Jacquemus Debuted Its Spring 2021 Collection on a Live Runway in a Wheat Field

Socially-distanced guests watched the parade of mini-bags on a wooden catwalk in the French countryside.

Details from the Jacquemus Spring 2021 collection.

If fashion is about fantasy, Simon Porte Jacquemus‘s fantasy is that the world isn’t actively battling a pandemic and luxury is worth the indulgence, even in an economic recession. On Thursday, Jacquemus presented his Spring 2021 collection via a live runway show complete with a socially-distant audience in a wheat field about an hour outside of Paris.

Entitled “L’Amour,” the show was inspired by the way that love “can endure — sometimes even grow stronger — in the absence of people being together,” said Jacquemus in a release. “Not long after my team was separated from each other, we were all in our homes feeling the desire to work, and a new vision of the collection emerged. We became a human chain, every step of the creative process executed with love.”

He added that the decision to combine menswear and womenswear into one collection shown twice a year “ended up saving us this season” as the brand had already received its fabric orders before lockdown began.

“Deciding to go ahead with our usual collection schedule and with a show is at the heart of our visual identity, our commercial strategy,” Jacquemus claimed. “With this smaller collection, presented mainly to our family and friends” — though some of the models, it should be noted, seem to have been flown in from other countries — “we bring our interior worlds out into the open, interpreting the humble fabrics and objects we live with that have their own poems to tell.”

The collection was chock-full of Jacquemus signatures. There were slinky dresses with sexy straps showing up in unexpected places, and microbags in a range of shapes and materials. This season, the latter also got a few updates — tiny bags made of wicker, a leather picnic accessory that carried a single dinner plate and a tiny leather basket-like bag full of strawberries all made their debut. Menswear featured subtly asymmetric jackets and detailing made to look like wooden tableware, and the whole collection was colored in muted tones that felt of a piece with the wheat field background.

See the full Jacquemus Spring 2021 collection in the gallery below.