Day three of London Fashion Week’s AW23 collections kicked off with a giant phallus. No, no not a reference to any of the dickish behaviour show season can unfortunately evoke, but part of the installation that JW Anderson’s Roundhouse runway wrapped around.
This season, he collaborated with boundary-breaking choreographer and dancer Michael Clark. Looking at Clark’s legacy gave Anderson an opportunity to also look at his own. “Fifteen years of JW Anderson are condensed here and now, redone and re-seen,” he explained in the show notes. Not one to do things the obvious way, this didn’t mean a greatest hits re-edition. Rather, it felt like a dialogue, an exchange of ideas. Nowness rather than newness, he said. Side note: the Tesco dress and the Clark merch will excite the JDubz obsessives, but there were some really straightforwardly great, unassuming but no less exciting, clothes in the mix too. Shout out to the bootleg trousers with deliberately ragged hems.
