Simon Porte Jacquemus is on the LVMH Prize short list this year. He s made it to the semifinal round after landing a spot on the finalist list last year. With the judging scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday, the deconstructed, surrealist, shoeless, NSFW collection he showed tonight was either a flip-off to the jurors or a come-on. Whichever, it definitely won t go unnoticed. Not when the first model out was topless, save for the outline of a tank painted above her breasts, and faceless, thanks to a featureless paper mask, wearing pants so stiff and oversized they could ve walked off without her.
From season to season, Jacquemus has bopped from commercial-mindedness to conceptualism. Such unpredictably isn t entirely a surprise: He is all of 25, after all, and he never finished design school. After the pop and humor of Jacquemus beachy Spring show, tonight s collection landed firmly in the conceptual camp. Explaining that he wanted to recapture some of the instinctual feel of being a child, the designer said: "I cut jackets like little kids will do—sometimes the cut is weird, there is just a half top. I like this randomness."
Jacquemus came up into the business via Comme des Garçons—he worked at the label s Paris store as recently as 2013. With this collection s porthole and strap construction, the shirtsleeves sewn onto the front of a dress, and the general askewness of the clothes, this outing definitely had its avant-garde antecedents in the work of Rei Kawakubo. Rei had the shock of the new going for her, though; Jacquemus does not. Add up the one-leg pants and the bared breasts, and what you got today was a collection that felt too effortful on the one hand, and not polished enough on the other. That said, there were a few pieces that rose above the silliness of a look that sandwiched a model between two giant felt cutouts of hands. A curvy dress and a very belle poitrine coat, both of which spilled off the shoulders, signaled that a grown-up Jacquemus is lurking behind the cutup.
