British fashion needs “to step up and say something” at a moment when the country is “in a paralysis”, the leading London fashion week designer Jonathan Anderson has said.
His JW Anderson show on Sunday will revive the punk-spirit stagewear of the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark – labelled “the David Bowie of dance” – in a catwalk show celebrating the anti-establishment heritage of British culture.
Rebellion is in the air as London fashion week begins. The entire week of shows are dedicated to the memory of Dame Vivienne Westwood, who died in December. The Design Museum has just announced a major exhibition entitled Rebel – 30 Years of London Fashion to open in September, sponsored by Alexander McQueen.
“I also work in France, where rebellion means a strike,” said Anderson, who has catapulted the bourgeois Spanish leather goods house of Loewe into a Paris fashion week hot ticket, where clothes are decorated with acrylic egg shells or deflated balloons, and the front row has featured Zadie Smith and Timothée Chalamet. “But in Britain, rebellion has also this crazy, creative, vibrant artistic identity – from Clark and McQueen, to Leigh Bowery, Tracey Emin. Westwood was extraordinary – she changed British culture, and it feels like it is only now that we are appreciating the full scale of what she did.”
London fashion week is depleted of major names, with Victoria Beckham having joined the Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney labels on the Paris schedule. Anderson, who created the pregnancy-announcing boilersuit for Rihanna’s Super Bowl half-time show that made front pages all over the world – a derogatory tweet from Donald Trump was the icing on the cake of global publicity – has serious clout in the industry. But keeping his eponymous brand in London has required “soul-searching”, Anderson says.
“There is no denying that Paris and Milan have become dominant. But I would not have been able to build my brand without the talent and the people in this country. I am Northern Irish, I work in Britain, and I’m proud to be here, so I believe that I need to be loud about that and to do what I can to help keep talent here at a difficult moment.”
A unitard inspired by a Tesco bag in which Clark once performed, and a onesie fashioned out of an upside down smiley-face T-shirt, will be part of JW Anderson’s catwalk show on Sunday morning, which will be held at the Roundhouse venue in Camden Town where Clark staged some of his most iconic shows. “Clark was part of the reason I got into fashion,” said Anderson. “He symbolised London as a melting pot of self-expression, that was not just about dance but also about gender, about clubbing, about a rebellion against the establishment. His energy was alien to the prevailing culture of the time, and it represented the possibility of a different kind of future.”
It is this spirit that British fashion needs to rediscover, said Anderson. “British fashion now can’t be tweed skirts, or whatever. Britain is in a very different place now and we can’t hide behind history and heritage. I believe in a creative future for this country, but it is going to require a lot of heavy lifting. And that future is not going to be led by this government, it is going to be led by the people. Fashion and the arts has an important role to play, because you need lateral thinking at a time like this. It is easy to hate fashion because it is associated with commerce – but it has real psychological power. Fashion can be a liberator.”
Shock value has replaced chic as the currency of fashion, with Schiaparelli’s faux-taxidermy lion head cocktail dresses dominating coverage of the most recent haute couture fashion week. Anderson has been one of the drivers of fashion’s shift toward the surreal – a JW Anderson £795 resin clutch bag in the shape of a pigeon went viral last year after it was spotted being cradled by the actor Sarah Jessica Parker – but he insists that he “tries not to make things that are obnoxiously gross. We have glorified very weird things in fashion in the last few years – and climaxed on the idea of the grotesque. Fashion has become recreational outrage.”
After Kanye West shocked Paris fashion week with a “White Lives Matter” sweatshirt last year, the first show by Balenciaga after the brand was forced to apologise for a series of offensive advertising images will be a flashpoint of the season, with some editors and buyers expected to decline their invitations. Anderson is critical of “cancel culture”, pointing out that Alexander McQueen, who shot to fame with the violent imagery of his Highland Rape collection in 1995, would probably have been cancelled “and that can’t be a good thing”. Now, the power of clickbait means that “some people have fallen on the blade of outrage, because they have courted that outrage. That’s a terrible game to play.”
Anderson is not above a controversial accessory. The high-heeled leather mules with toes in the shape of cat paws that will be worn on his catwalk on Sunday are likely to prove catnip – pun intended – to fashion audiences currently in thrall to animal kingdom imagery, from Schiaparelli’s big cats to Anderson’s pigeons. Many will appreciate the reference to designer Martin Margiela’s iconic split-toe Tabi shoes, which first appeared on catwalks in the late 1980s era when Clark found fame as a dancer and choreographer.
After London fashion week, Anderson’s focus will move out of the capital. The JW Anderson brand has funded the purchase of a Jake Grewal charcoal entitled The Sentimentality of Nature, which will be donated to the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire. The donation will be the first of four each year to institutions outside London. “There is a non-prioritisation of the arts in this country at the moment,” said Anderson, who sits on the board of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In London later this year, he will curate an exhibition of British modernism and “the idea of the city” at the Offer Waterman gallery, looking at “how Freud and Bacon and other artists were influenced by this city – its parks, its pubs.” The show will include a Frank Auerbach painting of Dalston Junction in east London, close to where Anderson lives.
The rising status of the role of costume designers, with film and television setting the style agenda – from the Gen Z wardrobes in White Lotus to the jaunty Ascot scarves of Glass Onion – is reflected in Anderson’s sideways move into film, and he will be collaborating with director Luca Guadagnino on two upcoming projects. The Challengers, set in the world of tennis, will be released in September, while Queer, based on the novel by William S Burroughs, will begin filming this spring. “It is one of my all time favourite books. And the film has everything – Mexico, lots of drugs, and Daniel Craig,” enthuses Anderson of his new project.
• This article was amended on 19 February 2023. An earlier version said Loewe’s sales “totalled £402m in 2021”; this figure relates only to part of the brand’s activities in Spain, and does not reflect Loewe sales overall. The parent company, LVMH, does not report revenues for its individual businesses separately.
