It’s a beautiful life. Love actually. The holiday (ugh). Most of us like our Christmas movies as sweet and sickly as eggnog. Jonathan Anderson, however, has a spicier taste. As he said in his preview: “Eyes wide closed is one of my favorite movies, and I actually think it’s a great Christmas movie.” However, it was two viewings last summer that led to this collection. “I’ve never done anything about a movie,” Anderson said. “This is also the sexiest we’ve ever been – as far as I can go.”
The result was a delightfully varied design orgy, from the primitive to the perverse: in both menswear and women’s pre-fall clothing, there was something for everyone to get into, regardless of their preference. Being an Anderson production, this went deeper than a simple “I like that movie” collection. Stanley Kubrick died just before the film’s controversial release in 1999. Anderson contacted Kubrick’s widow Christiane, who is 91 years old and still lives at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, the house they shared. When the Kubricks married, Anderson explained, Christiane had chosen to give up acting, but her husband continued to cast her out of love by including her painting of their family life in his films, including A Clockwork Orange (of which a painting is currently on display in the window of the JWA store in Milan) and Eyes wide closed.
It was these paintings that spanned the triptych jersey knit dresses: other pieces showed a portrait of a family cat, a potted plant with a barcode still on the fairing, and a car interior. Anderson said, “What I found interesting was the psychology of this idea of bringing someone from the background to the foreground.”
This was about as literal as Anderson got. The collection featured no Christmas trees or masks – although Nicole Kidman was on the soundtrack and provided the almost last line of dialogue – but a palpable spirit of twisted bourgeois eroticism ran like fil rouge down the dark catwalk. Red, with all its implications, headlined by an oversized velvet evening jacket for men – a fluid parody of power formality, echoed elsewhere in the cork slippers with ghillie tassels and the evening shirts with cut arm braces. The womenswear counterpoint to the jacket was a red velvet jumpsuit with one disordered, asymmetrically cut leg that resembled the intersection of sleepwear and evening wear. A black T-shirt dress trimmed with a scarlet vector, a red silk dress with hanging glove sleeves and a high-cut patent leather trench in green were other positively incendiary looks.
Anderson’s own recurring penchant for shorts was once again satisfied via some beautiful rib-knit pieces – sometimes paired with cardigans – whose edges exuded suggestive, disturbingly homely wisps of satin. Dressing his female models in tights over panties gave a less figure-skating aspect to the trophy underwear trend in women’s clothing. Repeating the maneuver with his men, especially immediately after a blue wrap coat worthy of Max Mara, was a masterful act of equal opportunism. This cerebral fashion series was, let’s be honest, also a collection that fired up both its wearers and their important audience members to prepare for something very important that they have to do as soon as possible.
