Jonathan Anderson packed his bags, and moved on to desert climes and sun-bleached terrain, taking his elongated silhouettes and generous proportions along with him.
He took the nomad as his muse, with models making their way around an installation by the multimedia artist Hilary Lloyd: Her TV screens beamed out a yellow parrot going about his business, hyper-real plants and abstract images of the moon, among other images. She said that she creates art by training her camera on everyday things. “What happens, happens. And then I exploit it.”
The TV screens were stuck onto tall metal rods that drew the eye straight up to the brutalist ceiling of the room at the UNESCO headquarters. Lloyd, who had never worked with a fashion designer before, said she loved the idea of those rods “pushing up through the gaps in the ceiling. I love that ceiling. It changes the work. You don’t get ceilings like this in art galleries,” she said.
Anderson’s men were dressed in lots of loose layers made for the wanderer, including a line up of shalwar kameez style suits, in dark blue or toffee-toned suede, in a skinny rib knit, or in cotton stripes.
He used fabric made in Kenya for long, color block or striped tabards, some of which he layered under tailored jackets, while oversize sailor suits with wide legs and denim toggle-front coats were for the man traveling by sea, or in a colder climates.
Anderson said he was going for something “romantic, kind of a youthful nomadic-ness, something nymph-like. I wanted it to be effortless, and I liked this idea that you can just tumble away, or you could go to the beach – or not. These kids could also be walking the streets in a kind of dreamscape.”
Wherever they were headed, these laid-back boys with their long, sweeping layers and lavender climbing boots, were looking fine.