JW A Show

Founded in London in 2008, JW Anderson initially emerged as a menswear proposal, beginning with a collection of accessories that quickly attracted attention within the industry.¹ However, from the outset, the brand was not conceived as a conventional structure. Rather than defining an identity, it introduces a position.

Under the direction of Jonathan Anderson, clothing is no longer organised around gender. It does not operate as a closed system, but as an open field in which traditional categories lose stability. As Anderson states, “I don’t know how you can classify a garment as a gender.”² Garments displaced from their usual context, bodies that resist fixed readings, and a wardrobe that no longer belongs to a single identity. From its earliest shows, this condition produces an ambiguous reading. Recognisable elements, such as miniskirts or cropped tops, appear on male bodies without seeking direct provocation. Instead, they introduce a subtle friction, a misalignment that prevents immediate interpretation, a quality frequently noted in critical responses to the collections.³

A language of proportion and displacement

JW Anderson is not defined by a specific silhouette, but by a method. Its work begins with the recognisable, yet never remains within it. Forms are altered, proportions expanded, and objects positioned within an uncertain boundary between function and representation. Everyday garments are reconfigured from their structure. A hem ceases to be a finish and becomes a support. Knitwear expands to an architectural scale.

Accessories move beyond their secondary role and approach the sculptural, introducing an almost surreal dimension, a quality often identified in analyses of the brand.⁴ This reduction towards the essential becomes explicit in recent proposals. The Spring/Summer 2025 collection, developed using four materials, cashmere, leather, silk and sequins, does not seek limitation, but concentration. The result is not simplification, but precision, aligned with an approach focused on refining ideas to their core.⁵

Art, archive and cultural references

The archive, both personal and external, operates as an active tool. In the FW23 show, presented at The Roundhouse, the notion of fandom introduces a personal and fragmented reading of the past. Rather than reconstructing it, it is reorganised, generating new relationships between images, objects and references.⁶

Throughout its evolution, JW Anderson maintains an unstable position in relation to the industry. In 2015, the brand received both Menswear and Womenswear Designer of the Year at The Fashion Awards, consolidating its recognition within the system. Yet recognition has never operated as an anchor for JW Anderson. The brand does not settle into what has worked. It continues to introduce friction.

That friction took a decisive form in 2025. After seventeen years of seasonal collections and runway presentations, JW Anderson announced an indefinite pause on its shows at London Fashion Week, reorienting the label towards a slower, more considered model centred on craftsmanship, wardrobe staples and the domestic sphere. The decision had been a year in the making, driven by the JW Anderson team. Anderson described it in terms of personal clarification rather than strategic repositioning: “I wanted to rearticulate my own brand. When I started it, I had come out of university. I was more angsty. When I turned 40, I decided that I wanted to change the brand and work out who I am today.”⁷

The visual identity was revised accordingly. The process began with a refined logo, its slimmer typeface signalling a new chapter, alongside updated packaging.⁸ The retail spaces followed the same logic. The Pimlico Road store, designed by Sanchez Benton Architects, was conceived as a domestic nook rather than a luxury flagship, defined by warm materials and an arrangement that evokes a well-lived studio.⁹ Its shelves bring together re-editions of Charles Rennie Mackintosh lamps and stools, ceramics by Akiko Hirai, handmade Murano glassware, Welsh blankets and honey from Houghton Hall Estate.¹⁰ Every object has a provenance, a maker, a material logic.

Nothing is arbitrary. What the rebrand proposes, taken as a whole, is a different relationship between a fashion label and its public: one organised not around desire manufactured seasonally, but around sustained attention to things worth keeping. “Things don’t have to be a success overnight. It’s about enjoying a design and sticking with it. It’s a slower process, and finding fetish within things. And it’s very much how I see my home, and my world.”¹¹ This is, in the end, the same operation the brand has always performed: working with the familiar without allowing it to remain stable, introducing a minimal variation that alters perception, displacing the object from its immediate context. What changed in 2025 was not the method but the scale at which it was applied.

The project is informed by two distinct yet complementary references: the work of Hans Holbein the Younger and the practice of William Morris. While Holbein operates through precision, control, and ambiguity, Morris develops a language based on repetition, material presence, and surface. These two positions establish a framework in which meaning is constructed either through concealment or through extension across the visible field.

Rather than treating these references as isolated influences, the project understands them as operative systems that shape the perception of space. The resulting environment is defined by a balance between clarity and disruption, where ordered compositions coexist with elements that introduce doubt, partial visibility, and continuous pattern. In this way, the project situates itself between two modes of representation, using their tension to construct a spatial experience that is both controlled and open to interpretation.

The work of Hans Holbein the Younger informs the project not through a historical reading, but through his systems of representation. His compositions are defined by clarity, controlled use of colour, and careful attention to textiles¹², producing images that appear stable and ordered. This stability is never complete. A subtle tension remains, both visual and psychological. In his portraits, the gaze of the figures, although calm, creates a distance that is difficult to resolve.¹³

This condition of ambiguity is also reflected in Jonathan Anderson’s description of Holbein as “an enigma in the world of painting”.¹⁴ Rather than referring only to style, this points to a way of constructing images in which meaning is never fully fixed, and where clarity and uncertainty exist at the same time. These qualities are understood here as perceptual strategies. Meaning depends on position, framing, and partial visibility. A similar approach can be identified in Anderson’s spatial thinking, where the perception of objects shifts depending on the viewer’s position.

This informs the design of a spatial setting conceived as an ‘avenue’ for a runway presentation. The space is organised as a clear composition, but small shifts prevent it from being fully read. A dominant exposed brick beam defines the space, introducing a strong material presence that contrasts with the surrounding. The floor suggests a larger image, but it cannot be fully seen from a single point of view. This condition is reinforced by the introduction of a screen combining wood and silk. It acts both as a scenographic element and as a device that conceals part of the space. The experience unfolds in two stages. At first, the viewer encounters a sense of clarity, supported by material and composition. This perception shifts as attention moves towards the screen, whose presence interrupts the existing order. In this way, the project relates to Holbein’s work not through visual imitation, but through a shared approach to perception. The space cannot be understood as a fixed whole, but depends on movement and viewpoint.

“The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein the Younger introduces a complex reading of the space, not so much as a direct reference, but as a structure of thought.

The painting presents an apparent stability: two figures, a symmetrical composition, an accumulation of objects that point to knowledge, technique and the material world.¹⁵ Yet this stability is disrupted by an element that unsettles the entire scene: the anamorphic skull, visible only from a displaced point of view.¹⁶ As philosopher and scholar Hagi Kenaan has noted, what makes the painting singular is precisely “its implied suggestion of a hidden reality behind the scenes. It is what divides the original space of the Ambassadors into the visible and the invisible.”¹⁷

That same logic can be recognised within the space. At first glance, it follows a clear, almost conventional structure. There is an axis, an organisation, a materiality that refers back to the historical. But this apparent normality never fully settles. There is a slight discomfort, a feeling that is difficult to name, as if something were just slightly out of place.

The connection with Jonathan Anderson lies precisely there. Not in direct quotation, but in a shared way of constructing meaning. Working with the recognisable, only to alter it just enough for it to become something else. Introducing a displacement that neither resolves itself nor disappears.

Anamorphosis is not translated here as an image, but as a condition. As one reading of the painting suggests, “you cannot see both images at the same time”:¹⁸ the skull and the composition are mutually exclusive. The space does not conceal something specific, yet it holds a latent instability. Something that never quite aligns and, for that very reason, demands to be looked at twice.

In contrast to the controlled and ambiguous systems of representation found in Holbein’s work, the practice of William Morris introduces a different approach to meaning, one rooted in materiality, repetition, and surface. Morris’s work places strong emphasis on craftsmanship and the value of making by hand, where the process becomes inseparable from the final object.¹⁹

This attention to the handmade is reflected in the use of natural motifs, particularly floral patterns, which are repeated to create continuous surfaces without a clear focal point.²⁰ Rather than concealing meaning, these compositions extend it across the surface, allowing it to remain constantly visible. Colour plays a central role within this system.

Morris’s palettes embrace intensity and variation, moving away from neutrality in favour of a more expressive language. Colour becomes a way of reinforcing the presence of pattern and its connection to nature, introducing a sense of vitality within the space. Within the project, this approach is translated through several key elements.

The exposed brick structure reflects a material language closely associated with the architectural context of Morris’s time in Britain, introducing a connection to a vernacular condition grounded in craft and construction.²¹

Repetition is further developed through the placement of seating, specifically through the use of Sussex Chairs associated with Morris & Co. While often linked to William Morris, the design is generally attributed to Philip Webb and draws from vernacular chair traditions from Sussex.²²

This origin reinforces the connection to craftsmanship, collective production, and the reinterpretation of historical forms. Their repetition within the space establishes a rhythmic composition, where individual objects contribute to a continuous spatial reading. The floor operates as a patterned surface, composed of tiles that construct an image reminiscent of wallpaper. This strategy recalls the interiors of the Red House, where early approaches to surface design were developed and later informed modern decorative systems.²³ As in Morris’s work, the pattern extends beyond immediate perception, existing as a continuous field rather than a fixed image.

Similarly, the floral textile applied to the screen introduces a direct reference to Morris’s visual language, reinforcing the presence of nature through repetition and abstraction. In this case, the surface remains visible and active, yet is also tied to a spatial function that introduces moments of concealment.

If Holbein constructs meaning through ambiguity and controlled visibility, Morris does so through repetition, material presence, and surface. The project operates between these two positions, combining a structured spatial composition with elements that expand across the space, establishing a dialogue between what is clearly seen and what remains partially hidden.

A shared geometry

The trinquet and the jeu de paume are, before anything else, the same architectural decision: to enclose movement. Both are elongated rectangles of almost identical proportions, with lateral galleries that integrate the spectator into the volume of play without placing them entirely outside it or entirely within it. The ceiling is high not for aesthetic reasons but functional ones: the trajectory of the ball demands it. The windows are lateral and set high, because light cannot interfere with the reading of the game. The architecture of these spaces is an architecture of consequences: every formal decision responds to a necessity of movement.

What these courts share with the nave of this show is a logic of the channel. There is no stage. There is no focal point. There is a longitudinal axis along which something moves, and two lateral bands from which that movement is followed. It is a structure that compels the eye to move, that makes time a spatial dimension.

Fashion, the body and trajectory

Fashion is, in its most honest form, a temporal practice. A garment does not fully exist on the hanger or in the photograph: it exists in the body that inhabits it and in the movement of that body through space.

The geometry of the trinquet and the jeu de paume proposes understanding that movement as a field rather than a line. The body in motion does not advance towards a vanishing point but traces a trajectory within a space that surrounds it completely. The spectator does not receive the garment face on, but accompanies it, loses sight of it, recovers it from another angle.

The role of the show

This show enters that logic and carries it one step further. The three rooms are not three consecutive runways. They are three distinct fields, each with its own spatial character and its own central object, through which a single collection moves in circular routes before continuing. The spectator remains fixed, but what unfolds around them has no single point of departure or arrival. As in the trinquet, as in the jeu de paume, the game ends only when the ball stops moving.

This project departs from a condition that runs through JW Anderson's practice: the displacement of the familiar. Not its negation, not its replacement, but a minimal shift that prevents it from settling into a fixed reading. Enough to make it strange. Enough to make it worth looking at twice.

The collage that anchors this project makes that operation visible in a single image. A Shaker wooden fork, one of the most elemental tools the movement produced, is driven through a JW Anderson leather bag and a yellow sandal from the brand. It does not decorate them. It traverses them. The Shaker object does not sit beside the contemporary one; it passes through it, leaving both altered.

That is the conceptual core of the show. Three historical references, Hans Holbein the Younger, William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement, and the Shaker communities of eighteenth and nineteenth century America, are not treated here as sources of inspiration in the conventional sense. They do not provide a mood or an aesthetic. They function as structural forces that pass through the project, through the space, the objects, and the collection, without fully dissolving into it. The tension between what they carry, devotion, craft, the political act of making by hand, and what JW Anderson proposes today, is not resolved. It is held open.

The gilded frame in the collage contains neither a Holbein portrait nor a Morris wallpaper, but the tiled floor of the show itself: a ceramic surface drawn from the patterns Morris developed for the Red House, now reframed as a painting, as an object of contemplation rather than a surface to walk across. What was underfoot becomes frontal. What was decorative becomes the image. The frame, borrowed from the visual language of Holbein's era, does not authenticate what it contains. It displaces it.

The Shaker chair above, seen from the front but inverted, its legs pointing upward and its back facing down, hovers over the entire composition. Turned upside down, the chair loses its function without losing its form. It remains entirely recognisable, yet refuses to be used. Like the Shaker practice of hanging chairs from wall-mounted rails to free the floor beneath, the object is lifted out of its functional logic and held in a different kind of presence: still legible, no longer available.

This is what the show proposes: a space in which historical references do not illustrate the collection but coexist with it, each retaining its own logic while being pulled into contact with the others. The Shaker wooden fork through the JW Anderson bag is not a metaphor. It is a method. Something old passing through something new, and neither coming out unchanged.

The journey as argument

The show does not unfold as a sequence of rooms. It unfolds as a proposition. Each of the three wings proposes a distinct relationship between the visitor, the object at its centre, and the collection that moves around it. Taken together, they form an argument that does not resolve into a single conclusion but accumulates, room by room, into a way of seeing.

The left wing establishes the ground. Its materiality is direct and unmediated: brick, ceramic, wood, rush. The references are present but not illustrated. Morris is not quoted; he is built into the floor, the chairs, the logic of repetition that runs beneath everything. The Shaker bench at the centre asks for nothing beyond what it is. The room does not demand interpretation. It demands attention.

The central wing introduces friction. The screen that bisects the space is simultaneously a wall, a surface, and a concealment. One side offers the silk panel and the Holbein reproduction; the other offers only wood. The same object reads differently depending on where the visitor sits. Meaning is no longer stable. It depends on position, on angle, on what remains out of view.

The right wing offers neither resolution nor conclusion, but something closer to stillness. The brick structure reads in full for the first time. Nothing interrupts the view. At the centre, three Shaker oval boxes sit directly on the floor. After the accumulation of references, materials and displacements that precede them, these three objects ask only to be seen for what they are. The argument does not end. It quiets.

The relationship between the spectator and the space

The audience does not arrive at this show as observers positioned outside the event. The spatial logic of the nave, borrowed from the trinquet and the jeu de paume, does not allow for that distance. There is no raised platform, no proscenium, no single privileged viewpoint. The Sussex chairs that line both sides of each room are not waiting rooms. They are part of the composition.

In the trinquet, the lateral gallery where spectators stand is reglamentarily part of the playing field. The ball can strike its wall and the point stands. The spectator's physical presence, the surface that separates them from the game, is one of the surfaces that defines the space of play. This show borrows that logic without illustrating it. The audience occupies the lateral bands of each room while the collection moves through the centre. Neither is complete without the other.

This also means that the experience is not uniform. The visitor seated on the side facing the silk panel of the screen sees the Holbein reproduction in full. The visitor on the opposite side sees only wood. The visitor closest to the Shaker boxes sees their scale and material with precision. The visitor at the far end of the room sees them as a single still point in a larger field. Position is not incidental. It is the condition under which meaning is produced.

The show does not offer a correct vantage point. It offers several partial ones, each valid, none complete. What the visitor sees depends on where they sit, and what they miss is as much a part of the experience as what they encounter.

The tension between the fixed and the moving

Each of the three rooms is organised around a still point. In the left wing, the Shaker bench and the Constance Spry urn. In the central wing, the screen. In the right wing, the three oval boxes placed directly on the floor. These objects do not move. They do not respond to the collection that circulates around them. They simply remain.

That stillness is not passive. In a space designed around movement, an object that does not move accumulates a different kind of weight. The models circle each room before passing to the next, and with each pass the central object is seen again from a slightly different angle, in relation to a different garment, under a different quality of light. The object does not change. The reading of it does.

This is the structural logic that connects the three rooms. Not a shared aesthetic, not a common material, but a shared condition: something fixed at the centre, something moving around it. The bench and the urn hold the left wing in place while Morris and the Shakers are read through the garments that pass before them. The screen holds the central wing in suspension, revealing and concealing in equal measure as the collection rotates around it. The boxes hold the right wing in silence, receiving the end of the journey without comment.

The collection does not illustrate the objects. The objects do not explain the collection. They coexist in the same space, each following its own logic, each altered by the proximity of the other. What the show proposes, in the end, is that meaning does not reside in either one alone, but in the space between them, in the movement that connects the fixed and the mobile, the historical and the contemporary, the made and the worn.

The brick here is not a fragment but a complete presence. Unlike the left wing, where the wall appears divided, in this room the brick structure occupies the entire back wall, forming a beam composed of two arches. It is the moment of greatest architectural weight across the three rooms, and it is precisely within that context that the screen is placed.

The screen is the central object of the room and its reason for being. It is composed of several wooden panels, sober and without surface treatment, and a single panel of gold-stamped silk with floral motifs, against which rests, framed, a reproduction of The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger.

The tension between the two materials is not decorative: the wood speaks the same language as the bench in the left wing, the same constructive honesty of the Shaker Movement, while the silk introduces an entirely different temporality, a different register, that of the court, of power, of ornament as declaration.

The Holbein reproduction faces a single direction. The audience seated before it sees it in full: the two ambassadors, the objects on the table, the anamorphic skull on the floor that only resolves itself from an oblique angle. The audience on the opposite side sees only the wood.

This asymmetry is not a shortcoming but a decision: not all spectators have access to the same image, in the same way that in The Ambassadors not all information is visible from a single point of view.

The models circle the screen during their circular route, passing alternately through the silk side and the wooden side, inhabiting that same ambiguity. Access to the right wing opens beneath the brick structure, on the right side of the back wall.

The space is deliberately unresolved: a pre-existing industrial nave onto which a single intervention has been layered. A brick wall, built expressly for this project, bisects the far end of the room. It is not found architecture but constructed reference, a direct invocation of the Arts & Crafts movement and, more specifically, of William Morris, whose Red House in Bexleyheath is perhaps his most personal and direct expression. The brick does not pretend to be original. It is a proposition.

That same logic of the handmade and the considered runs through every element of the room. The floor unfolds as a continuous ceramic surface, its motifs drawn from the wallpaper patterns Morris designed for the Red House: botanical, dense, unapologetically decorative. It is not limited to this wing but continues through the whole space, connecting all three rooms beneath the feet of the audience as a single, uninterrupted field. The Sussex chairs line both sides of the room.

At the centre of the room, placed along the axis that the models will circle during the show, sits a long wooden bench informed by the principles of the Shaker Movement. Its construction is without ornament: honest joinery, visible structure, nothing added that does not need to be there.

On it rests an urn by Constance Spry for Fulham Pottery, a single ceramic object whose soft, irregular glaze sits in quiet contrast to the bench’s restraint. Together they form a still point around which the collection moves: craft as the foundation, the object as witness.

Where Morris celebrated the decorative as a political act and the Shakers reduced form to its most essential, this room holds both positions without resolving the tension between them. The brick wall behind opens to the right through a single arch, leading the eye and eventually the models toward the central wing.

If the two preceding rooms organise perception through interruption, the right wing suspends it. For the first time in the journey, nothing interferes between the spectator and the far wall. The brick structure reads in its entirety, symmetrical, with no blind arches to block the view and no elements to redirect the eye. The space offers itself whole from the threshold.

This clarity is not neutrality. It is the result of a process. The visitor arrives here having passed through the unmediated materiality of the left wing and the deliberate ambiguity of the central room. What in another context would simply be an empty space here carries the weight of everything that came before.

At the centre of the room, placed directly on the floor, three Shaker oval boxes of different sizes and colours are stacked: ochre at the base, slate blue in the middle, chestnut at the top. These are objects produced by Shaker communities from the late eighteenth century onwards, made from maple and pine with the characteristic swallowtail joints that secure the layers without the use of nails.²⁶

Their form is the direct result of their function: for the Shakers, work was an act of devotion, and that conviction is legible in the construction of every object they made.²⁷ There is no decorative gesture in them that is not a consequence of how they are built.

Placed directly on the floor, with no bench or table to elevate them, the boxes are not presented as display objects but as presences. Their scale, small in relation to the space that surrounds them, does not make them insignificant but precise. The entire room converges towards them without anything forcing it to do so.

The journey ends here. Not with a complex image, not with an element that demands to be decoded, but with three boxes stacked on a tiled floor. After the friction and the doubt, the room proposes something different: the sufficiency of the well-made object. As in Shaker practice, where form does not precede function but emerges from it, what is seen is exactly what is there.