It was playtime with Jonathan Anderson at my house this morning. There he was on my screen—over in his studio across London—telling me how to hold up the paper-cutout figures of his new spring collection against a silver reflective photograph that somebody had taken on holiday in Brittany, just as you see them in the nuttily charming look-book kit he created this season. “So there’s a bit of crafting going on here,” he laughed.
The sequel to the JW Anderson show-in-a-box that he delivered for his pre-collection back in early July winged its way to our doors wrapped in paper printed with the opening scene of *The Importance of Being Earnest,*a hilariously witty text for all of us who are intent on unpacking the meaning of fashion in these serious times. Anderson says he’s been drawing inspiration from none other than his great Irish compatriot Oscar Wilde: “During the pandemic, I’ve been looking at how news is spun by one-liners. Thinking about people in history who did that—well, obviously Oscar Wilde was one of the greatest with the one-liner.” What kick-started Anderson was discovering this Wilde aphorism: “The secret of life is in art.” “It spoke to me as a text [and] literary landscape for the collection—not inspired by Oscar Wilde himself, but the idea of him as an outrageous figure in his period. What would he be today?”
In other words: Seize the day to do a lot more out-of-the box creative thinking about fashion. Or, in Anderson’s case, about the importance of everything he can do in the box. “Even through one of the most challenging times for everyone, you can become incredibly creative and focused,” he said. “I think sometimes we’ve turned shows into a crutch to be able to show fashion. How do you take one piece of information and share something that everyone can experience at the same time?”
Activating childlike curiosity, doing something as analog and anti-digital-gizmo reliant as can be, was Anderson’s personal solution for illustrating a summer collection that was entirely made with local resources in lockdown. The lineup includes puffed volumes, asymmetrically draped tops and evening dresses, and tailoring detailed with the sort of quirks of proportion— and a feather here, a sparkle there—that are native to JW Anderson’s non-normal normal fashion vocab. “It’s a lot based on the suit,” he said. “A puffball dandy somehow. There’s a beautiful tuxedo and a puffball belt that belts on. So you can get a two-for-one in a look!”
Part of the task was finding a path between firing the instinct for extravagance and making practical-minded things; Anderson described it as the tension between “arrogant and non-arrogant fashion.” On the little 2D printed cutouts, he described jacquard peplum-jacketed looks, one cream, the other rose pink, inspired by research about 16th- and 17th-century damask napkins, originally designed to reveal the secret symbolism of their patterns by candlelight. He also took time to develop a technique of pleating suede, crimping the surfaces and cutting it into asymmetric ponchos and T-shirts. On the practical-fashion side: lots of culotte-y board shorts. “What I’ve really loved about this year, as much as it’s been a challenge, is that I’ve found the romance in fashion again,” he reflects. “The clothes are beautifully made. I have a fantastic team. I like the purity of it. Beautifully made clothes, made in England—it’s really homing in on what we do well.”
In lots of ways, Jonathan Anderson has been winning the pandemic from the point of view of communicating in methods that nobody else has come up with: playing in a field that is the absolute opposite of the multimillion-dollar CGI-aided fashion film. Lower budget, for sure—but Anderson’s strategic mind for anticipating the longer-term emotional undercurrents that determine the tides of fashion has put him right at the leading edge. Nor is he planning a physical Loewe show in Paris this week. (He promises something else will be coming to our doors for that.)
So what did he think when he saw runway shows beginning to come back in Milan over the past few days? Will he go back to it—or is something else going to emerge out of all this? “My struggle with it is that fashion has to be about its moment,” he said. “Oddly, when I look at shows now, the idea of seeing a model walking seems very strange—not that I mean I don’t want to do a show ever again. But doing a show in this moment is very complex. The minute we succumb to the pressure of a show now, we end up getting tricked into a false sense of reality—instead of saying, ‘Well, we all can be creative in this moment!’ It is tricky, but you can have a bit of fun and experiment with things. It’s all about: How do you make it personal? I think we will remember these times.”
