How did Jonathan Anderson be the main storyteller of the fashion world?

On September 17, 1984, a secondary school teacher named Jonathan William Anderson was born in Küçük Marafelt, Northern Ireland. The fairy tale about one of the most talented designers of our time to breathe the Spanish Fashion House Liewe, who is dying of life, proved that there is nothing impossible in the world. Today, on the occasion of Jonathan Anderson’s 41st birthday, we will try to understand how it managed to fall in love with the main snobs of the fashion world and that it has become the main character of our time.

Now it’s hard to believe it, but in his youth, Jonathan Anderson dreamed of an actor’s career. His idol was James Dean and he pushed the future designer to try to enter the theater school. Anderson went to the United States and began training at the Studio Theater in Washington, but noticed that his interest was shifting towards costumes and visual design.

After returning to Ireland, he found a business as a seller in Brown Thomas and later decided to enter Central Saint Martins and learn the designer. Right, rejected. They say they are not inspired by the portfolio of the Acceptance Commission. It is impossible to believe it now, isn’t it? However, at that moment, London Fashion College was the only educational institution that was ready to accept. Jonathan Anderson entered the men’s clothes department.

The designer opened his own brand JW Anderson in 2008. Right, success did not come here immediately. Anderson (initially only male), the Androgyn images, was very progressive for the end of zero. So much so that even critics accepted them quite skeptical. However, general people and media were not missing in acute comments.

“I will never forget what happened the next day (After the show – Approximately. Ed.). Journalists and only people on the Web, that I have destroyed gender norms, that it is disgusting, and the place where the fashion is rolling ”and“ yes abnormal! ” They ran to write what I wrote. I didn’t expect such hate in response, and I never understood what caused him and why. I even thought of throwing my career as a designer’s career for a while, because frankly I wasn’t good enough for that, Jonathan Anderson said in 2015 at the British High School on the public.

In 2010, Jonathan Anderson presented male and female lines for the first time as part of London Fashion Week. Two years later, the British Fashion Council supported the support of the Council and an award in the developing talent category, which became an important recognition in a professional environment. And in 2013, Donatella Versace invited him to develop a capsule collection for the Versus line. In the same year, it became a key for Anderson: the French Konglomera Lvmh acquired a minority package of the JW Anderson brand and a completely new episode began in the designer’s life.

In 2013, LVMH leadership entrusted Anderson a much larger task and led the Spanish Fashion House Loewe, once famous for its skin products. For many people in the industry, this goal has become slightly unexpected: a young designer with provocateur reputation and a young designer with minimum experience with large brands must have given a new life to a pale brand. Later, Pierre-Yves Roussel, who organized his position as the President of the Fashion Group in LVMH, remembered Jonathan Anderson’s words about the proposed work: “I would like to do this.” And yes, he really did everything and more.

Already in 2014, only started to work Anderson, radically reviewed the brand strategy. The first step was an extended collection of a new Loewe Visual Language – a combination of a craft base and a combination of modern ideas. In parallel, the designer restarted the branded logo: Spanish calligraphy created by Vicente, the four -leaf, reflecting the idea of ​​modernity easier and graphic performance.

Anderson began to build it around Loewe, like a whole cultural ecosystem, not just a stylish brand. Loewe made a bet on cooperation with artists, photographers and architects by transforming advertising campaigns into separate art objects. Steven Mayzel, Paolo Rovelsi and Joachim Santos – all of this has helped the brand to go beyond fashion and gain a cultural player status.

At the same time, the designer paid attention to the basic heritage of the house – skin work. When fashion houses are based on “fast fashion” and trend products, Anderson was brought to the forefront of the skill of Spanish craftsmen. He created the new “cult” accessories of Loewe: The Puzzle Bag, the symbol of the new era, which emerged in 2014. These models not only remember the roots of the brand, but also became the object of desires for a new global mass.

In the meantime, financial reports showed the effectiveness of Anderson’s strategy. In the early 2010s, LEWE remained as a niche brand in the LVMH portfolio, and its sales exceeded $ 1.5 billion for the first time by 2022. It turned out that the Irish designer has managed to turn it not only to protect the DNA of the house, but also to one of the most debated and commercially successful brands of the decade.

As we have understood before, Jonathan Anderson is the same designer who constantly goes beyond the usual fashion. For his own brand Loewe and now Christian Dior, his collections look light, almost weightless as if he has woven from the game and irony. But this is a deceptive convenience, because there is careful work, dozens of sketches and endless arrangements behind each “joke”. Your favorite children’s fairy tale – at first glance naive and simple, but behind the author’s serious and subtle work is how to read hidden.

Anderson felt tired of being serious, and it seemed like immersing a clutch in a fantasy world where a clutch could be a pigeon, tomato or frog’s bag, with sandals with minnie mouse or “broken eggs”, and the dress turned into a sping or a car. It creates its own mythology, not just clothes, but also frames, restrictions or taboos.

Fantasy destroys the usual limits between fashion and art, joke and seriousness, utilitarian and conceptual. Anderson reminds every, fashion is not just functionality or tendencies, it is a imagination, a game and the courage to be different. And probably, it remains to imagine how the person who once refused to enter the young Jonathan’s headquarters in his headquarters Saint Martins. It was unlikely that the fashion world could imagine that the fashion world was the main storyteller in the future.