For this season's collection, Jonathan William Anderson did not start out by looking at any distant characters or historical figures, or at any kind of artistic or literary reference. He started out by looking at the people he loves and has loved: his friends, family and lovers. He looked at the people he sees day in day out, and looked at the clothes they wear, the music they love, the movies they're into, the books they read and the subtle, repetitive gestures that make up their characters. This collection started life by being a celebration of those people and their passions. JW Anderson, however, is obsessive. And with love and obsession naturally come infatuation, joy, heartbreak and longing. So it evolved to become an honest brutal look at love and fanatical romance, and all of the happiness, agony, pleasure and craving that come along. It became a collection about the indefinable gap between paradise and catastrophe, about the joy of romance and the awkward, strangely triumphant feeling of melancholy and loneliness that it often belies. As such, much of this collection is not what it seems. Loop back jersey and camel cashmere are fused to look like shearling, while painstaking hand embroidery is used to make cotton and wool look like astrakhan. Symbols of clawing domination, the unspoken desire for ownership that underlies conventions of romance, appears in the form of slave cuffs and collars, which are covered by baroque embellishments in an attempt to dress them up as something less extreme. Mizpah motifs and love heart keepsakes are repeated throughout the collection in the form of stretched horn jewellery, embroidery, and embellishments made of fine silks tied up in knots. They're sweet and romantic, but they smack of the human desire to make fleeting experiences into something permanent and immortal. Boiled cashmere and crepe, felted wools, and tartan blanket like fabrics produced in a special collaboration with Highland craftsman reference back to JW Anderson's first ever collection, where the fact that he had no money and no stockists meant that he had to make everything out of blankets and felt. That season was naïve and simple, but it was honest and optimistic, and came from the triumph of emotion over rationale. The current collection does that too. Kudos Mr Anderson !
