Review of JW Anderson Fall 2023 Men’s Fashion Show
It’s Frogs, What Else Did You Expect?
By Mark Wittmer
Perhaps more of a scattering or a dispersion than a collection (though not at all in a bad way) in its seemingly disparate threads, JW Anderson’s Fall 2023 men’s outing delights in hopping between motifs that seem to be symbols for something, inviting us to try to connect the dots and kicking its frog-clad feet when we’re left scratching our heads.
Jonathan Anderson is one of the few real post-modernists in fashion, and like any post-modernist, he’s going to have haters that call his work pretentious and nonsensical – but for those of us who can keep an open mind, who like to be amused, confounded, and astounded by what fashion can do and can be, it was another great show.
The opening two looks of a model wearing just underwear and shoes and carrying a big spool of fabric felt a bit too preformatively clever (ooh la la, he’s taken deconstruction to its logical extreme (not really though because that would actually require carrying a sheep or a cotton plant, or actually the sun, or actually primordial chaos…)) and should have had the model be completely naked if it really wanted to follow through. From here though things picked up. Frogs, computer chips, male torsos, tomatoes, bondage hardware (well, actually pretty much just bondage shoes), and pillows made up the collection’s glossolalia of images. The frog clutch formed a well-earned sequel to the designer’s recent smash hit pigeon clutch, while the frog clogs – a collaboration with Wellipets that revives the throwback childhood favorite in adult sizes – are sure to be a hot item as well.
At least when it comes to his eponymous label, Anderson seems to be a piece-forward designer rather than a look-forward designer, opting for the simplicity of just two or three elements rather than layers and interaction. This makes for a striking sense of directness that treats both its more goofy pieces, like the frogs, and something simple and beautiful, like a classic knit sweater, with the same attitude of sensory acceptance.
And there are more than a few relatively simple, beautifully designed pieces here, like the aforementioned sweater, the biker jackets, some of them shearling lined, the rakishly too-small suits, or the raw-hem coat. Without moving into totally weird, pseudo-symbolic territory, there are also some pieces that are just pretty quirky, like the frilly hemmed leather shorts and tube dress and the knit briefs.
It’s not “a commentary” on the internet and how it’s affected our psyches and attention spans, but this feels like a collection that couldn’t exist before the internet; its breakneck jumps between sumptuous luxury and fetish content and what is basically a meme echo the experience of living in an online world. As he dares us to draw a pattern, to see the symbols, JW Anderson points out the absurdity of trying to make sense of a world that is absurd. And yet, his plastic-cased pillows, which could be said to say that the industry is full of nothing but fluff, are indeed a symbol…