For some in the fashion world, Jonathan Anderson is frighteningly ambitious. They might well be right – and Jonathan Anderson might well agree. Anderson’s ambition comes with hefty talent: the ability to create and implement a startling overall vision; a love of and gift with the transformational qualities of clothing and imagery; excellent taste and a breadth of cultural knowledge; a tough work ethic; a need to produce the best and a desire to work with the best. He unashamedly wants to compete in the ‘great game’ of fashion and, not to sound too Charlie Sheen about it, he wants to win.
Nevertheless, he wants to take those of us who follow and consume it along for the ride. He’s never really forgotten that his own power and fascination with fashion have come from consuming it and being consumed by it – and he’s still emotional about it. He started off as a kid with a wishlist – not of ‘acquisitive objects’ but of feelings that were generated by looking at images and trying on clothes. He wanted to meet, work with and learn from the people who created them – and at this point, he has largely made that wishlist come true. As he puts it: “Ultimately, these people are the paintbrush for me. They’re the people who are going to build this ever-lasting fantasy that’s trapped in this image.”

Now, at 37, he is the creative director of both his eponymous brand, JW Anderson (established by Anderson in 2007) and Loewe – both in conjunction with LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. Although it should be pointed out that he still holds the controlling share in JW Anderson, not always the case for designers with a leviathan luxury partner. Yet being firmly ensconced in ‘The Empire’ is something else that suits Anderson’s ambition and desire to win, itself reflected in LVMH’s chief executive officer and luxury visionary, Bernard Arnault. Arnault is somebody that the journalist Sarah Mower once described as the ‘Rupert Murdoch of French fashion in a silk suit.’ The thing is, at this point, Mr Arnault might well be richer and more powerful than Mr Murdoch – such is the success and influence of his global luxury vision.
“There is something remarkable about the drive and the kind of self-assurance to be the best in the world. I kind of live for those sort of characters,” says Anderson. “That’s why deep down I really admire, technically my boss, Bernard Arnault. I think I like that he is very ‘I want to be number one.’ I don’t even know if he says that, but I get that sense from him – a sort of tunnel vision, looking at building something that is remarkable. I remember when I joined LVMH [in 2013] someone asked me why I had joined and I was kind of like, ‘Well for me it was the Oxford over the Cambridge.’ But there is something about these characters that is fascinating because the ambition is real, I think that’s what lures you in, it’s incredibly attractive somehow.”

“I think in fashion, ultimately, you end up getting a persona that you never wanted to get. That’s because it’s made up by this imaginary ‘machine’, because it’s fashion at the end of the day. I just think, which is probably unusual for a British or an Irish designer, I am very driven. I am very driven to a point where… I don’t know, I’m driven by rediscovering myself over and over again. I’m driven by being better and better and better. You can always be better.”

Perhaps understandably, being without our more typically British Isles bashfulness, the Northern Irish Anderson is seen as something of an anomaly. He just doesn’t pussy-foot about. I always think of a quote from Cristiano Ronaldo when I think of JWA: “Your love makes me strong, your hate makes me unstoppable.” He does have his haters – but he also has a habit of ‘I’ll show them.’ And he invariably does. As he puts it: “I think I’m quite thick-skinned, ultimately. I think sometimes that kind of thing drives me more. The more I am challenged the more I succeed. Because I need that kind of threat, sometimes, I need to be kept on my toes.” Maybe it’s his father, Willie Anderson, the rugby union coach and former Irish international, who passed on this love of sporting competition that Anderson has applied to the field of fashion. Although the designer adds to the sporting analogy somewhat differently.
“My dad was a sportsman so that is something to do with this idea of competitiveness which I think is good. But I do think there is another similarity with sport,” he explains. “My father was a rugby player and coached rugby, and I think the things that I have taken from that, something misread in fashion, is practice and training. I think in fashion you have to be willing to keep setting the bar higher; it’s like a marathon, but the marathon is never-ending so you’ve got to keep training your eye. If I were to stop, then I would stop. I could never stop and then come back in because I think you have to train the eye in what you are looking for and be able to reinvent that thing over and over again, to be curious. Ultimately, the key in fashion is always to be curious about things that you may not even want to be into, because that’s where you find newness. It could be curiosity about the Renaissance but it could be about hip-hop, it could be about gardening it could be about drinking different types of wine. You have to be curious to consume these things to see whether it informs you somehow. Then the minute that I would stop I would feel like I have no practice and then I would have to change into a different thing. I would have to be part of a different industry.”

“Ultimately, the key in fashion is always to be curious about things that you may not even want to be into, because that’s where you find newness.”

Saying all of that – and not meaning to make him into a character in a Jackie Collins novel, or more likely someone in the French and Saunders version of a Jackie Collins novel Lucky Bitches – Jonathan Anderson is wise enough not to take himself too seriously. For this shoot, he expressed a desire to look “quite dev’d. In a wig.” He has a wry humour and an ultimate sense of the ridiculous – he purposely wanted to be playful with his image. In fact, at first, it was like pulling teeth to get him to be photographed at all. Then, in typical style, he decided to test himself and went all-in on set. “As much as people may think I’m a vain person or I work in a vain industry, I’m not,” he says, after the shoot. “I’m not someone who likes the camera on me; I’m too much of a perfectionist for that. I deal with beauty all day, so the idea of looking at myself as a figure is a very weird thing.”
He’s a bit beyond the blond, pretty-boy thing – and this is not faux modesty – he is a bit beyond being focused upon personally at all. And that’s not just to do with lockdown fat – for a start, he doesn’t seem to have gained any. It’s what led to the abandonment of his first ‘discovery of self’ in the form of being an actor.

“I wanted to be an actor, I had no idea why,” he laughs. “I did musical theatre, which for some people is probably even more abstract, so I was in theatre and I actually went to Washington DC to go and study acting when I was a teenager. In a weird way, I think if I hadn’t done that I don’t think I would have been able to do what I do today.” For a start, he just playfully embraced a JW Anderson persona for this photoshoot, although ‘out of character’ he is disarmingly honest and not afraid to discuss his insecurities. “If I was to take a couple of things that I learned in that weird moment in my life, it’s one, I knew I was never going to be the best in the world at it, so if you’re never going to be the best in the world, don’t do it. Two, I couldn’t lose myself; I couldn’t get out of who I was to become someone else. I could tell someone else to be what they needed to be but I couldn’t be told what to be. And finally, I think the biggest thing was if you’re going to create a character you have to live and breathe it. You have to believe in it no matter how bad or good it is and I think there is something that will always hold me back – the Stanislavski technique is based on living and breathing it; you have to be that person.”

It is at this point that Jonathan Anderson discovered he was less the performer and more the impresario; a controlling force that was interested in putting all of the elements together. It is something that has stood him in good stead as a world-class founder and creative director of fashion brands. He continues: “If I had to lose myself in the moment I’d find it very difficult, but when I was seeing how people would dress in theatre and looking at clothing, I started to realise that maybe I was more into that – not just the costume, but the sets, the direction of the whole. And then there was the reality of it all – in a weird way, if I hadn’t done all of that and I hadn’t racked up loads of debt, I would never have had my parents say to me, ‘You need to pay it back’ and then I would never have worked in the Brown Thomas store in Dublin. I think Brown Thomas, quite randomly, was probably the most important thing, because it was the early 2000s and it introduced me to an incredibly important moment in menswear.”
It was working in Brown Thomas that he first truly got lost in a flurry of fashion: “Tom Ford for Gucci and YSL, Hedi Slimane for Dior… I wasn’t following fashion at first so it wasn’t like I was a Raf fan or an Ann Demeulemeester fan, it was just this was the first thing I had seen that was remarkable to me. I also think the advertising I saw then has informed the advertising I do now because it was the golden age of fashion advertising. I was selling this stuff to people and buying the more adventurous things that had been left on the sale rack. I think it was a combination of working from nine to five and going out – also knowing by this stage, after coming back from America, that this was not a phase, patches were not going to sort it out, I was not going to be holistically changed somehow, that I was 100 per cent homosexual. I was then able to enjoy fashion, go out clubbing and you know… Live it.”

From then on Anderson progressed fast in fashion – from initially meeting Manuela Pavesi in Brown Thomas and then finally working for her, then attending London College of Fashion and establishing his own brand. It could be seen that the latest JW Anderson collection for Spring-Summer 22, is part of a new phase of rediscovery and rejuvenation for the designer in this pandemic period; something that takes in a rediscovery of some of these older selves. Particularly the idea of a kid in his bedroom in Northern Ireland trying on clothes…
“I think in this last collection I just did for JW, it was the first time I’d kind of really understood what I love in menswear if we have to categorise it as menswear,” he explains. “This is something deep down in me that I think comes from when I was growing up in Northern Ireland. I remember wearing a fluorescent orange jacket; it was on the sale rack in TK Maxx from Dolce… I think it was Dolce. And a pair of Jean Paul Gaultier tiger print velour trousers that had pockets on the front and a zip down the back. In my head, by wearing these clothes, that was me being part of something. I bought them and wore them and then I realised that they were not acceptable on me. So now I actually think whatever is my menswear or womenswear is deep down a twisted fantasy of what I’d love to wear. And there’s nothing more exciting than having someone in front of you who can actually wear it.”

“So now I actually think whatever is my menswear or womenswear is deep down a twisted fantasy of what I’d love to wear. And there’s nothing more exciting than having someone in front of you who can actually wear it.”

After worrying that JW was getting “way too chic and too ethereal” pre-pandemic, without its original bratty brand of “wrongness”, Anderson has now gone back to the founding principles of JW: “It had lost that kind of sexual ambiguity, tension, humour and wrongness that I think really was happening at the beginning. The brand was kind of birthed through an idea – as boring as it sounds now – of a shared wardrobe. It was never about gender as in I was on a gender crusade, it was more like, well wouldn’t it be simpler if everyone just used the same wardrobe?”
More than this, the new phase of JW Anderson also means a new rediscovery of self by Jonathan Anderson. “I feel like I’ve regained the love of who I am and what I do,” says the designer. “I don’t take everything seriously. It is for me an experimental thing; it’s discovery. It’s about losing yourself sometimes and trying to discover different things that turn you on. That can change or it can go back in time. Recently, I’ve felt like I associate with certain things I did at the very beginning of my career again. It’s not like I’m going to recreate them but there’s a feeling that I love what I do and I’m still excited to do it.”
And so onwards to a new, always better, JWA.

Interview originally published in HERO 26.

hair SHON HYUNGSUN JU at THE WALL GROUP; make-up MEL ARTER at JULIAN WATSON AGENCY; photography assistant LEX KEMBERY and SIMON MACKINLAY