Between Loewe and his independent, namesake label, Jonathan Anderson has garnered a reputation as perhaps the most irreverent, willfully playful designer in fashion. Yesterday, at North London’s iconic Roundhouse, that was firmly vindicated with the opening look at JW Anderson’s SS24 show – a moulded grey hoodie and a pair of white shoulders, both rendered in a moulded, pinched-and-puckered material. Initial surmisals as to whether it was moulded leather or, perhaps, some ingeniously developed kind of pliable papier-mâché were swiftly dashed post-show, when Jonathan revealed that they were, in fact, moulded from plasticine.
Yes, plasticine! The rainbow-hued, claggy play clay of primary school art class renown. Bizarre a material choice as it may seem, it set the tone for a collection that explored the notion of “putting playfulness in pragmatism, and putting pragmatism in playfulness,” the show notes read – essentially adopting a whimsical, absurdist perspective on the most quotidian and functional of garments, while also tempering what may appear whimsical and absurd with a sense of rigour and function.
Guided by this logic, the result was a collection that revelled in obfuscating what, in principle, were pretty ‘normal’ clothes. Whittled-waisted, peak-lapelled jackets were rendered in stiff camel Prussian blue suede, their sculptural poise slightly redolent of the cast copper jackets Jonathan sent down the runway a couple seasons ago at Loewe, while simple, double-strapped shift dresses were actually painstakingly crocheted in glossy leather yarns. Speaking of glossy, trousers and tees with bow-tie details at the collar appeared in padded vinyls in pops of cerulean, mandarin and lemon yellow, and streams of feathers sprouted from the seams of oversized nylon bombers and swollen cargo pants, almost like down pillows (or, well, jackets) coming undone.
A more subtle sense of warped pragmatism came through with the pastel canvas trenches with in-built, overlaying gathered skirts and leather bikers jacket spliced with J Crew-issue toggled hoodies, while jersey dresses came in mummy-like drapes, like an extremely elevated version of what a primary school kid might do with a loo roll, and buttery leather flight jackets came with overblown, almost cape-like collars.
Indeed, this was a collection whose success was predicated on the careful balance of zaniness and sobriety, with that balance more often than not found in individual looks or pieces. That was perhaps best epitomised by a sequence of looks that came close to the end, comprising what were technically skirts cobbled together from what looked like jagged scraps of blindingly rhinestoned belts. Their disco ball glitz was counterposed by the serenity of oversized hoodies rendered in diaphanous sea foam green and duck egg blue chiffon, harmonising chaos and calm in one.