You know the hugely inflated J.W.Anderson leg-of-mutton sleeves that set everyone in fashion arguing last season? Well, whatever position you took on them—hate and derision or all-out excitement—the likelihood is that they’ll be affecting the way women dress by next year. Shoulders haven’t been out there for a long time, and certainly not in the ’80s-Edwardiana configuration last demonstrated in public by Dynasty’s Krystle Carrington and Princess Diana in her Shy Di years, which is the buried taste-memory Jonathan Anderson’s idea conjured up in the first round. But he has a talent for lobbing incendiary proposals into the fashion crowd and then following up swiftly with the wearable version, and in this case, it’s in the shape of sweaters with a curved, puffed silhouette and some cropped jackets with the same line. Modular is what he was calling it at his lookbook shoot in London, meaning the way the line is seamless and continuous from neck through sleeve, but also, perhaps, in the sense of being a “module” to click into a look put together from separates.
Whatever he calls it, and wherever it came from, it’s highly wantable, and highly likely to be copied—and he isn’t one to stick around and wait for others to take advantage of an idea before he can sell it. “You can’t overthink things in fashion,” he said, alluding to the speed at which ideas are turned over now. “It’s what you feel in the moment.”
His smart method of adapting high-concept or awkward-seeming runway ideas was evidenced in other ways, as well, in this extensive pre-collection. The superimposed underwired bras that opened his last show are vestigially registered in the cup-seaming in a brown leather jacket; the tracksuits he launched for Spring are now manifest as vertically zippered denim and metallic-nylon two-pieces. “Remember K-Way shell suits?” he asked with a laugh. Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but either way, it doesn’t really matter. What does is the fact that Anderson is now capable of transforming references of whatever cheesy origin into a whole spectrum of products girls want, right down to the studded, nylon fabric–covered, ’90s-ish square-toed boots.
