J.W. Anderson is one of those smart cookies who utilizes the calendar synchronicity of his women's Pre-Fall and men's Fall collections to maximum effect, carrying over particular fabrics, silhouettes, and accessories. He's also smart enough to know that the similarities between the two collections will actually amplify the differences. Take his obsession with cuffs, for example: With his womenswear, the cuffs elongated sleeves and pants with a feminine languor that, translated into the menswear he showed today, read as foppish subversion. Or maybe just as something that defied definition, which fit right in with the customer envisaged in Anderson's show notes: "a free-spirited thinker with an interest in pataphysics." It's sometimes hard to escape the feeling that Anderson is playing the wind-up artist when he says things like that. Pataphysics was, after all, a prankish pseudo philosophy cooked up by the French provocateur Alfred Jarry in the late 19th century. But if we were to get all pataphysical on yo' ass, the notion actually jelled well with Anderson's extraordinary presentation.
It was a breakthrough collection for him, and maybe for menswear, too. Fashion has an increasingly referential bent, with designers tapping other talents in other times for inspiration and doing their best to bury the sources, but Anderson's stance is a more devil-may-care borrow-and-be-damned. And because he is quite fearless in that, his collections become an unplaceable stew of fashion echoes. There was a lot of the '70s here: the same belted brown leather coat we saw in Pre-Fall's womenswear, the trim shearlings, the suede coat with the knit sleeves, the blue corduroy jacket, the funky Soul Train collar points on sinuous shirts. The big buttons that were the collection's jewelry-like decorative element were a whole other thing. The mesh squares were inspired by the stereo speakers in a car; the ceramics were an offshoot of Anderson's obsession with the legendary Lucie Rie, who turned to button-making during World War II when she was no longer able to make her pots and vases. OMG!
Then there were the coat and top in the mohair that toymaker Steiff uses for teddy bears, and the suit in a mustard-ish shade of velvet that was totally evocative of turn-of-the-century (talking about 19th here) dandies. The luxuriantly fringed scarves evoked the same period, while the slicked-back hair that made the boys look like Tamara de Lempicka pinup boys was from an entirely different era of dandy. The whole show took place on a reeking floor of purple rubber chips, the remains of car tires normally used for gymkhanas. For some reason, it made Anderson think of George Orwell and 1984.
So, that happened. And what it added up to was a new kind of menswear for a new kind of man. Some of the models walked swinging Anderson's amulets, a chain with a spoon cupping a smidgen of—what did he call it?—fool's gold. Remember Mia Farrow's stinky amulet in Rosemary's Baby? That was the devil's work. There is something equally unhinging about J.W. Anderson. Thank god (or something else).
