The PLAY'S THE THING

Jonathan Anderson celebrating a decade at the helm of Loewe this year has found a way to have serious fun with fashion.

- VÉRONIQUE HYLAND

It wasn’t until James Joyce left Ireland that he wrote Ulysses and Dubliners, classics that embed themselves in the topography of his island home. He did so, says Jonathan Anderson, “via not being there, but meticulously being there,” tracing Dublin’s streets like a palm reader delineating not the future, but the past. Sometimes, Anderson says, “you have to run away from something to appreciate it.”

Anderson himself grew up splitting time between Northern Ireland and Ibiza. “The great thing about an island is you want to get out,” he says. Having the Troubles as the backdrop to your childhood, “you realize you take everything for granted. Everything can be very fragile,” he recalls now, running a rope-braceleted wrist through his tousled dirty-blonde hair. At the same time, “It’s so beautiful. Everything is gray, so colors really pop. Whereas in Ibiza you’ve got blue skies, and everything becomes harmonious with each other.” In a Joycean turn of events, when Anderson decamped for London, he became freer to tell his own story. And storytelling, he says, is what “fashion ultimately is about.”

Anderson first drew acclaim for his line JW Anderson, which won him a British Fashion Council nod as an Emerging Talent–Ready to Wear, in 2012. The following year, he was tapped by LVMH to run the Spanish house of Loewe. A decade later, Anderson is a veteran by fashion standards. And like a writer operating at the height of his powers, he is creating more fanciful, relevant, and talked-about collections than ever.