How much does it take to shift the needle on what men will want to wear? If a cool designer endorses wearing a white T-shirt, chino shorts, and flip-flops, will that have people following in droves? Or ought directional fashion be operating on the level of taboo-breaking avant-garde, like frilled neoprene shorts and one-shoulder evening tops? Well, this season Jonathan Anderson has shifted from the latter position—the gender challenge he threw down when he started—to the former, or what he called “no-fuss fashion basic-ness. Trying to strip everything back.” And then he added, “I think this is the first season I’ve tried everything on myself. It was like going back into yourself.”
So, was this collection more about Jonathan Anderson personally—or was it also a pragmatic turn toward servicing the ways of the commercial world? The show was, by the by, in the spectacular Florentine gardens of the Villa La Pietra; Anderson is a guest designer of the Italian Pitti Immagine organization, which cleverly baits its menswear tradeshow with the juicy attraction of foreign talent. Perhaps they, and everyone who made the trip to Florence specially to see it, expected Anderson to outdo himself on the conceptual level in front of the international audience. Instead, he went more or less completely in the opposite direction, showing what was, broadly speaking, an assemblage of lightweight generics: summer trenches, wide-leg jeans, denim shorts, sweatshirts, Breton T-shirts, chinos, and sweaters emblazoned with his JW initials-as-anchor logo. Passing by, too, was a new collaboration with Converse in the form of collaged, glittery sneakers or beige suede.
Needless to say, the after-discussions about the pros and cons went on half the night among the gathered menswear fraternity—many of whom themselves are noticeably dressed for the heat in Bermuda shorts, T-shirts, cotton trousers, and sandals. Conversation rolled around the topic of whether there was enough for a fashion-hungry customer’s eye to be caught by this show. Yet plenty admitted that these are the kinds of clothes they’d like to wear themselves. And like all men, they’d homed in on the details—the burgundy abstract print on the wide-leg jeans, the T-shirts with spoofs of American branding, the arty-crafty appliqués, and the tapestry patch of a swan on a bag.
Backstage, behind a topiary hedge, in fact, Anderson said he’d partly been inspired by looking at what tourists wear while taking in the sights of Florence. Another thought, as he spoke against the backdrop of classical sculptures: “This is the most sexual of cities, everywhere you go, there’s nakedness!” The homoerotic awareness in Anderson’s work is undeniably there; it has just moved on from presenting boys in headscarves and bustier tops.
Perhaps it has also involved a degree of honesty. In conversations over the past year, Anderson has often questioned the validity of the term luxury and admitted that, personally, he doesn’t really buy fashion clothing. For once, rather than designing for les autres, he’d decided to be subjective, gone into his own wardrobe, had a look at his favorite things, and “made jeans based on ones I’ve had for years.” As for the chinos and white T-shirts? The ease of ordinariness, to judge by the way most men are dressing around these shows, is an avant-garde trend just waiting for someone as revered as Anderson to declare it okay.
