Childhood, Guinness and extravagance in JW Anderson's SS25

Last year, JW Anderson's invitation for his SS24 collection in London was a block of plastiline produced in his homeland, Northern Ireland. A playful and unusual object that gave birth to the shapes and textures of the collection that was about to debut, christening this « polly pocket » aesthetic that still defines the designer's style. For SS25, this time in Milan, volumes between comic and fairytale are pushed to the extreme, almost like a vision due to an excess of Guinness. The iconic Irish beer is indeed at the heart of a collaboration whose logo in beads on sweatshirts and sweaters - up to the dense foam of the stout, known for its consistency allowing figures to be drawn that do not disappear when drinking, inspires garments with rounded shapes reminiscent of the drink's « creamy head ». The collection takes us back to childhood again, but a certain typically Irish intoxication pushes the imagination beyond conventional volumes, adding a touch of wonder.

Bulky leather coats become spongy soft, worn over t-shirts bearing the slogan « Real Sleep » in a collection that seems to offer an escape from the turmoil of the real world. With humorous verve, Anderson plays on scale contrasts, moving from the infinitely small to the exaggeratedly large. The collection opens with quilted jackets of monumental proportions, before transforming into huge cashmere balls, repeated in exuberant triptychs. On the miniature side, Anderson evokes nostalgia by recreating Georgian row houses and bucolic cottages on his knits, adorned with inlaid doors and windows, like scenes from a fairy tale. The sweatshirts, almost architectural, seem capable of protecting from a fall. The coats, adorned with large colored silk structures, resemble inflated balloons, signifying a certain exhaustion in the face of the world's overload, in an inverted skirt reminiscent of a 19th-century bustle. And if it all gets too much, Anderson invites us to find refuge and comfort in the joyful iconography of a pint of Guinness, integrated into a capsule collection with extravagant images from a past advertising campaign.

Anderson admits in Vogue that there was no particular guiding thread in this show of « irrational clothes ». But from experience, we know that with the designer, we always navigate between thoughts and memories. And they are not lacking in this collection, which looks more like a collage of ideas from similar sources, but which juggles the boundaries between the real and the abstract, the miniature and the gigantic. Anderson celebrates Guinness by paying tribute to the clothing traditions of his homeland: the facades of typical houses become wool sweaters, the popular clothes with vests and gathered shirts transform into giant knits, and the waterproof jackets of northern fishermen are reinterpreted in ample versions, to the point of resembling capes. By playing with dimensions, Anderson makes us understand that this visual journey is not a hypnotic illusion, but a tangible reality. In exploring « the idea of permissiveness with clothes », Anderson asserts that what he does best is telling stories, and this collection is a striking proof of that.