Since the beginning of his career, Jonathan Anderson has used menswear to write his design agenda. He launched his namesake label, JW Anderson, originally as a menswear line, famously causing tabloid commotion with one of his early collections for putting boys in ruffled shorts that resembled skirts. Most wouldn’t bat an eyelid at such garments appearing on the catwalk today, but back in the early 2010s, it was Anderson who set a precedent of distorting and reconfiguring menswear tropes to free them of strict binaries, creating garments that thrilled with excitement and innovation.
Now he must do the same, this time on the biggest of fashion stages with his historic Dior appointment that will see him lead the maison’s women’s, men’s and couture collections, a first for the house. Like his earliest work, for his debut this afternoon he began by thinking how he could unravel the familiar, “decoding the language of the house in order to recode it”, as put in the show notes.
For the show, he built his own pseudo gallery that mimicked on the interior of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, with two paintings from 18th-century artist Jean Siméon Chardin lining the walls. (He had chosen Chardin, he said, as the artist repelled grandeur, favouring instead “sincerity and empathy” in his work.) The industry’s biggest designers and photographers as well as stars in the worlds of music and film (like Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig, many of whom have been connected to Anderson since his time at Loewe) were there in attendance to witness Anderson’s first act.
The collection was about redefining formal wear to transform what was once considered unattainable into garments grounded in reality. It started with studying “classic tropes of class”, like 18th-century waistcoats which walked alongside patchworked jeans, or capes that were draped over untucked pinstriped shirts and ties that hung loosely at the neck as if worn by naughty school boys. He described his approach as a “reconstruction of formality”, positioning military jackets and cable knit jumpers into new contexts that felt modern and fresh. Save for a series of cargo three-quarter lengths ballooned to resemble the shape of panniers, paired excellently with plaid shirts or preppy takes on the Dior Bar jacket (crafted from Donegal tweed), the avant-garde that peppered previous Anderson collections – he is the man, after all, who turned cars into dresses and made stilettos with heels shaped like cracked eggs – was replaced by a study of classics, rethought and rewritten. A sentiment echoed in the totes that populated the show, each stamped with covers of beloved books like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. All good stories must begin with a turning of the page. Let Anderson’s Dior adventures begin.
Photography courtesy of Dior.
