“When it comes to culture — fashion culture, art culture — we are in this incredibly insane moment of self censorship,” says 38-year-old fashion designer Jonathan Anderson. “I think we are too scared to have dialogue, too scared to be controversial — because we’re worried that we’ll be cancelled. And it makes me feel that, creatively, everything is moving incredibly slowly.”
It’s perhaps a sign of the pace that Anderson moves at — a world most of us find overwhelmingly fast, he finds stultifying. Born in Northern Ireland (he’s lived in London for more than two decades), he heads up two of the world’s coolest fashion labels: the eponymous JW Anderson, which he launched aged 24 in 2008 as a menswear label (he added womenswear in 2010), and Spanish luxury juggernaut Loewe, which under his decade-long stewardship has become a $1 billion-a-year brand. He creates 18 collections each year — six for JW Anderson, 10 for Loewe and two as part of a collaboration with Uniqlo.
