Jonathan Anderson left London and showed in Milan this season. Sort of. In the latest in his series of ingenious pandemic alternatives to putting models on a runway, he made a surprise intervention in public. “We have dozens of trucks with billboards of the collection images circulating Milan all day,” he announced on Saturday in an early morning phone call from Paris, where he was prepping his Loewe collection. “Juergen Teller is out photographing them with people at gas stations and other stops. Content becomes content. Image becomes pictures of pictures. Fashion becomes part of the landscape.”
As a device for creating a widely seen, soon to be endlessly Instagram-replicated public spectacle, it’s just the latest of Anderson’s super-smart manipulations of media—right in the middle of the Italian city where the institution of the fashion billboard has been part of the competitive pride of fashion week for years.
And this, simply with one photographer and one model, his friend Hari Nef impersonating four pop-cultural ‘characters,’ and a fleet of truckers. “We don’t have thematics any more. We’re doing bite-sized, light-hearted things like this,” Anderson said. “We have a young demographic, and we’re a small contemporary brand. With all the multiple issues we’re facing—going from one crisis to another crisis—there has to be learning from that. New types and ways of doing things.”
Since the pandemic hit Anderson has been acing communication by playing with printed matter in delightful ways. He’s also re-focused his own-brand strategy on “two main seasons, and two experimental ones. So this is one of those experiments.”
Rolled out (literally) around Milan were pictures designed simultaneously to provoke lots of fun and push Gen-Z memory-buttons. “We’re playing with this media paradox in pop culture where there’s this constant going to the past, and bringing it forward. So things are just as valid as they were, but in a different context.”
One set is around the movie posters for Carrie—original graphics from Sissy Spacek’s classic 1976 horror role as the awkward teenager who turns out to have gory telekinetic powers of revenge at the school prom. No random choice, that: “I feel like that movie is such an influence on teen TV series being made now,” Anderson acutely observed. (MGM owns the movie, but getting the images involved approaching Spacek for her personal permission, he said.) Apart from the obvious T-shirt, sweatpant, and pajama-set graphics, there’s a one-shouldered silver silk satin prom dress. Quite ingeniously, it’s photo-printed all around the hem with “hyper realistic” balloons from Carrie’s own prom.
It barely took seconds for fans to recognize via the JW Anderson Instagram account that he’s also wheeling out a Run Hany collab—images from the 1980s Korean cult cartoon series are printed on bumperbags and tops.
Anderson met Hari Nef in a Boston bar a while back. “I’ve known her for years. She’s someone who’s incredibly good at playing parts, transforming themselves. We’re the same generation and she has a brilliant sense of humor.” They’d bonded over Anderson’s “Frills” fall 2013 menswear collection—credited as the first show in the continuing wave of gender-blurring fashion that is center-front everywhere now. “She told me it had an incredible impact in America, when that came out.” So Nef makes the ideal Anderson avatar to act up, in a big-hair wig, as homage to the time-defying gay icon that is Cher. In another part, she has a flicked hairstyle which nods to Brokeback Mountain.
There’s a difference between the Juergen Teller mobile billboard campaign and the lookbook shoot that Anderson sent out to fashion press to peruse. That’s surely to keep all plates spinning for multiple audiences—the 3-D juggling act (and what works better than a mixed metaphor in these chaotic days?) that all brands must perform now to maintain visibility. That gives us the opportunity to parse the intellectual side of JW Anderson’s interests in tufty textures, quirky craft, and (this time) odd-ball inflatables.
Still, he has it both ways now. Time was when an ‘extreme’ chandelier paillette corset and earrings, shaggy trousers, or a blow-up bustier might have been read and contained within the hermetic insider fashion system as “show pieces,” purely made as fodder for fashion shoots. No longer. Influencer culture has made certain that clothes like these are in demand and worn. The show is on the outside now.
