Jonathan Anderson’s big idea – The Washington Post

In the midst of this bleak glut are a handful of designers who offer hope. And the one who seems most confident that fashion can be something more is Jonathan Anderson, the Irish-born creative director of Loewe since 2013 and founder of his own brand, JW Anderson.

Anderson has dominated culture over the past year — dressing the world’s biggest pop stars, making costumes for Luca Guadagnino’s films and creating bizarre and inventive clothes that articulate the dangers and pleasures of our reliance on the internet. His success is a thumb in the eye of anyone who thinks creative success in this era requires being dull.

He’s always looked down on the concept of luxury, he says, sitting in a back booth of Gemma, the Bowery Hotel’s restaurant, earlier this week. When he started a decade ago at Loewe, a Spanish leather goods brand owned by LVMH, he said he wanted it to be a brand about culture rather than luxury. “Luxury lost its meaning,” Anderson recalls thinking. “You can get luxury sausages. You put ‘luxury’ on something, and that just means it’s worth more.”

What Anderson does is far beyond the scope of fashion. “I don’t think what I’ve created is a very logical way of creating a brand. I would love to say it is, but it’s not like, here is the aesthetic, and we rely on this singular aesthetic. It’s like a moving feast, somehow, that breaks down and reinvents itself, and breaks down and reinvents itself.”

The scope of Anderson’s creativity is evident in the many ways you might have seen his work this year. His clothing is the way that the world found out Rihanna was pregnant for the second time: the red Loewe jumpsuit he designed for her to wear while performing at the Super Bowl was gently open at the front to reveal her bump to the world.

He helped craft Beyoncé’s Renaissance iconography: a bodysuit and gloves he designed for her — based on a dress from his Fall 2022 Loewe collection with hands that conjured Nosferatu modeling for Diana Vreeland’s Vogue — became one of the most recognizable looks on her summer tour, with fans attending concerts dressed in homemade homages to the look.

He doesn’t only court the world’s biggest pop stars. Earlier this month, Maggie Smith appeared in Loewe’s ads, her Michelangelo face framed hovering above the house’s bags.

This isn’t an attempt to appeal to everyone but rather to celebrate people whose originality he feels define our times. “If you look at something, and you feel like you could take over the world, then that person is doing an amazing job. When you’re at a Beyoncé concert, you feel like anything is possible. I was just at a show by a painter called Lisa Brice, and when you see someone put out creativity that is on a level that you’ve never seen, it makes you say, Oh my — I’m so — thank God there’s something happening like this in the time that I’m alive.”

“Jonathan could do a number of other things creatively, either in art or design,” says Hari Nef, an actress who frequently collaborates with Anderson. (In fact, Anderson, who is 39, studied acting earlier in his career.) “It’s interesting that he’s chosen fashion. And he’s not even doing fashion in an elusive, look-at-my-point-of-view reclusive creative register. He’s sending clothes out on the runway all the time and doing campaigns and front rows and merchandising — making things that sell. I wonder what he loves specifically about that, because you could argue that he’s too cool for it, or just too smart.”

He spent the summer with Guadagnino, doing the costumes for his adaptation of the William S. Burroughs book “Queer”; he also did the costumes for Guadagnino’s forthcoming tennis love triangle extravaganza, “Challengers.”

“Jonathan is the most wickedly intelligent person I know. He is so smart and he has such an incredible sense of irony that is so disarming and so profound,” Guadagnino says, adding that the arc of Zendaya’s character in “Challengers” is shaped not only by her “sublime performance” but “by the wit and savviness and precision of how Jonathan thought about” the costumes.

In the midst of all that, he staged a show in June that he calls “one of the greatest menswear shows I’ll ever do.” Between three fountains by the sculptor Lynda Benglis, he introduced an absurd pair of high-waisted pocketed pants, fixing his models into a strange, uptight hunch. His womenswear collection, which debuted in Paris in September, reiterated the shape (and also included fantastical jewelry by Benglis). Most creative people, whether they’re making a TV show or a $5,000 coat, are driven to make their ideas as immediate and understandable as possible. Anderson, instead, threw himself into giving us something we’d never seen: a shape that looked at once taut and baggy, that made the cool and relaxed act of slinging your hands in your pocket look disarming or even threatening.

Designers today are rarely bold enough to say they reinvented pockets, or made a shape that inspires men or women to walk differently, the way that Coco Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent often did in their times. But Anderson actually got close. “It was a silhouette,” he says. “And for me, the fantasy of being a designer when I was younger was the idea that you could create a silhouette.”

The evening after our interview, he was honored as the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s International Designer of the Year, accepting the trophy after a tribute from Greta Lee “I know he probably hates hearing this but, Jonathan, I’m sorry — you are a genius,” she said. He is much more comfortable talking than he is preening, and posed awkwardly on the carpet in a Loewe tuxedo jacket over dull gray chinos and scuffed brown boots. (“I have a very strange relationship with, like, clothing. I don’t know,” he says.)

On Wednesday morning, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the theme for its annual blockbuster fashion exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties,” it also revealed that Loewe would provide support for the show (alongside TikTok as the official sponsor), which is essentially an opportunity for a designer to flood the Met Gala red carpet with celebrities in their best designs.

“We always try to have a synergy between the sponsor and the theme of the exhibition,” the Costume Institute’s head curator Andrew Bolton said during a media preview on Wednesday. “And Jonathan’s so well known for using technology in his work and playing with the idea of technology, and analog — the idea of the hand and the machine is often very critical in his work.”

If 2023 was Anderson’s year, he seems poised to dominate 2024 just as much.

“My fear is, the minute I get comfortable with the idea of the aesthetic I’m putting out, I have to destroy it,” he says. “I think the minute you are trapped by an aesthetic — the clock ticks.”

Luxury became so boring because fashion lacks creative energy. Whether it’s a fear of declining sales or a lack of time to have new ideas, the idea of clothing that defines what it looks and feels like to be alive in 2023, seems stagnant. At the root of this is the internet, of course, which has pushed anyone creating visual culture — designers, filmmakers, artists — to make things that look familiar, even similar (and do so more quickly). “I think the internet has been fantastic,” says Anderson, “but at the same time, it f—ed us because there’s so much consumption of imagery.”

Anderson became the antidote by putting ideas at the center of his brand. For the first seven years he worked at Loewe, his clothes were a mix of intellect and whimsy; they felt crafty and elevated, their rough edges encouraging shoppers to consider the time and hands it took to make a fabric or textile or leather handbag. During the pandemic, when fashion week as it was known went on hiatus, he leaned into the global longing for human connection, releasing his collections as a box of paper dolls and toys one season, as a series of enormous posters the next, and in a book made as a tribute to artist Joe Brainard the following, all mailed to those who would have otherwise attended his fashion shows.

But suddenly, when fashion shows began again in October 2021, it was almost as if that designer ceased to exist. “Before the pandemic, I think I was sleepwalking,” he says. “And then the pandemic happened and it was like, well, there is no choice. I need to be creative. And I thought, f— it. I have nothing to lose here.”

His clothes became intense, clean and conceptual. Cold and cerebral where they’d once been warm and emotional. They seemed obsessed with the fissure between how clothes, and objects in general, exists online — on the runway, in static imagery, with little sense of scale or sensation or movement — and in real life. If the origin story was once the essence of what Loewe produced, it was now impossible to tell what was real or how it was made; he made shoes with deflated balloons and cracked eggs. One T-shirt and pair of pants, from Spring 2023, actually look pixelated. A leather dress from Fall 2022 looks like a frozen gif or video (or an ancient Greek statue’s chiton swaying in the breeze in bronze or marble). A series of dresses from Fall 2023 look like blurred digital files of frilly dresses placed on top of the dumbest white concept of a dress, like someone did a sloppy drag and drop.

Most people see fashion online first. Indeed, many people only ever see fashion online. Most designers find that depressing, but for a creative few, it’s a source of stimulation. Other designers have made their runways into digital culture commentary in the past; Rei Kawakubo’s Fall 2012 Comme collection was almost entirely flat, a play on how Instagram has made clothes one-dimensional. In 2020, Hedi Slimane released a men’s collection titled “The Dancing Kid” that took its inspiration directly from the postmodern mash-up of eras and styles created by young men on TikTok. Anderson’s work carries forward the lineage of heightening our awareness of how the internet has not only transformed our tastes but our ability to seek out what is original, different or even ugly or challenging.

(You can also see how Anderson and his CEO, Pascale Lepoivre, might be positioning the brand as a welcome refuge for shoppers who feel adrift after the departure of quirky fashion savant Alessandro Michele from Kering’s star brand Gucci at the end of 2022. Lepoivre, who joined the company in 2016, points out that the brand became “much more recognizable globally” in 2022. Lepoivre eagerly emphasizes the brand’s creativity, saying that Loewe’s sense of luxury is about beautiful products and high quality but also “unfettered imagination, delivered in an approachable and unexpected way.”)

Anderson also doesn’t feel the pressure of putting out multiple collections a year, or the drive many designers privately complain about to meet outrageous revenue goals set by corporate leaders, especially LVMH’s founder and CEO Bernard Arnault, who is at any given time the richest or second richest person in the world. “Never, never,” Anderson says. “Never cared. Never cared.” He dismisses reporting about the unsparing demands of Arnault or Kering CEO François-Henri] Pinault. “I’ve never felt that inside LVMH. And that’s not me being some kind of propagandist. I like the way Bernard Arnault runs the business because it’s like if you’re good, you’re good, and you do the work. Be creative. Be creative and make money. There’s no logic to it. I like that approach that he has.”

The designer should be the one pushing themself, saying that their work is never enough, Anderson says. (Which, he says, he is.)

“For me, the unknown, the uncomfortable, new ground, the experiment — it’s super important,” says Guadagnino. “I feel like that’s what Jonathan is about. One could say the beauty of taking risks. But at the same time, Jonathan is super strategic in a beautiful way — he’s like a general. There is something beautifully military about him.”

So where is Anderson now? “I’m in a very kind of strange place with everything, because I feel so happy with where I am. I feel like I’m at the end of a chapter somehow, and suddenly everyone’s sort of noticing it.”

The countdown to reinvention begins.