JW Anderson: the designer who doesn’t do dresses

JW Anderson: the designer who doesn’t do dressesHe won the British Fashion Council’s Emerging Talent award and is Topshop’s most successful designer collaboration. But JW Anderson just wants clothes to be practical, says Karen Dacre
p41 Picture by Daniel Hambury. .27/11/12.Fashion designer Jonathan Anderson pictured in his London studio.
Karen Dacre9 January 2013

Party dresses might be ten-a-penny at the moment but you’ll struggle to find one with JW Anderson’s name on the label. Despite a momentous few years during which the Northern Irish designer has created numerous critically acclaimed menswear and womenswear collections and a phenomenally successful spin-off line for Topshop and has been awarded The Emerging Talent award by the British Fashion Council, Jonathan William Anderson is yet to add the art of designing evening dresses to his repertoire. And for good reason. “I hate dresses,” says the sandy-haired 28-year-old who left Londonderry for New York at 18.

A lover of separates, Anderson puts practicality high on his agenda when designing clothes. “Nowadays women want to mix things, a dress limits you in that capacity,” he says. His greatest grievance with evening wear is its irrelevance. “Evening wear is only for award ceremonies and tripe. It’s a performance, a forced conviction. You don’t have to be intelligent to do that.”

This isn’t to say Anderson has dismissed the dress but that he hasn’t yet figured out how to create one in the JW Anderson aesthetic. “My challenge is to create a new form of architecture, a dress that is tri-functional,” he says. “We’ll crack it someday.”

JW Anderson arrived on the British fashion scene in 2008. His first foray was a menswear collection which caught the eye of Donatella Versace. He launched his womenswear collection in 2011 and last week the Italian fashion powerhouse announced it had enlisted Anderson to create a capsule collection for Versace’s sister line Versus.

His style is hard to define — let’s try loose and fluid. It’s stripped back but not minimalist. Like Miuccia Prada, for whom Anderson once worked as a visual merchandiser, his skill is to create clothes which are strange and yet also compelling.

A self-proclaimed perfectionist, Anderson is extraordinarily hardworking. Almost worryingly so. He has spent days, nights, weekends and Christmases in his Dalston studio, kept company by strong black coffee, cigarettes and his friend, the stylist Benjamin Bruno, with whom he works closely on every collection. He is “addicted to work”. “Sometimes it gets bad but I do it because I love it,” he says.

Such determination seems to run in the Anderson family. The son of former Ireland rugby player Willie Anderson, JW hails from farming stock and credits the countryside as one of his greatest inspirations. “The country gives an element of freedom which I think is really important. It gets stuck with you and permeates your brain without you knowing. I love that.”

Today, despite years spent living in London and New York, where he went after leaving school with the intention of becoming an actor, the country and its industries remain a focus for Anderson. So much so, in fact, that he relies on knitwear producers and suppliers from across the UK to create his collections instead of outsourcing production further afield. “It’s a humanity thing,” he says. “They are culturally valuable places that should be protected.”

An ideas-obsessive, Anderson struggles with a short attention span which perhaps explains why he was left dissatisfied by his degree at the London College of Fashion. “I don’t think design is something you can teach,” he says. “It’s all about the ideas.”

As well as designing four collections a year and creating his new project with Versus, he works with Topshop, for whom he created the chain’s most successful designer collaboration to date. The first collection arrived in store during London Fashion Week in September and was welcomed by fashion lovers across the globe. And not just because it bore the name of one of London’s hottest young designers but because it offered them clothes which were wearable, affordable and, most importantly, interesting. Among its star pieces was a bat-knit jumper, a paisley print skirt and a series of pleated kilts which sold out within days. The printed party dresses so often a feature of Topshop’s collaborations were notable by their absence.

“It worked because it was wearable,” says Anderson. “It was launched in a moment in which people wanted to get more for their money and wanted to get design.” But producing such an expansive offering wasn’t easy. “It opened my eyes,” says the designer whose final “more twisted” offering for the brand will be in stores on February 14. “The difficulty was creating something that would engage people of all demographics. I wanted to involve them in an industry which is usually expensive. I hate elitism.”

It is Anderson’s non-elitist approach that sets him apart from his contemporaries. While it’s become standard practice for designers to dress celebrities, Anderson — whose designs are favourite with the likes of Alexa Chung and Pixie Geldof — is reluctant to operate his business in the same way.

“I have a very mixed view of celebrity. It obviously is a very important factor in this industry and I’m intrigued by that power but I don’t feed off it. The biggest kick is seeing a girl or a guy on the street in your design.

“That’s what really excites me.”

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