"Can fashion ever be art?" Jonathan Anderson chose a challenging venue to ask himself that question when he transported a handful of editors up to Cambridge last night to see his collection for Resort 2016 in a house called Kettle's Yard. Jim Ede, its original owner, filled the airy, white-walled, wood-floored space to the rafters with a collection of British modernists more complete than anything you'd see outside a grand institution like the Tate Gallery (where Ede, in fact, worked in the '20s and '30s). It's Anderson's favorite style of art, so Kettle's Yard has been his mecca for years. Same with other connoisseurs of modernism like Paul Smith, who was there last time Anderson visited. And with the place about to close for refurbishment, he was keen to share his enthusiasm. "I'm pretending it's my house for one evening," Anderson said gleefully.
But it wouldn't be a J.W. event if there wasn't something innately unsettling, contradictory. In this case, there was a profound dissonance between the clothes and the setting. "This Zen-like experience of the clothing is ultimately not connected to the collection," the designer agreed. And with that, he had the answer to his own question about fashion and art. A flat "No." But that scarcely lessened the impact of what he showed. If Ede's house was a serene arrangement of paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and objets trouvés, Anderson's resortwear was a brash, lively extension of the spectacular '80s-influenced collection he showed for Fall. Floral prints, ruffled hems, and puffed sleeves, ruched skirts, and polka dots felt like an update of Emanuel Ungaro's vocabulary. So did the body-consciousness of the fitted dresses suspended from bra tops. There were literally suspenders attached as a detail to a dress whose V-shaped top outlined in snaps echoed '80s icon Klaus Nomi. And a vibrantly striped, elbows-out dress in a ribbed knit could have slipped out of an Antonio drawing.
Still, if Anderson's choice of venue was contradictory in one way, it was complementary in another. Ede's genius was composition, the arrangement of art and objects in a space to educate the eye. One brilliant example: The bright spot of lemon on a little blue Miró was counterpointed by a real lemon on a nearby platter. Another: the three shells lined up next to a Ben Nicholson painting, casually propped on a windowsill. Ede created vantage points from which these tiny tableaux could be appreciated. Anderson was hoping we'd feel similarly contemplative. "I want to show where inspiration comes from," he said. And, in the end, the elements he brought together in his collection, both prosaic and weird—from a snapped denim skirt and matching jacket to the ruffled boots to the fabulous Vorticist handbags—were also about composition.
