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FashionMusicArtCulture

This Summer, Jonathan Anderson Takes Us on a Potty Village Trip

18 June 2024

Jonathan Anderson approached his summer collection a “bit like a space cadet.” There is something of the fictional traveller in the pantaloon-like trousers wrapped in buckles and tunics, and the outerwear in the form of an oilskin Driz-a-Bone, a buccaneer, a sea rover, or perhaps a highwayman. 

The anachronistic trip we were sent on was like the truly potty resort village of Thorpeness, a fishing hamlet on the Suffolk coast. The town is based on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan—there is a lot of Pan’s capriciousness in the whims of Anderson himself—with its Tudor and Jacobean revivalism, pirates’ lair, and Wendy’s house. Recently, Anderson—who is also the creative director of Spanish fashion house Loewe—has photographed models nestled amongst hobby miniature villages. 

And here, for the turn of his eponymous brand, he has created cardigans that evoke Cornish cottages, complete with wee windows, soffits and trims; one even has a seagull perched on the shoulder. It would all be twee nostalgia if not for the contrast of these with leather trousers in powdery blue, ecru and black. 

Immense MA-1 bomber and motorcycle jackets and quilted liner jackets were paired with army boots (complete with exaggerated tongues). These offset softer elements such as cardigans in a macro waffle knit, pastel leathers, and the goofiness of a trim used on shirts and coats, the latter of which can only be described as protuberances—coloured balloons that look to have had the air emptied out of them. 

Jubilant divertissements such as the maypole (a symbol of fertility) or fête tent appear to extrude as strips of coloured fabric draping from an apparatus attached to the waistline of a series of dress shorts. An exaggerated men’s tie echoes this sexuality further; the longer the length of the tie, the more it is meant to be a marker of the wearer’s prowess.

Anderson has always been able to combine the prosaic and the wonderful and present both the storied and the new; we are participants in his world’s playground. From his beginnings with Fashion East for Fall/Winter 2010 with clan tartan Mizpah heart motifs and a proto-tribal core to picture window landscapes rendered in five ply wool vests in 2015, he has always been able to present the vicissitudes between reality and dream that make up a United, or not-so-United, Kingdom. 

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