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Crikey: this double-edition show featuring both menswear and resort contained approximately a whole fashion week’s worth of ideas. Many of the most eye-catching, granted, did not translate into overwhelmingly easy wears. However, that was kind of the point. “Irrational clothing,” Jonathan Anderson called it, adding: “I liked this idea of when you’re spaced out, you’re a bit like a space cadet.”
Apart from that (apparent) irrationality, there was no particular fil rouge that ran through the collections: instead they seemed more like a disparate collage of adjacently-sourced thoughts all set on designing garments that aggravated and stimulated the outer reaches of familiarity. Liner jackets in lushly colored silk and hula-hoop hemmed billows-pocketed denim gilets were both delivered in steroid-shot proportions to transform them beyond their conventional category. “Sometimes it’s about movement and sponginess and being tactile,” offered Anderson of the three inside-out knit mega-bomber jackets that followed. Two sweaters came next that were both conjoined with two colorfully-clad puckered pillows at each hip. Their vaguely Henry Moore-ish abstracted ergonomics seemed to preface the pastel leather supersized blouses that followed a few looks later.
Maybe it was because unfamiliarity always catalyzes a frenzied mental hunt for context through comparison, but there seemed something swashbuckling and 18th century in the patch pocket jackets that featured raised and Driza-Bone-adjacent storm flaps across each shoulder and as menswear full-legged shorts cuffed mid-calf. The pants in the closing look, worn against that same jacket in blue, were muskateerishly tucked into vintage military-style boots unlaced up from the shin.
Anderson’s disruptively irrational approach to worn facades became cross-disciplinary in a series of three two-story cardigans and two taller shifts knit with purposefully homespun craftiness to resemble various English architectural styles. One of the earlier ones—creamy white, maybe a Cornish cottage bought as a second home by some bourgeois Londoner—looked to have a seagull perched on its shoulder. In between these looks three oversized knit V-necks were bibbed in resin that secured a fringe of lace to the neckline. Here and there we saw variations of a new bag style—compellingly modeled also at Anderson’s preview—featuring the “whale tale” penny keeper conventionally used on a loafer. The designer also proposed a discreet return to the tie in menswear.
One aside that appeared leftfield in the context of everything else were the sweats and knits featuring vintage Guinness advertising. Anderson said this was partially because he is Northern Irish and a fan of Guinness, and partially because he has always relished that non-fashion brand’s history of radical image-making from the vintage pieces showcased here to Jonathan Glazer’s 1999 surfer advertisement.
Shirts, jackets and a coat were affixed with roundly folded supersized silk tags in harlequin colors that resembled deflated balloons. They were lovely and strange. Three menswear looks were office wear north of the waist, but festival campsite south of it: a sort of pop-up tent structure projected from the waist was draped with colored strips of knit. Anderson noted as an aside that he had recently been to the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona. He said: “it was interesting to watch how experimental people have become within clothing or expressing themselves. In a weird way, maybe fashion is becoming less radical than what is happening on the streets.” He added: “The younger generation is incredible in how far they will go today. So this [collection] is probably mild.” As is so often the case with Anderson, these clothes seemed to be an exercise in experimentation in order to intuit the shape of taste not as it is now, but as it might become—and to then jump ahead of that curve.
