We do live in very incoherent times: one minute our attention is caught by serious global issues going from nuclear wars to climate change, the next we're preoccupied about more superficial matters like the latest model of high-tech gadget on the market, believing it may help us radically changing our lives. It is therefore not surprising that incoherent young designers à la J.W. Anderson have been doing rather well or are considered as fashion saviours.
Since launching his collections, Anderson has mashed up, collaged and remixed themes and eras, going from the conceptual to the androgynous, adding too many ruffles to his menswear designs only to strip the garments down in more recent collections, introducing in one season a modern version of a Tudor doublet, only to deny any historical connection in the next one; reinventing a forgotten Pierre Cardin number without any fashion critics every noticing it or coming up with ill-fitting and badly cut garments.
Anderson may say he is a "fluid" designer, he therefore goes with the flow of time, passing from one inspiration to the next, yet the term "fluid" shouldn't be a euphemism for "lacking coherence". Instead, if you stop and look back now on the collections he has developed so far, you realise they do not form one coherent narrative but a series of broken chapters in his design biography.
Yet there seems to be a certain continuity between his latest men's collection and his S/S 18 womenswear designs, showcased during London Fashion Week.
In June, during his runway at Pitti Uomo, Anderson stated he was returning to simplicity and he followed the same principle in his womenswear show (mind you, Anderson's collaboration with Uniqlo is arriving online and in-store this week and simplicity is one of the core values of this company, so maybe the designer was still in this simple/plain/basic mood while working on his own S/S 18 collection...) moving from a series of specific materials such as linen, coarse wool, cotton and nappa leather.
The circular art piece woven by contemporary artist Anne Low last year for the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery (where Anderson curated his "Disobedient Bodies" exhibition) occupied part of the runway floor, hinting at the clothes made with natural fibers.
The collection mainly revolved around loose dresses and flared skirts with a rustic look and a homespun feel about them, at times they featured a thick band of gold or black around the hem to create that much needed contrast between natural and synthetic.
Shoes were also built on contrasts, being a sort of hybrid combination of sneakers, espadrilles and desert boots in simple linen and suede.
There were also chemises and loose pants in white with a red stripe bearing the J.W. Anderson's name: the items hinted at the recycling theme since they were made with an Irish tea-towel linen woven and produced by John England in Northern Ireland (was this a more rustic version of Perry Ellis' S/S 1990 tablecloth/picnic blanket dress View this photo or maybe another way to reinvent the linen placemat dress from his S/S 17 collection?).
While these rustic and homely garments seemed to work, the ill-fitting bustiers and tops with stitched-bra cups looked instead rather awkward and out of place like the only luxury addition, a striped mini-dress made with a series of hand-stitched leather strips alternated with a band of sequins in a '70s palette, a combination of some long lost Pierre Cardin and some recent (but already forgotten) Nicolas Ghesquière for Louis Vuitton's S/S 15 (View this photo).
One things remained stable in this collection - the historical sleeve. In previous posts about the construction of garments we looked at how fashion favoured voluminous structures in the 1800s that looked as if they had been built by inflating them: quite often sleeves in the 1830s looked indeed as if they had been pumped up with air, because they were supported inside by large cotton pillows (the "plumpers").
As seen in a previous post, Anderson has been consistently playing with historical sleeves in his collections, and has now brought the rubbery consistency of the "plumpers" on the outside, relocating the fullness of the sleeve from the upper part of the arm to the section going between the elbow and the wrist.
In a way that is understandable as fashion works in circles and what goes around, comes around, but maybe the time has come for Anderson to break the circle, stop fiddling with sleeves and find more coherent paths to follow. It wouldn't hurt him for example to improve his knowledge of natural fibers and maybe focus on developing more knitwear pieces. Working on them would maybe keep him busy and help him leaving behind his (trademark) ill-fitting shapes and silhouettes.
Comments