“It’s just about kids having fun,” Jonathan Anderson said. “Sort of about putting on clothes and singing into the mirror.” The photos, shot by Juergen Teller, say all that. They capture something of the directness of the pictures that young people in shared student houses have been posting of themselves on social media all along the pandemic: all the raw, sweet, playful posing in bright, colorful self-styled clothes that’s been going on the world over.
Anderson has that audience with his own brand—the way that the Harry Styles JW Anderson DIY home knitting craze took off spontaneously on TikTok last year proved it. His fall collection dedicated full attention to them, throwing together colorful, quirky strawberry prints, hand-knits, windcheaters, running shorts, and diagonal-striped dresses with the unaffected randomness that is, of course, the look Gen Z’s invented for itself.
Anderson said the reference in his mind was a throwback to his upbringing in Northern Ireland and the times he visited his grandfather, to “a house of childhood.” In the mood he was designing, he had no interest “in being conceptual for conceptualism’s sake. It was kind of going back to the beginning of JW Anderson,” he said.
Scroll back to what that meant in 2011 or 2012 on Vogue Runway, and although the whole format looks so different (when everything was a runway show), Anderson was always on point with an original sweater. They still stand out now, and so does the anchor-initial JW Anderson logo he designed while imagining himself into a future when one day his name would be a brand. That youthful dream came to pass in what now seems like a long time ago—and the JW Anderson logo, blown up on sweaters, is here, artfully drawn, all over this collection.
When the pictures Teller had taken arrived at reviewers’ doors, his images turned out to have been framed in exactly the same mass-produced cardboard photo frames that high school and university commercial photographers use for end-of-year class souvenirs: a cutely touching alternative angle on marking the rites-of-passage teenage moments that haven’t been happening, perhaps?
