Jonathan Anderson has always revelled in the critique and redefinition of gender. From the heaving, floor-trailing bustles of AW 09/10 to the beaded skirts and slick, slender shift dresses of SS 10, the collusion of a deft hand and narrative invested vision have seen romance and rebellion coalesce, menswear tenets embraced and concurrently rebuffed. Where producing a companion womenswear collection could have extinguished the effeminate subversion slicing through his menswear, a turn to ‘The Fear of Naturalism’ instead sees contrasts of gender and sexuality by their very notion shot down, man and woman, feminine and masculine enmeshed.
A thus appropriate mirror image of the womenswear collection that stomped tomboy strides through Somerset House’s Portico Rooms on Sunday, the first exit – a slender navy knit, clerical white shirt and sharp black slacks came topped with a tied waist jumper come skirt, a motif that has peppered the last two seasons. Clean, crisp and endowed with a whiff of Miuccia Prada – never a criticism – this knitwear riff kicked off a passage that took in flocculent mohairs, interspersed with quilted and embroidered panelling and sequin peppered argyles in a collision of Westwood seditionaries and revived retroisms.
Sliced away at the torso to reveal a curving acre of unsullied shirting or cut and pasted to envelope the arms of a staple white shirt, the casting of pin-thin models topped with harsh Teutonic bowl cuts, exacerbated Jonathan’s subversion of the existing, his boys an angular futurist dissertation on corporate, office bound suits. Moving from city to country, Loden jackets came both cropped and taken to full-length, dissected, reassembled and repurposed with Harris-like tweeds backed by sportswear nylons, bursting tufts of Mongolian lamb, bulked-up silk paisley sleeves and pleated panels of skirt, trailing from the bottom hem.
An accent of skirt evolving to full garment, sweeping floor length kilts gave a nod to past glories, made masculine in drab, workwear navy’s and teamed with deft, high breaking blazers, sharp at shoulder, square at hem. Amidst a harsh, mechanical palette of navy, black, gray and white, searing saturated shots of hospital scrub green and charged pepto bismol pink were enriched in titillating latex, as full garments or as a singular strike at waist or collar.
The dishevelled, Grunge layering of Fall polished and the Sixties psychedelia of Spring finessed with placement paisley; bulky Bovver boots and workshoes trimmed with tufted fur epitomized the evolution of JW Anderson - from menswear designer to fully fledged brand, exploding tired definitions with pure naturalism.
Images to by Duilio Marconi
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