us wondered why he designed such a tiny, tiny accessory, we now have our answer: in order to put his medal in.” She characterized the Jacquemus aesthetic as: “a dream life of cheerful, sexy self-portraiture wrapped up in a collection of useful Frenchness.” She added: “He is very much a French, not a Parisian designer. And that distinction I think is crucial.”
As Jacquemus stepped up in jacket, tie, and white carpenter jeans to receive his medal, the well-wishers in the room filled it with cheers, whoops, whistles, and applause. Once that prize was safely pinned to his pocket, he recalled how Wintour was the first Vogue editor-in-chief he’d had the chance to meet in person as an emerging designer—and how he’d kept his visitor’s sticker from that first appointment in her office. He paid tribute to his late mother Valérie, who died when the designer was 18 years old—an event that acted as a galvanizing “electroshock” in accelerating his determination to succeed.
The Parisian editor Sophie Fontanel then gave her take on Jacquemus’s personal panache and non-elitist fashion point of view, before the designer returned to the lectern to give thanks to his closest loved-ones and colleagues. He said: “This medal is also yours because without you I could never have earned it.” He also thanked “those who said yes when others said no” during his earliest phase of development, including Dover Street Market’s , and other key supporters. More whoops and applause marked the end of Jacquemus’s latest milestone moment. As Wintour had said: “Simon Porte Jacquemus is the most most worthy recipient of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, not just for his great and inclusive vision of fashion, but for the joy and the optimism he brings with it.”