Foxgloves; deer; four girls wearing great clothes on stilts. These are just some of the things you might see if you venture out of the city and into the countryside. The final piece of that triad — while a little more of a rare find than the flora and fauna we’re used to — are the focal point of the JW Anderson’s new campaign for autumn/winter 2019, shot by none other than i-D favourite Tyler Mitchell.
In these shots, we see four models don Anderson’s latest collection to hit shelves: a parade of cubed boxy jackets, billowing trousers, floor-length dresses with georgette drape appliqués, levitating leather hats and zebra-print boots, all set against the beautiful backdrop of a rolling wheatfield and distant forests. It’s this obscuring of the ordinary that Anderson is so good at: taking traditional patterns and fabrics and playing with the proportions. It’s so ethereally beautiful that for them to be standing on gigantic, circus-like stilts doesn’t feel like an oddball move whatsoever.
For the campaign, Tyler and Jonathan made the decision to streetcast models rather than loop in familiar faces, selecting all new JW Anderson girls from across Europe to wear their latest designs. “What I love about this casting is that the girls feel like girls,” Tyler exclusively tells i-D. “Julia Lange and I were looking for an innocence and a certain on-the-brink-of-womanhood energy. And we wanted all black and brown girls. We wanted to go for a certain singularity. Not ‘diversity’ just to tick off boxes. I want to move brands away from doing that. It was about saying these are girls. They’re human. They’re infinite.”
“The fact that the models were street cast really points to the fact that Tyler is doing things differently,” Jonathan adds. “He’s a rising star and at JW Anderson we always try and support young talent, especially young photographers and artists. Tyler’s work feels young and fresh and the images are just gorgeous. I’m so happy with how the images came out.”
The collection of photographs, which you can view in all of their glory here, were the combination of Jonathan, Tyler and their respective team’s hard work, though Jonathan was fully prepared to let Tyler run wild on set. “I don’t think campaigns are ever just one person’s vision, but Tyler really had an idea of what he wanted and we went for it,” he adds. “Working with him was so easy.”
And as for those stilts? “I mean stilts are stilts!” Tyler says. “I’m caught between wanting to let the mind imagine what that idea meant and spelling it out. I think I’ll do the former.” So if you’re feeling a bit run down about the humdrum mundanity of city life and fancy sauntering off somewhere new, use these JW x Tyler Mitchell pics as destination inspo.
