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Fashion needs to step up as UK is ‘in a
paralysis’, says Jonathan Anderson
Designer urges industry to ‘say something’ and his
London show will celebrate anti-establishment British culture
Jess
Cartner-Morley
@JessC_M
Fri 17 Feb
2023 13.18 GMT
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 Leon Kossoff 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 and 23 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. Also, the portrait of Dalston
Junction that will be in the show is by Leon Kossoff, not Frank Auerbach.
LONDON
FASHION WEEK
Tailoring rebellion: British fashion confronts
Brexit with commercial counterculture offerings
At London Fashion Week, designers combined avant-garde
and realism, rebellion and entrepreneurial drive, amid a crisis in the textile
industry
HENRY
NICHOLLS (REUTERS)
LETICIA
GARCÍA
London -
FEB 24, 2023 - 15:24 GMT
In an
interview with The Guardian a few days ago, designer JW Anderson warned that
British fashion is at risk of disappearing amid what he described as a
post-Brexit “paralysis,” and called for the industry to “step up and say
something.” Indeed, according to data from the UK Fashion and Textile Trade
Association, 98% of British fashion businesses faced high administrative costs
in 2021, 83% had to increase the prices of their garments and 53% had several
of their orders held up in customs. According to a 2020 report by Oxford
Academics and the British Fashion Council, British fashion generates around £30
billion (about $36 billion). That’s more than what the music or film industries
bring in. Now, however, its place in the global industry is threatened.
London
Fashion Week, which began last Friday and ended on Tuesday of this week, was
two days shorter than usual this year. Some designers, most of them financially
and logistically supported by the British Fashion Council (the government
agency that promotes signature local fashion), such as KNWLS, Masha Popova and
Rejina Pyo, did not present collections at all. This year’s London Fashion Week
was dedicated to the late Vivienne Westwood, who died last December. She was a
designer who first channeled discontent and social anger into punk aesthetics
and then into climate activism.
Anderson
wanted to convey precisely that idea of fashion as a means of rebellion in his
fashion show last Saturday. The Roundhouse, a Camden venue known for raves and
shows, served as the setting for a collection inspired by the work of
choreographer and artist Michael Clark. “Over these 15 years, I have realized
that Clark has inspired each and every one of my collections,” Anderson
explained prior to the show. Thus, Anderson, who is also the artistic director
of Loewe, showcased styles that paid homage to some of his own past successes
(large-lapel coats, ruffled masculine shorts, structured knit dresses, sailor
shirts) and combined them with the iconoclastic boldness of the
Clark-influenced pieces in his work, such as a dress inspired by Tesco
supermarket bags, sweaters that read “witch” and “alpha male” and the enormous
penis used as a backdrop of the show.
For half a
century, rebelliousness and avant-garde styles have been classic features of
the fashion that the UK has exported around the world. But even more important
than these elements is the distinctly British style that defines the United
Kingdom in the collective imagination. In his long-awaited first collection for
Burberry – the quintessential British fashion house – designer Daniel Lee
returned to this concept. In the six years that designer Italian Riccardo Tisci
was at the helm of the brand, Burberry turned, with relative success, toward
the macro trend of urban fashion. But Lee’s first fashion show was a statement
of intent. It took place in a tent in Kennington Park that simulated one in the
countryside. There, the guests – who were given blankets and hot water bottles
printed with the house’s signature check pattern – saw that Burberry had
returned to its roots, as imagined by Lee, the man who turned classic Bottega
Veneta shows into viral events over the past few years.
This
collection featured wellies, suede trench coats lined with sheepskin, duck
prints, wool – in short, all the elements that define the English aesthetic,
all in the designer’s favorite colors (green, purple and yellow). They were
paired with items that showcased Lee’s talent for turning accessories into cult
pieces: Clarks-style suede shoes with exposed seams, quilted boots and furry
bags that close with a B adorned by another very English element: the (fake)
foxtail.
Self-reference
is also a recurrent theme of many Christopher Kane collections. The British
designer usually takes a decontextualized element and deconstructs it throughout
his collections. On this occasion, ruffled frills decorated the creator’s
favorite garments, from suits to very long-sleeved sweaters to latex skirts.
The collection redounded to Kane’s identity with a mix of knitwear and sequins,
vinyl and wool, necklines and decontextualized finishes, but they were all more
basic and commercial than usual.
These days,
that has been the general tone of the fashion shows in London (as well as those
at New York’s fashion week): many designers have decided to ground their
creative concepts and offer more realistic collections than they usually do.
For instance, Simone Rocha’s nineteenth-century fantasies, presented in the
dramatic setting of Westminster Hall, were mixed with the much more urban
aesthetic of bomber dresses, leather frock coats and flowing lace garments.
Similarly, Richard Quinn, who is famous for fusing romanticism and fetishism in
his floral print and latex combinations, stopped covering his models’ heads and
hands and dispensed with recreating Victorian styles. This time, his dresses
were made of precious fabrics studded with rhinestones and adjusted to the body
in almost natural proportion. Bridal gowns, the designer’s most realistic
commercial option, represented a third of the collection.
Small cult
brands, such as Chet Lo, Harri and Nensi Dojaka, also tried to add commercial
appeal to their signature styles. Chet Lo featured basic dresses, sweaters and
sweatshirts in its characteristic spike-knit fabric. Harri, which recently went
viral after singer Sam Smith wore its clothing at the Brit Awards, showcased
its signature puffy vinyl style in jackets and coats. And, for the first time,
Nensi Dojaka paired its famous transparent pieces replete with straps with
jeans and blazers, suggesting that the brand’s fashion can transcend catwalks
and red carpets. Even S.S. Daley, the brand new LVMH award winner, eschewed the
customary small plays with which he normally presents his collections in favor
of a traditional fashion show, which was inspired by sailor-style clothing and
opened by actor Ian McKellen.
During
these times of inflation and uncertainty, fashion seems to want to put its
outlandish fantasies aside in order to prove that it can be practical and to
please consumers who are drawn more to investment pieces than whimsy.
Additionally, with Brexit threatening its global survival, British fashion
wants to prove that it can blend avant-garde and realism, rebelliousness and
commercial appeal.
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