J.W. Anderson is very used to riling up the fashion establishment, but his Fall menswear show, with its frilled dresses, kangaroo-pocket tube tops, and knee-high boots, landed him in the crosshairs of the Daily Mail and CNBC. That s the kind of PR money can t buy, but to suggest that Anderson is courting buzz through scandal isn t quite accurate. Infamy may be a by-product, even perhaps a desired one (only the Shadow knows—or the shrink), but the designer himself insists on loftier aims. He wants to "find a new line," he said in his showroom. His men s collection was about "suspended architecture" and "stripping back to the flesh."
And so was his women s. Anderson has long cross-pollinated his menswear and womenswear. This was no exception. Pieces that had made their debut on the men s runway were reborn here, resized for women but functionally unchanged. The frilled wool shorts were actually coming back the third time around; their original outing was from a prior womenswear collection. The wool jumpers, bonded to sponge for volume, had been in the men s show. They d been inspired, Anderson said, by the old blazers he d worn at school, turned backward and fused into a single slipover piece.
That s Anderson s method: fun-house-mirror reflections and refractions bounced back and forth between menswear and womenswear, the past and the future. Shown on the runway, high-concept theatrics can make your head spin, and the designer s explanations can confuse more than they clarify. But step back from all that—turn off the CNBC—and there are hits that stand tall all on their own. The pullovers and gathered-neck tops (originally an experiment with a stapler!) are a good example. So are the high-slit minidresses, also veterans of the menswear collection, though arguably a more natural fit here. It s all a world away from the Tesco-bright collections he was showing just a year ago, but sometimes, he shrugged, "you reject it through the process of doing it." If his goal is, as he said, trying to keep things new, he s hit it.
