It’s A Wonderful 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 palate. As he said in his preview: “Eyes Wide Shut is one of my favorite films, and I actually think it’s a great Christmas film.” It was, however, two viewings last summer that led to this collection. “I’ve never made anything about a film before,” said Anderson. “This is also the sexiest we’ve ever gone—as far as I can go.”
The result was a delightfully diverse design orgy spanning the prim to the perverse: both in menswear and women’s pre-fall, there was something for everyone to get into, whatever their predilection. Being an Anderson production, this ran deeper than a straightforward “I like that movie” collection. Stanley Kubrick died just before the film’s controversial 1999 release. Anderson contacted Christiane, Kubrick’s widow, who is aged 91 and still lives in Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, the house they shared. When the Kubricks wed, Anderson explained, Christiane had chosen to give up acting, however her husband continued to cast her, through love, by inserting her painting of their family life in his movies—including A Clockwork Orange (from which there is a painting currently exhibited in the window of the JWA Milan store) and Eyes Wide Shut.
These paintings were what spanned the triptych knit jersey dresses: other pieces featured a portrait of a family cat, a pot plant with a barcode still on its tub, and a car interior. Said Anderson: “I thought what was interesting is the psychology of this idea of bringing someone from the background to the foreground.”
This was about as literal as Anderson got. The collection contained neither Christmas trees nor masks—although Nicole Kidman was on the soundtrack, delivering the near-to-last line of dialogue—however a palpable spirit of twisted bourgeois eroticism ran through the darkened runway as fil rouge. Red, with all its implications, headlined in an oversized velvet evening jacket for men—a flowing parody of power “formality” reflected elsewhere in the ghillie tassel cork slides and the sliced arm bibbed evening shirts. The jacket’s womenswear counterpoint was a red velvet jumpsuit with one disordered, asymmetrically cut leg that seemed at the intersection of sleepwear and evening wear. A black T-shirt dress hemmed with a vector of scarlet, a red silk dress with trailing glove sleeves, and a high cut patent trench in green were other positively inflammatory looks.
Anderson’s own recurring predilection for shorts was satisfied afresh via some wonderful rib knit pieces—sometimes partnered with cardigans—from whose edges oozed suggestive, unsettlingly domestic whorls of satin. Dressing his female models in tights over panties gave a less figure-skating aspect to the trophy underwear trend in womenswear. Repeating the maneuver with his males, meanwhile—especially directly following a blue wrap coat worthy of Max Mara—was a masterful act of equal opportunism. This cerebral suite of fashion was also, let’s face it, a collection to enflame both its wearers and their significant onlookers to ready themselves for something very important that they need to do as soon as possible.