The Camargue is not a location. It is a condition. Forty square kilometres of salt marsh and wild horse and flamingo at the edge of the Mediterranean, a landscape that resists the organising logic of human intention — too wet for farming, too flat for architecture, too alive with its own indifferent beauty to serve as backdrop for anything. Jacquemus chose it anyway, or rather chose it precisely for that reason. Staged upon the ethereal salt marshes of Aigues-Mortes. Models walked a runway of Giraud salt — a white mountain that dissolved at its edges into an oneiric blue sky. The kind of blue that makes you aware of your own smallness. Nothing about it was useful. Everything about it was overwhelming. The show served no purpose that could be expressed in the language of quarterly returns, and it generated, in the forty-eight hours following, a cultural saturation that no media spend could have purchased.

This is not fashion marketing. This is expenditure in the precise sense that Georges Bataille meant when he argued, in The Accursed Share, that the fundamental problem of any living system is not scarcity but surplus — not how to acquire enough, but what to do with the excess that accumulates beyond need. Bataille’s answer, drawn from Aztec sacrifice, was that surplus must be destroyed, gloriously and uselessly, or it will destroy the system from within. The festival, the sacrifice, the erotic encounter — these are not failures of rational economy. They are its necessary remainder, the expenditure without return that gives the entire system meaning.

Jacquemus has built one of the most commercially potent fashion brands of the twenty-first century by understanding this at a structural level — and by keeping that understanding completely invisible.

The word stole is doing specific work here. Influence implies acknowledgment, lineage, a conscious debt. Theft implies something else: the appropriation of a logic without crediting its source, or at minimum without awareness that a source exists. Simon Porte Jacquemus has never, in any interview this designer has encountered, mentioned Bataille. He speaks instead of his mother, of Provence, of joy, of simplicity, of the south of France. These are not false answers. But they are incomplete ones. Beneath the autobiography, beneath the sunlight and the oversized hats and the self-mythologising Instagram presence, there is a structural logic operating at a level of sophistication that the brand’s surface cheerfulness is specifically designed to conceal. That concealment is not incidental. It is, as this essay will argue, the mechanism by which the logic works.

Begin with the sun.

Not as metaphor, but as model. The sun spends itself without return. It radiates energy into space in quantities so vast that the portion absorbed by the earth’s biosphere is itself excessive beyond any possible use. It does not conserve. It does not accumulate. It keeps giving, without condition, and the surplus of that giving is the fundamental fact of life on earth. Every living system on the planet is, at its root, a problem of what to do with more energy than can be used. Bataille’s opening move in The Accursed Share is to take this literally: the general economy is not the economy of human exchange and accumulation that we call economics. It is the economy of the sun — the total movement of energy across the living system of the earth, in which the tendency is always and everywhere toward excess, toward overflow, toward the production of more than can be absorbed.

If the fundamental condition of life is surplus rather than scarcity — if the problem is always too much rather than too little — then the entire framework of classical economics, which begins with scarcity as its foundational assumption, is not wrong exactly but is operating at the wrong scale. It describes the anxious management of a local problem while missing the global condition that makes the local problem possible.

The restricted economy is the economy we recognise: production, accumulation, investment, return. The logic of use. The question it asks of every expenditure is: what does this produce? What comes back? Against this Bataille places dépense — expenditure without return. Spending that produces nothing, accumulates nothing, converts into nothing. He finds it everywhere that human cultures have placed their highest values. These are not failures of rational economy. They are not primitive irrationality awaiting the corrective of modern accounting. They are the points at which a culture touches what is most fully alive in itself — the moments when the drive to squander, to exceed, to spend beyond utility, asserts itself against the restricted logic of use and wins. Dépense is not the exception to this movement. It is its most honest expression.

Erotism belongs to the same structure, but operates at the level of the subject rather than the social. Bataille’s account of the erotic encounter begins from the observation that the self is, ordinarily, a bounded and defended thing. The erotic encounter interrupts this work. It is, in his formulation, a petite mort — a small death, a temporary dissolution of the boundary between self and other, a rupture in the continuity of the subject that is experienced as both loss and intensity. What makes the erotic specifically erotic, rather than merely physical, is precisely this dissolution: the moment in which the defended self loses its edges and merges, briefly and dangerously, with something beyond itself.

The sacred, in Bataille’s system, is not the holy in the conventional religious sense — it is not the pure or the elevated. It is the separated: that which has been removed from the domain of the profane, the useful, the safe and ordinary. The sacred is excessive, dangerous, contaminating — that which, if brought into contact with the profane world of use and utility, would overwhelm it. The taboo that surrounds the sacred is not arbitrary prohibition. It is a recognition that certain things carry an energy incompatible with the organised management of everyday life. To touch them is to risk dissolution. And it is this risk — this proximity to dissolution — that makes them the sites of the culture’s deepest investment.

Bataille’s system, taken whole, produces a single underlying claim: that what a culture most values, what it returns to compulsively and organises its highest ceremonies around, is always that which cannot be converted into use. The useless is not the worthless. It is, in the general economy, the most charged thing there is.

Start with the bag.

The Le Chiquito — Jacquemus’s signature object, the piece that made the brand legible to an audience beyond French fashion insiders — is approximately the size of a large matchbox. It holds, at maximum, a folded banknote and a single key. It cannot contain a phone. It cannot contain a card. It is, by every measure of the restricted economy, a failed bag. It fails at the only thing bags are supposed to do.

It sold out immediately. It continues to sell out. It has generated more cultural attention per square centimetre than almost any fashion object of the last decade. Women carry it knowing it is useless, and the knowledge of its uselessness is not incidental to its appeal — it is the appeal. To carry the Le Chiquito is to announce, visibly and deliberately, that you have moved beyond the domain of need. The object’s uselessness is its meaning.

The wide-brimmed hats that became Jacquemus’s early signature operated by the same logic at the opposite scale — brims so wide they caught the wind, proportions so exaggerated they tipped forward across the face, beautiful in photographs in the specific quality of shadow they cast, unwearable in any practical sense. The exaggeration that made them impractical was identical to the proportion that made them arresting. One was not the cost of the other. They were the same thing.

Then consider the shows. Jacquemus has staged runway presentations in a lavender field in Provence with no press in attendance — only the cameras that would distribute the images afterward, the landscape serving as the only audience that mattered. He has shown in a snowstorm, in a salt flat, on a moving conveyor belt inside Charles de Gaulle airport at six in the morning, the models walking against the flow of actual travellers pulling actual luggage toward actual destinations. In each case the location was chosen for its capacity to overwhelm utility — to place the clothes in a context so excessive, so indifferent to the practicalities of fashion presentation, that the event itself became the primary object. The clothes were almost secondary. What was being shown, in each case, was the brand’s willingness to spend — to commit resources, attention, and creative energy to something that produced no direct return beyond the images it generated and the feeling those images carried.

And then there is Simon Porte Jacquemus himself, who is perhaps the brand’s most carefully constructed object — and the one that reveals most clearly how deep the Bataillean logic runs. He narrates his own origins with the repetition and emotional architecture of myth: the childhood in Provence, the mother who died when he was eighteen, the arrival in Paris with nothing, the first collection shown in a park because he could not afford a venue. These are true facts, or true enough, but they have been told so many times, with such consistent structure, that they have passed beyond biography into something closer to sacred narrative. Bataille’s account of the sacred includes exactly this operation: the separation of certain events from ordinary history, their elevation into origin stories that give subsequent abundance its meaning, their transformation from mere facts into explanatory structures through which a community — in this case the brand’s audience — understands what it is participating in. The poverty is not incidental to the brand. It is the brand’s creation myth that transforms the lavender fields and the Mediterranean light and the beautiful useless objects into the expression of a sensibility that knows what it means to have had nothing and chooses beauty anyway, extravagantly and without apology. The myth converts consumption into affirmation — the affirmation of a value system in which beauty and uselessness and joy are worth more than prudence. The brand does not sell objects. It sells a permission structure for expenditure, grounded in a story of loss that makes the spending feel, paradoxically, like an act of survival. The origin myth is not the backstory of the brand. It is the brand’s fourth Bataillean operation: the construction of a sacred narrative that charges every object it touches with something beyond the object’s own properties.

What Jacquemus does is not merely aesthetically sophisticated or culturally attuned. It is structurally Bataillean — the brand operates according to the logic of the general economy, running operations that map onto the theoretical apparatus of The Accursed Share and Erotism not as metaphorical correspondences but as functional identities. The mechanism is the same. Only the context has changed.

In the summer of 2023, Jacquemus staged a show at the Palace of Versailles. Not inside the palace — on the grounds, in the formal gardens, with the fountains running and the geometry of Le Nôtre’s landscaping serving as the only set design required. The models walked. The clothes moved in the particular way clothes move when they are designed for movement rather than stillness. The sky did what the sky does over the Île-de-France in summer. It was, by any measure of rational resource allocation, an act of pure waste. The logistics of staging a fashion show at Versailles — the permissions, the staffing, the transport, the production infrastructure required to place a runway in a UNESCO World Heritage site — consume resources that bear no proportional relationship to the commercial return a single seasonal collection generates. By the metrics of the restricted economy, it was a catastrophic misallocation of capital. Its value was incommensurable with media spend, operating in a register that efficiency cannot measure because efficiency was never the point.

It generated, in the forty-eight hours following, a cultural saturation that no media spend of equivalent magnitude could have purchased. And more importantly, it generated something that media spend cannot purchase at any price: the feeling, in everyone who watched it, of having witnessed genuine excess. Not performed excess — not the simulation of spending, which is what most luxury brand communication produces — but actual expenditure, actual commitment of real resources to something that returned nothing but beauty and the cultural authority that beauty, spent lavishly enough, confers.

This is dépense operating as prestige logic, and it works through a mechanism Bataille identified in the potlatch: the destruction of value in public establishes the destroyer as operating beyond the domain of need. The chief who burns the most blankets is not impoverished by the burning — he is elevated by it, because the burning demonstrates a surplus so vast that its destruction is possible. Jacquemus burning resources on the Versailles gardens, on the Charles de Gaulle conveyor, on the L.A. pool show where the models walked across the surface of the water on a submerged transparent runway and the entire apparatus existed for approximately twenty-two minutes before being dismantled — each of these acts performs the same operation. The brand announces, through the scale and the deliberateness of its waste, that it exists beyond necessity. And in existing beyond necessity it becomes, for the person watching, the object through which their own desire to exist beyond necessity can be vicariously expressed.

This is the transaction the customer is actually making when they buy the Le Chiquito or the oversized hat. They are not buying an object. They are buying a participation in an uneconomy — a small material stake in the brand’s demonstrated capacity for expenditure without return. The purchase is the restricted economy’s token of membership in the general one. The customer cannot stage a show at Versailles. But they can carry the object that the entity capable of staging a show at Versailles produced. The desire the brand generates is inseparable from the waste the brand performs. Remove the dépense and the objects become merely expensive.

It is the expenditure that charges them.

The second movement: eroticism as dissolution

Jacquemus is one of the very few fashion houses where the body is not a hanger. The dominant logic of luxury fashion presentation treats the body as a neutral infrastructure for the display of garments — the model’s function is to make the clothes visible, to move them through space in a way that communicates their construction and their drape, to present rather than to inhabit. The body is subordinated to the object. It disappears into the service of the thing it carries.

Jacquemus inverts this relationship, but not through exposure and directed desire — not through the logic of display that makes the body available for a viewer’s structured consumption. What Jacquemus does is different. The cutouts in a Jacquemus garment — and there are always cutouts, apertures in the fabric that reveal the body beneath in geometrically considered and seemingly arbitrary locations, a hip, a shoulder blade, the space between the ribs — do not expose the body in the logic of display. They suggest porosity. They are not windows. They are breaches. The garment does not frame the body for consumption. It suggests that the boundary between the clothed self and the world beyond it is permeable, negotiable, subject to dissolution.

The models’ expressions complete this operation. In most luxury fashion presentation, the model’s face performs one of a limited set of affective states: cool indifference, directed challenge, aspirational elevation. These are all relational expressions — they position the viewer in relation to the brand’s identity. Jacquemus models frequently appear to be experiencing something entirely internal and entirely private. Not withdrawn exactly, but interior — present to something the viewer cannot access, absorbed in an experience that the camera is documenting rather than constructing. The expression is not directed outward. It curves inward.

This interiority is continuous with Bataille’s account of the erotic encounter as an experience that dissolves the boundary of the self not toward another person but toward something beyond the personal entirely — toward what he calls continuity, the state prior to and beneath the individuated subject, the condition of being that precedes the formation of the defended self. The erotic, in Bataille’s system, is not fundamentally about the other person. It is about what happens to the self in the encounter: the temporary suspension of the boundaries that constitute ordinary subjectivity, the brief experience of existing without edges.

The Jacquemus garment creates the conditions for this experience without producing the encounter itself. It suggests dissolution rather than achieving it. The cutout implies porosity without actualising it. The model’s interior expression implies an experience the viewer cannot share but can feel the outline of. This is eroticism operating as atmospheric condition rather than as explicit content — and it is, for that reason, far more pervasive and far more potent than the directed sexuality of houses that make the erotic explicit. Explicit sexuality in fashion produces a specific and bounded response. It is exciting in a way that has clear edges and a clear object. What Jacquemus produces is something more diffuse and more destabilising: a generalised sense of threshold, of standing at the boundary between the contained self and something larger and more dangerous, without being able to identify precisely what that larger thing is or where the boundary is located.

Bataille argued that this threshold experience — the sense of standing at the edge of one’s own dissolution without crossing it — was the fundamental structure of both the erotic and the sacred. The sacred is not what lies beyond the threshold. It is the threshold itself: the zone of contact between the profane and the overwhelming, between the organised self and the unorganised energy that precedes and exceeds it. Jacquemus constructs this zone through the body, through the garment’s relationship to the body, through the specific and deliberate imprecision of its erotic register. The brand does not tell you what you desire. It places you at the edge of desiring and holds you there — because desire with a clear object exhausts itself in acquisition, while desire held at the threshold of its own articulation is, in principle, inexhaustible.

The Jacquemus feed does not resolve. It accumulates images that circle the same threshold without crossing it: bodies in light, garments that open where they should close, landscapes that dwarf the human figure, expressions that look inward at something the viewer cannot name. The overall effect is not of a brand presenting its products but of a sensibility in a permanent state of approach — always moving toward something, never arriving, generating in the viewer a corresponding state of suspended wanting that is, structurally, indistinguishable from what Bataille describes as the condition of the erotic subject poised at the moment before dissolution.

The brand has monetised the petite mort. Not the death itself — the approach. The endless, renewable, commercially inexhaustible approach.

Return to the bag.

The Le Chiquito is, in the history of fashion objects, genuinely anomalous. The Hermès Birkin costs more than a car and functions less reliably as a carrying vessel, but the Birkin at least gestures toward utility. It is large. It closes securely. It could, in principle, hold the contents of a life organised around the need to carry things. The excess of its cost over its function is real but the function itself is not negated. The Birkin is a useful object that has been made, through the application of extraordinary craft and extraordinary price, into something more than useful.

The Le Chiquito does not make this gesture. It abandons utility without apology, without the compensation of extraordinary craft or historical prestige or the weight of a century of artisanal tradition. It is a very small bag made by a relatively young brand with no inherited cultural authority, and it holds almost nothing, and it costs a significant multiple of what a bag that held everything would cost. By every logic of the restricted economy it should not exist as a desirable object. It exists as a highly desirable object. The question is why.

Bataille’s account of the sacred object provides the only adequate answer. The sacred is constituted by a double operation: separation from the domain of ordinary use, and the investment of that separated thing with an energy or charge that ordinary objects do not carry. The sacred object is useless by design — its removal from the circuit of utility is precisely what makes it sacred, what allows it to carry the concentrated energy of the culture’s highest values rather than being dispersed into the flat equivalence of functional things. The taboo that surrounds it is the mechanism by which that charge is maintained. To approach the sacred object is to approach something genuinely dangerous: not dangerous in a physical sense but dangerous in the sense that contact with it risks the dissolution of the ordinary categories by which the profane world is organised.

The Le Chiquito replicates this structure with a fidelity that is either the product of extraordinary intuitive intelligence or the clearest possible evidence that Bataille was describing something real about how value operates in human cultures rather than constructing a philosophical system specific to archaic societies. The bag is separated from ordinary use — not metaphorically but literally, by the simple fact of being too small to be useful. That separation invests it with a charge that useful bags do not carry. The price functions as taboo: it marks the object as set apart, as requiring a specific and deliberate act of transgression to possess. And the possession of it, once the transgression has been made, confers on the carrier the status of someone who has made contact with the sacred: someone who exists, at least in this one material expression, beyond the domain of need.

This is the Bataillean gift operating inside a commercial transaction. The Le Chiquito cannot be recuperated into utility. It cannot be justified to a rationalist accounting of needs met and purposes served. It can only be spent — worn, carried, displayed — in the full knowledge that the spending produces nothing beyond the experience of having spent. The customer who buys it is performing, in miniature and in the register of consumer capitalism, the same operation as the Aztec priest who fed the sun. The object is offered to something larger than need. The offering produces nothing recoverable. And in producing nothing recoverable, it produces everything that matters: the brief, material experience of existing beyond the logic of use, of participating, however modestly and however mediated by commerce, in the general economy’s fundamental tendency toward the greatest possible squandering.

The sacred is not merely separate from the profane — it actively threatens the profane with its proximity. The Le Chiquito, carried into a workplace, a supermarket, a school run, is a small detonation of uselessness in the landscape of use. Its presence in those spaces is a minor but genuine act of transgression — a declaration that the bearer has imported something from the domain of excess into the domain of necessity that the domain of necessity cannot entirely contain or account for. The culture needs its useless things not despite their uselessness but because of it — because without the periodic intrusion of the excessive, the uneconomic, the beautiful and pointless, the restricted economy closes entirely around itself and forgets that it is a local solution to a local problem rather than the total description of reality that it always tends to become. The Le Chiquito is doing the same work Bataille identified in the cathedral, in the potlatch, in the sacrifice. It is keeping the general economy visible inside the restricted one. It is insisting, in the most legible and portable form available to a commercial fashion brand, that uselessness is not the absence of value but its most concentrated expression.

Dépense as prestige logic, eroticism as dissolution, sacred uselessness as the object’s deepest identity, origin myth as sacred narrative — these are not decorative features of the Jacquemus brand. They are its operating system. They are the reason the brand generates the desire it generates, the cultural authority it commands, the loyalty it produces in an audience that could, in purely functional terms, satisfy every need the brand meets at a fraction of the cost. The brand works because it has, whether through intuition or accident or some synthesis of both that cannot be cleanly separated, reconstructed within the logic of contemporary consumer capitalism the structures through which human cultures have always organised their relationship to excess, to the body, to the sacred, and to the necessary destruction of value that gives the accumulation of value its meaning.

Bataille spent his career arguing that these structures were not primitive survivals awaiting the civilising correction of rational economy. They were, he insisted, the deepest and most durable expressions of what it means to be a living system embedded in a universe that produces more energy than it can use. Jacquemus, without acknowledgment and possibly without awareness, has proven him right — in the most commercially legible, the most widely distributed, and the most photographed form the argument has yet taken.

The theft is complete. The stolen goods are everywhere.

Bataille’s general economy is not a theory that can be borrowed without remainder. It is not a toolkit of concepts available for application to whatever phenomenon seems to rhyme with them. It is, at its foundation, a claim about what escapes — about the irreducible excess that cannot be captured by the restricted economy without being destroyed in the capturing. Dépense is not merely unproductive spending. It is spending that resists conversion. The potlatch gift cannot be returned without destroying the entire social logic it enacts. The sacrifice cannot be recuperated into utility without ceasing to be sacrifice. The erotic encounter dissolves the subject because it cannot be managed or planned or converted into a product without the dissolution failing to occur. The general economy is general because it exceeds every attempt to domesticate it, to fold it back into the logic of accumulation and return.

The Jacquemus machine does not escape. It accumulates.

The lavender field runway show is broadcast on Instagram to fourteen million followers. The expenditure — the real expenditure, the logistics and the permissions and the production infrastructure — is converted immediately and efficiently into content, and content is the restricted economy’s most successful recent innovation: the transformation of experience into a reproducible and distributable commodity that generates returns across an indefinite future. The show is spent once. The images are spent forever. What looked like dépense was, at the structural level, an extremely efficient form of investment — the production of cultural capital through the performance of its own negation. The waste was not waste. It was the most productive thing the brand did that season.

This is Debord’s insight, made in 1967 and not yet superseded: the spectacle does not merely represent the dominant order, it recuperates its own negation. Every gesture of refusal, every performance of excess or transgression or escape from the logic of the commodity, is available to the spectacle as raw material — available to be repackaged, redistributed, and sold back to the audience that found the gesture meaningful. The underground becomes a brand. The anti-fashion statement becomes a fashion statement. The lavender field becomes a content format. The mechanism of recuperation is not a conspiracy or a failure of authentic intention. It is simply what the spectacle does, automatically and without effort, because it has no outside.

The Mediterranean light, the Provençal origin myth, the body at the threshold of its own dissolution — these are not experiences the brand delivers. They are images of experiences that the logic of the brand, by definition, cannot deliver. The customer buys the image. The image is beautiful. The experience it points toward remains, structurally and necessarily, just out of reach — which is why the customer returns, why the desire is inexhaustible, why the brand does not exhaust itself in a single season of successful sales. Mark Fisher called this hauntology: the condition in which capital, having foreclosed the possibility of a genuine outside, learns instead to simulate the outside, to sell images of escape that are themselves fully commodified, to produce the feeling of transgression without the transgression, the feeling of excess without the excess. The haunted object points toward something that cannot be recovered, and the pointing is real even when the thing pointed toward cannot be reached.

The €600 bag is the index of this operation. Its sacred uselessness is real — the analysis above stands. But the taboo that constitutes the sacred in Bataille’s system is a genuine prohibition, a genuine danger, a genuine risk of dissolution for whoever approaches it. The taboo around the Le Chiquito is a price point. It separates those who can spend from those who cannot. It does not threaten dissolution. It confirms the subject in its social position — confirms the buyer as someone with sufficient surplus to perform uselessness at this particular scale. The sacred object, in Bataille, undoes the self. The luxury object, in the market, produces the self — confirms it, consolidates it, equips it with a portable sign of its own capacity for beautiful waste. The operation looks like the sacred. It functions as its opposite.

Not the stolen concept, still alive in its new context, still doing the work it did in the original — but a simulacrum of the concept, a reproduction so faithful in its surface features and so empty at its structural core that the difference only becomes visible when you press on the place where the danger should be and find, instead of the abyss, a price tag.

The cynical reading is available and it is not wrong, but it is not the whole truth either — and the gap between its being not wrong and its being the whole truth is where the most interesting thinking lives.

State it with the precision it deserves. Jacquemus has aestheticised Bataillean expenditure and redistributed it as symbolic participation in aristocratic excess for the aspiring professional classes. The mechanism is Bourdieu’s rather than Bataille’s: what the brand actually produces and sells is not dépense but distinction — the social legibility of having aligned oneself with a particular taste culture, of having demonstrated, through the specific and recognisable form of one’s spending, membership in a class defined by its access to beautiful uselessness. The Le Chiquito’s uselessness is not sacred. It is functional — it functions as a signal, as a unit of cultural currency, as a conversion of economic capital into the social capital that Bourdieu spent his career showing was the restricted economy’s most sophisticated product. The transgression has been made exchangeable — and an exchangeable transgression is, by definition, no longer a transgression. It is a transaction. The general economy has been pickpocketed by the restricted one. Bataille’s excess has been converted into Bourdieu’s capital. The con is perfect because it is invisible — because the person carrying the bag experiences themselves as participating in something beyond utility while the brand accumulates the utility of their participation with complete efficiency.

The generous reading is also available, and it too deserves precision rather than sentimentality. Bataille never claimed that the sacred had to be metaphysically authentic to produce its effects. His account of the sacred is anthropological before it is philosophical — it describes what human cultures do with excess, how they construct the zones of the dangerous and the useless and the overwhelming, regardless of whether those constructions correspond to any transcendent reality. The potlatch chief burning blankets is not accessing a genuine general economy that exists independently of the ceremony. He is constructing, through the ceremony, a temporary suspension of the restricted economy’s logic — and that suspension, however constructed, however contingent, produces real effects in the people who witness and participate in it. The construction does not invalidate the experience. The scaffolding does not negate the building.

Apply this to the person standing in a field in Provence watching models walk through lavender at dusk. The show is a content production exercise. The images will be on Instagram within the hour. The entire apparatus is recuperated before it has finished occurring. All of this is true. And the person standing in the field is also, for the duration of the show, genuinely outside the logic of use — genuinely in the presence of something that cannot be justified by any accounting of needs met and purposes served, genuinely subject to the particular quality of attention that beauty, spent at sufficient scale, compels. The experience is manufactured. It is also real. These two facts do not cancel each other.

The haunted object in Fisher’s account is not simply fake — it is not a cynical simulation with nothing beneath it. It is genuinely lost, genuinely pointing toward something that cannot be recovered, genuinely registering an absence that is not nothing. The Jacquemus aesthetic haunts because it points toward a relationship with beauty and uselessness and the body and excess that the conditions of contemporary life make structurally unavailable — and the pointing is real even when the thing pointed toward cannot be reached. The image of the lavender field is not the lavender field. But it is not nothing. It is a record of a genuine human need that the market has learned to address in the only way the market can address anything: imperfectly, at a profit, in a form that creates as much of the need as it satisfies.

The spectacle of expenditure contains, nested within it, a genuine expenditure — smaller than the one it performs, insufficient to the need it addresses, compromised at every level by the commercial logic that stages it, but real nonetheless. The person who carries the Le Chiquito knowing it holds nothing has made, in however minor and mediated a form, an actual choice against utility. The choice is recuperated the moment it becomes legible as social currency. But the moment of the choice itself — the moment of spending money on something beautiful and useless in the full knowledge of its uselessness — is a moment in which the restricted economy’s logic is genuinely, if briefly, suspended. Bataille would find it insufficient. He would be right. But insufficient is not the same as nothing, and nothing is what the cynical reading, pressed to its conclusion, leaves us with.

The remainder is small. It is real.

One of the most commercially successful luxury fashion brands of the twenty-first century — a brand built by a man from Provence with no inherited cultural capital, no fashion house lineage, no theoretical education in the philosophy of excess — has generated its desire, its cultural authority, and its market position almost entirely by reconstructing, intuitively and without acknowledgment, the conceptual architecture of a French heterodox philosopher who believed that capitalism was a catastrophic mismanagement of the universe’s fundamental tendency toward waste.

The restricted economy, left to itself, cannot generate genuine want. It can generate need — through scarcity, through planned obsolescence, through the manufacture of lack — but need is not want, and the aspiring professional classes who constitute Jacquemus’s core market have, by and large, had their needs met. They are not buying the Le Chiquito because they lack a bag. They are buying it because utility alone no longer produces the feeling that spending is supposed to produce — the feeling of contact with something larger than the organised management of daily life, something excessive and beautiful and, in the precise sense that Bataille meant, sacred. The restricted economy cannot produce this feeling from its own resources. It has to reach outside itself, toward the general economy’s logic of expenditure without return, toward the sacred’s logic of the useless and the dangerous and the overwhelming, toward the erotic’s logic of dissolution and threshold and the suspended self. It has to steal.

And this is where the essay’s initial charge reverses itself. The theft is not, finally, a critique of Jacquemus. It is a compliment to Bataille — the most commercially legible compliment his work has yet received. The fact that capital, in its late-spectacular phase, has had to reach outside the restricted economy to sustain desire is precisely what Bataille predicted it would eventually have to do. The restricted economy, he argued, could never be total — could never fully capture and convert the general economy’s excess — because the excess was not a feature of the system but the condition of the system’s existence.

You cannot domesticate the sun. You can build structures that manage the light it produces, that convert some portion of its energy into use, that organise human life around the fact of its giving. But the giving continues beyond every structure built to manage it, and eventually the excess finds its way through — in sacrifice, in festival, in the erotic encounter, in the potlatch, in the runway show staged in a salt marsh at the edge of the Mediterranean where the horses move through water and the sky makes utility feel, for a moment, like the smaller thing it actually is.

Jacquemus did not steal from Bataille because he is cynical. He stole because Bataille was right. The desire that moves through the brand — the desire that makes the useless bag desirable, the wasteful show necessary, the body at the threshold of its own dissolution the image the culture cannot stop producing and consuming — is not a desire the brand invented. It is a desire the brand found, already operating, in the structure of a living system that produces more energy than it can use and has always known, at some level beneath articulation, what to do with it.

It is the point.

first published in Lenin Anduquia · Substack