Picture a 1970s, British suburban scene: an Marks & Spencer blouse with a delicate bow detail at the neck blows in the breeze on a washing line. Nosy neighbors living in rows of terraced houses peer at your clean laundry through picket fences. Well, that was the mood behind JW Anderson‘s autumn-winter 2024 collection. Jonathan Anderson is the absolute fashion mastermind when it comes to planting bizarre, irrational ideas and making them somehow desirable. Old-style English underwear and slippers. Grandpa coats. Even grandma’s gray hairdo became an avant-nostalgia accessory. “They’re hats!” he revealed. This collection certainly has to be read through an irony-tinged lens…
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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News. Fake news. Deep fakes. AI. Images. No one interprets the Internet – and contemporary (non)reality – like Loewe‘s Jonathan Anderson. We are bombarded with sensations, information, visuals, screens, all sorts of media, day-to-night. This over-stimulation was the designer’s key point behind the autumn-winter 2024 collection. Anderson reflects on how everything is leveled up today: celebrity culture, social media, pop culture, and art history, all forming one single collage. Fittingly, the collection was also inspired by the collage art of Richard Hawkins, who explores the male body and its representation in various cultural contexts. The new season offering challenges the notion of a uniform or a signature style, and instead presents a range of characters that embody different expressions of masculinity. The clothes combine classic elements of menswear with more casual and edgy pieces, creating a layered, spontaneous, even random looks. Some of the pieces were also attached to each other (like a couple of coats with sticking out layers of colorful shirts), reflecting the collaged reality we live in. The line-up also features Hawkins’ artworks, which are incorporated into the accessories and garments as prints, jacquards, embroideries, and embellishments.
However, what truly stood out in the outing was the runway setting. Hawkins collaborated with Loewe to create a series of 12 video collages that were displayed on large screens in the show venue, a white cube that evoked the stained glass windows of Loewe’s 1960s window designs by José Pérez de Rozas. The videos featured Loewe’s brand ambassadors (from Josh O’Connor to Jamie Dornan) along with elements from Hawkins’ eclectic sources.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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Jonathan Anderson said in his autumn-winter 2024 preview: “Eyes Wide Shut is one of my favorite films, and I actually think it’s a great Christmas film.” It was, however, two viewings last summer that led to this JW Anderson collection. “I’ve never made anything about a film before,” said Anderson. “This is also the sexiest we’ve ever gone – as far as I can go.” Fashion world has a great affection for this Stanley Kubrick fim. Lately, Puppets & Puppets had an entire collection dedicated to this spicy romance-thriller. In case of Anderson, the result was a diverse design range, spanning from prim to perverse: both in menswear and women’s pre-fall, at moments in a Prada-ist manner (fun fact: in the 2000s, the Irish designer used to work around Prada at Brown Thomas in Dublin; there he met Manuela Pavesi, Miuccia’s right-hand, where she consulted the brand’s merchandising). For the collection’s hero print, Anderson contacted Christiane, Kubrick’s widow, regarding her paintings that the director used in his films (including A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut). These paintings were what spanned the triptych knit jersey dresses: other pieces featured a portrait of a family cat, a pot plant with a barcode still on its tub, and a car interior. Said Anderson: “I thought what was interesting is the psychology of this idea of bringing someone from the background to the foreground.” This was about as literal as Anderson got. The collection contained neither Christmas trees nor masks – although Nicole Kidman was on the soundtrack, delivering the near-to-last line of dialogue – however a palpable spirit of twisted bourgeois eroticism ran through the darkened runway as fil rouge. Red, with all its implications, headlined in an oversized velvet evening jacket for men. The jacket’s womenswear counterpoint was a red velvet jumpsuit with one disordered, asymmetrically cut leg that seemed at the intersection of sleepwear and evening wear. Anderson’s own recurring predilection for shorts was satisfied afresh via some wonderful rib knit pieces – sometimes partnered with cardigans, sometimes not – from whose edges oozed suggestive, unsettlingly domestic whorls of satin. Dressing his female and male models in tights over panties gave a less figure-skating aspect to the trophy underwear trend.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe was a dialogue between the normal and the extreme. He proved that we can have both at the same time. The spring-summer 2024 collection kicked off with an Anderson statement of reduction, where cardigan-dresses were knitted with a loose gauge and fastened with beaten gold buttons, blown up to playful proportions. The silhouette from the designer’s recent menswear show – high, high trousers and a cropped shirt – influenced a couple of womenswear numbers. Anderson is a master of making mundane clothing spectacular, and the spectacular clothing, astonishing. Take the leather shorts which were pinned with a sewing needle crafted in gold-toned metal, artistically holding the pleats in place. On the other hand, two tops were created from crystal-encrusted flowers, hanging together like one sculptural piece. Skirts were all about the art of asymmetry to create pleats that fell like an accordion down one side of the leg. The designer also indulged in proportion play: things that aren’t usually massive, like a ring, were huge. Jeans were wide wide. Cocoon ponchos were so comfortable you just wanted to wrap yourself up inside it. But then, in true whiplash fashion, Anderson presented silk dresses that effortlessly flowed down the runway, topping the chest with a pin-punched square.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
“Substance” seemed to be keyword for Jonathan Anderson‘s spring-summer 2024 menswear collection for Loewe. The three Lynda Benglis fountains that the designer’s curatorial enthusiasm had brought together for the first time were the first clues. One was tall and looming, another an apparently kinetically charged wave mid-break, and the last low and spreading like an unpruned shrub. Splashes of water erupting from Beglis’ structures inhabited the runway space, making the Loewe show an art experience, not just a parade of clothes. But the clothes were equally transfixing as the liquid-like installations. The garments hewn by Anderson and his team for this collection defined the shape and aspect of the moving human substance within them. By pulling the waistband of his pants up so very high, Anderson said afterwards, he wanted to create a way of seeing this collection that was akin to viewing it from ground level with a fish-eye lens. Coating some looks with crystals that glinted in the skylight sunshine invited you to see another watery parallel with Anderson’s installed artworks. When not obscured by long coats, or three hypersized swatches (complete with hypersized pins) of what looked like chintzy vintage wall upholstery fabric, that looming silhouette was generally undisturbed yet variously expressed. Sparkly polo shirts, chunky knits, argyle sweaters, trench coat shirts, and bonded gray rib knits with rounded shoulders or two dimensional side-tabs were all cropped around the southern reaches of the wearer’s ribcage. Three leather jumpsuits near the end, one pastel pink, latter scarlet, the last black, combined the trouser shape with the upholstery facade into a hybridized silhouette. “It’s always about trying to find contradictions in men and women: like how do you blur all of that? I feel like something in this is very precise in that message, it’s very reduced, very luxe”, Anderson said.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
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