Ostensibly, there was not lot to see at JW Anderson’s show. A forward march of minimal mini-silhouettes. Shapes that ran from tiny, apparently recognisable generic sweaters, sweatshirts and bombers to conceptual leather tutu-dresses. A single snub-toed leather welly-biker shoe-boot on everyone. Materials reduced to four fabrications: cashmere knit, leather, silk and sequins.
But then again: Anderson was saying so much to unpack within all of this. Number one: his big-picture thinking about the parlous state of fashion after years of runaway excess: “I think where we are today is that there needs to be a kind of narrowing of things while the world is transitioning. I think fashion needs to kind of refocus somehow, because we’re in a moment where we, the industry, have to look at ourselves.”
Number two: how it’s entirely possible to be playfully creative with the toolbox of techniques—knitting, trompe l’oeil tricks and brand signifiers—he’s built up since he first started JW Anderson, on virtually nothing.
Number three: keeping eyes open to young people’s attitudes and how they dress. Anderson talked about “a girly independence” in his post-show debrief. “A lot of what I do in the brand is reflected on my sister or people around me in the studio,” he said. When someone asked him what he meant by that, he talked about going out with his younger sister and her friends. “Maybe it’s a Northern Irish thing. They sort of pack together on a night out. They call each other ‘the girlies.’ There’s a toughness there that I like.”
Avid Anderson-ologists will spot the fact that this collection was sprinkled with variations on his signatures over time: a paisley print dress, sweater dresses made of vertical strips mimicking high-rise buildings—these last a follow-on from the “house” hand-knits in his last men’s show.
A printed text which recurred in this collection was the introduction to an essay on art and design by Clive Bell, the British art critic who was a member of the early 20th century Bloomsbury Group. Anderson didn’t go into detail about the thrust of this treatise. What he did say circled back to his remarks about the issues fashion is facing. “It’s more like this idea of starting from a blank page,” he said. “Where is the next decade going, and how do we work with it?”
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