Has the busiest man in fashion just allowed couture to be comfortable?
Jonathan Anderson, the busiest man in fashion, just released his couture collection for Dior and there’s a lot going on. First impression: a pleated silver hat, seemingly fashioned from tin foil. Conspiracy-era millinery offset by a hefty grey jersey stole wrapped around the shoulders with all the determination of a grandmother who refuses to catch a draft. The model looks faintly paranoid. Elegantly so.
For couture, this collection has an unusual number of robes and pieces that look comfortable, like luxe loungewear. Where, exactly, are we going in radiation-proof millinery and a stola? An art museum? My grandmother’s linen cupboard? A retirement home? New Mexico?
The answer is all of them. Jonathan’s challenge, of course, was what to do with the Bar jacket. His answer is not to sharpen, but to soften it, dissolving its architecture into cardigan-like jackets and robes that look almost too comfortable for couture. Throughout the collection, fabric is constantly pretending to be something else: paper, foil, wire, metal. The Bar jacket, meanwhile, pretends to be soft. If Schiaparelli spent this week turning latex into couture, Anderson seems intent on doing the same for aluminium foil.
His starting point was American sculptor Lynda Benglis, the radical feminist whose work often begins with flat sheets of material before they’re pleated, knotted, and twisted into sculptural forms. She’s hardly a new acquaintance. They collaborated during his Loewe years, and her work returns here. The silver knots, the crisp folds, the paper-like fabrics, the metallic plissé-it’s all referring to her sculptures. Simultaneously, Jonathan imagined her gardens in her years spent in Ahmedabad, India, inspiring the floral embellishments, mother-of-pearl inlays and antique chintz fragments that appear throughout the collection, and the dry landscapes of Santa Fe seep into its softer colours, cacti motifs and crystalline shimmer.
A shimmery, light blue, ’80s-esque draped dress catches the light like those grainy VHS recordings of dolphins leaping through shiny waves. Another variation, in soft green, moves like grass in a Studio Ghibli film: in waves, slithering, rustling. A pale blue dress has an actual fan attached to the front, later another variation with the fan attached to the backside, somewhere between a bustle, a pair of wings, and a very glamorous piece of air conditioning. My personal favourites are the two green, meadowy dresses – with minuscule daisies all over.
The bags are equally interesting. Most of the bags are exquisitely inlaid clutches or metallic bows folded into sculptural handbags, until one model appears carrying a rolled-up silver armadillo. Another has a dumpling-shaped cactus with beaded spikes. Which brings us, inevitably, to the shoes. Tiny crocheted flowers and mysterious little bits dangle from satin pumps as though somebody emptied the contents of a sewing basket directly onto them. I kept expecting to spot a thimble. Later, the charms mutate into little feathers, folded flowers, and beaded ornaments inspired by Lynda Benglis’ Peacock sculptures. One pair blooms with flowers, poisonous foxgloves to be specific.
People often say couture resembles sculpture, as though this were the highest compliment available. I wondered instead whether sculpture has been trying, all along, to become a bathrobe. Turns out, the distance between a folded blanket, a grandmother fastening her shawl, a knot in aluminium, and an exquisitely made Dior gown is perhaps much smaller than one first imagines.
Words by Pykel van Latum
