That’s a vital thing for designers to accomplish in the physically and technologically packed hypermarket that is contemporary fashion. A multitude of names are jostling for both attention and consumption. Anderson is in his early thirties, acutely aware of the demands of the new age. So he gives us shows animated with endless novelty and frivolity, easily consumed both visually and at sales tills. He talked about his outfits being “snapshots”, after an iPhone-welded audience spent his show doing little other than snapping, and said he wanted each observer to wind up “immersed in a look”.
Pulled close in to the models on a narrow catwalk, you did wind up buried, near physically, in the details of embroidered leather bodices, ruched leggings, fish-scale paillette shoes and munched-up ruffled skirts. It was tough to see them as an entity, but rather as abstracts perpetual motion. “It’s to get a sense of clothing,” mused Anderson grandly. “It’s fine if it’s not commercial.”
But it isn’t fine, and this was commercial, despite Anderson’s protestations. A designer has to sell their clothes to survive, and the current rejigging of catwalk calendars in favour of a model dubbed “see now, buy now” underlines the demands of commerce. Anderson’s snapshots trained your eye to focus on particular facets of the clothes: a studded handbag, sequinned shoes, shirt-dresses kicking into stiff saturn rings of coloured leather about the knee. Coupling those saturn rings with the wide-cut puritan collars and those ribbity frog flounces, and it felt like Anderson was trying – physically – to distance his wearer from her surroundings. Perhaps protectively, perhaps simply misanthropically. Perhaps also to allow a woman to exist in her own space, without intrusion, behind heavy-duty metal grommeting as armour. Anderson mentioned that he likes to be confrontational backstage: maybe he didn’t just mean in terms of cocktail attire.
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