Simon Porte Jacquemus's universe is expanding into the realm of art. From October 20 to 24, the Collège des Bernardins in Paris will host "Mythes," an exhibition curated and designed by him that brings together works from antiquity and sculptures by Aristide Maillol. The project, conceived in collaboration with Galerie Chenel and Galerie Dina Vierny, will be on display in both galleries from Thursday, October 30, to Saturday, December 20.

Simon Porte Jacquemus’ first major curatorial undertaking orchestrates a dialogue between the antique, the sculpted, and the everyday. This undertaking reveals a shared mythic resonance of line, volume, and human presence. It is a conversation across time: from the terracotta and marble of Olympia that inspired Maillol, to his small-scale bronzes, to the geometric folds of Jacquemus’ garments. In each is both allegory and monument. The continuity is palpable: the antique informs Maillol, and Maillol, in turn, informs Simon Porte Jacquemus’ work. At the heart of it all lies antique sculpture, the inexhaustible point of origin. These marbles have given to generations a language of measure. They are the discipline through which nature could be distilled into myth and for Simon Porte Jacquemus, they are the geometry that underpins the poise of a silhouette.

Aristide Maillol devoted his life to the pursuit of harmony, transforming nature into myth to reaffirm the poetry and vitality of earthly existence. A fervent admirer of the ancients, he drew on Egyptian art, archaic and classical Greek sculpture, yet always sought to create ex nihilo. His nudes are pared to essentials, stocky Mediterranean figures, short-waisted, upstanding breasts, powerful hips, smoothed with a keen sense of measure and stasis. A serene classicism touched with rustic vitality. Like Maillol, Simon Porte Jacquemus unites the virtue of a classic with the innocence of a primitive.

Both find in the antique not nostalgia but a structure for invention, a base upon which to build their own new mythologies. The antique gave Maillol a discipline, a way of returning the human figure to its most enduring proportions. In Jacquemus, the echo is subtler but no less insistent: his garments draw on the same economy of line, showing that simplicity, when rightly measured, can embody the whole of elegance just as Polykleitos’ canon once inscribed it in stone.

This attention to geometry, to the harmony of human presence and elemental form, finds a renewed expression in Simon Porte Jacquemus. His garments, too, are sculptural, architectural even, folded and draped with the same careful eye the masters of antiquity and Maillol trained on the human body.

Mythes
October 20 to December 20, 2025
Collège des Bernardins
20 Rue de Poissy
75005 Paris