The Man Turning European Fashion Into Something Raw and Real

Jonathan Anderson’s creations for Loewe and his own brand, JW Anderson, have made him one of the most forward-thinking designers working today.

“THERE MIGHT BE no other place in the world as good as where I’m going to take you,” says Jonathan Anderson, with a final drag of his cigarette. We are standing on the vast stone steps of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses one of the world’s most extensive repositories of decorative arts. He grinds the cigarette out with his heel and hurries inside, bolting past reception and bounding up the marble stairs to a series of high-ceilinged rooms.

The ceramics galleries on the top floor have been relocated since their 1868 inception and were reconfigured a decade ago. The 11 rooms house over 30,000 vases, platters, cups and tea service in porcelain, earthenware and stoneware from 2500 B.C. to present day, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Cotswolds. Only a few of the anterooms contain the sort of edited, thoughtfully labeled, artfully lit displays found in modern museums; most of the floor space here is occupied by rows of 12-foot-tall glass cases, each ignominiously stuffed with stacked pieces. The contents’ origins are written in plain letters on the surface of each case, almost too high to see: China, Japan, the Middle East. You can glimpse the royal blue and marigold iridescent lip of a platter here, the rough neck of a sand-colored hand-turned vase there, but not much more: You would have to stand for hours — as Anderson has — day after day, to absorb it all. It resembles less a museum than a series of oversize storage closets of the sort you’d find in a Georgian countryside mansion, packed with generations of heirlooms secreted away to weather the Great War. “There’s so much here because families keep all this history,” Anderson says as he walks the aisles, stopping occasionally to look up at one of the cases. “Yes, it would probably be easier to put much of this in storage to make a better viewing experience, but you would never want to tamp down the love.”

Although he was recently named a trustee of the museum, Anderson himself is not a historian or a gallerist but the 34-year-old creator of strange, beautiful clothing and accessories that occupy the liminal space between the rivetingly avant-garde and the satisfyingly wearable, and among the most forward-thinking designers working today. He first visited the Victoria and Albert Museum as a teenager with his mother and now goes at least twice a month, traveling by cab from his Victorian house in East London or the headquarters of his namesake label in Hoxton. In 2008, he launched JW Anderson, his off-kilter, androgynous men’s line, introducing tissue-light leather dresses and ruffled hot pants in duffel-bag cotton fabric in an era before such gender transgressions became common. A couple of years later, he added a line of well-crafted and witty women’s wear (a mod silk paisley pajama suit with a white rubber clerical collar, square-toed studded boots balanced on a steel-barrel heel), all of which he produces from an airy 3,000-square-foot atelier. A 2012 collaboration with Topshop brought him mainstream attention, and a year later, LVMH bought a stake in his company while also naming him creative director of Loewe, a venerable but sleepy Spanish leather-goods company that neither Narciso Rodriguez nor Stuart Vevers, now the creative director of Coach, had been able to awaken.

Source: The New York Times

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