Big and Bulbous, Long and Lean: the Many Shapes of JW Anderson

Comically large knitted sweaters. Big and chunky polo dresses. Khaki short sets with matching tops. Jonathan Anderson stripped away any sparkling, over-the-top fluff and brought guests to the Seymour Leisure Centre to present his JW Anderson fall 2024 collection at London Fashion Week. The result of all that paring back? Clothing that was inspired by the way people feel and think, simply put. That meant hulking coats with supersize lapels and V-neck sweaters with ribbon streamer skirts that looked like they could have been pulled from the aisles of Party City—and made subversively chic.

The designer has long spoken about how technology and screens inspire his work. Backstage after the show, he cited “future thinking” at a time when young people are discovering nostalgia. (Interestingly, there’s plenty of discourse about young people and personal style happening online right now. Does the concept of personal style even exist anymore? And who has it?) How has the Internet’s commodification of style—think “quiet luxury” or “Mob Wife Aesthetic”— shaped society’s current viewpoint on fashion? JW Anderson didn’t have a direct answer to that question, of course. But his collection—divided up into two categories, the “grotesque” and the “pragmatic,”—attempted to get at the topic. And it was easy to see which pieces fell into either bracket.

A model donned a white slipdress with draped, chunky tassels and twists, and styled with stout little chunky boots and a wiry gray wig, plus bright red lipstick. (Several models wore similar wigs, perhaps a nod at the wider trend currently sweeping the fall 2024 runways: more mature women as the most fashionable muses.) Others had on thick, horizontally striped sweaters with mid leg-length shorts and those same boots.

There were some outfits that felt less editorial, but still bore that off-kilter JW Anderson quirk—you had to just look a little closer to find it. Knit sets came with not one waistband, but two. Fuzzy sweater dresses had big, rounded shoulders and sculptural bell-shaped bottoms. Sweaters had ribbons of ruffles that seemed to grow off of them, paired with leather-like versions of sporty knee-length basketball shorts. These athletically inclined sets recalled new (one might call them “future-thinking”) versions of tracksuits from the early 2000s. The push-and-pull between totally wearable vs. over-the-top represented both sides of the designer.

Still, those giant coats and XXXL knit dresses—which opened and closed the runway show—delivered on the fantasy we’ve come to expect from the wonderful world of JW Anderson (this is a man, after all, who gave us pigeon- and frog-shaped bags). And during a time when many fashions bear a similar likeness, and trends, logos, and “It” items are flooding our timelines, his audience craves those surprising feats of free thinking and individuality.