Portraits by Annie Leibovitz. Fashion Photographs by Stef Mitchell.
The light outside is pale and fading when, late one Friday afternoon, on a quiet street in Paris, Jonathan Anderson settles at a large table in his office to sift the pieces of the future. “What have we got to go through?” he asks.
With an air of surgical focus, his design director, Alberto Dalla Colletta, runs through the day’s couture decision points, then turns to urgencies in women’s ready-to-wear. “This is that skirt we repaired,” he says, riffling through a sheaf of papers. “It’s becoming more of a thing, which I thought was fun.”
“The back is nice,” Anderson says briskly, and then nods for the next item. Tall and relentless, with a flare of auburn hair and a tumbling Irish baritone of a voice, Anderson, at 41, is the new holder of one of the most powerful jobs in fashion: the creative directorship of Dior. When his appointment was announced last year, it was greeted, across the industry, with a shimmer of excitement. He was finishing 11 years at Loewe, during which he energized the field with a style of creative eclecticism that reached across fashion history and his own scattered interests to bring a crisp new allure to the market. And he did it, remarkably, while leading his own London-based brand, JW Anderson, which is now 18 years old. His couture debut, in February, was a springtime explosion of flowerlike volume that drew on the wide technical range of Dior’s expertise.
“ He can just go in any kind of direction—I don’t think of his designs as looking like one thing,” says Jennifer Lawrence, among the first to wear Anderson’s Dior dresses on the red carpet. “Normally you get maybe three sketches that are all in the same universe. With Jonathan, it looks like 25 different designers sending me 25 different options. His range constantly amazes me.”
Dalla Colletta moves on to the next thing, vaguely apologetic. “The colors didn’t come out major, in my opinion. The brown is a bit—”
“Do you know what could be quite good, actually, is trying one where you have brown with gold,” Anderson offers, undeterred.
“Oh, whoa. Okay.”
“Could be weird,” Anderson says, and turns his head to one side.
On the mantel of a fireplace at the far end of the office is a bag emblazoned with the words “Ulysses by James Joyce”—part of the book-cover bag series that Anderson created—and his desk is set with a manual typewriter and candles in the shape of fruit. Eight wheeled panel boards, randomly arranged throughout the center of the room, are tacked with images of an advertising campaign in progress. A mannequin is hung with marked-up calico toile, and two clothing racks encircle the table. The excitement of Anderson’s appointment came, in part, from its high-wire stakes: He is the first designer at the house since Christian Dior himself to lead all fashion lines—women’s, men’s, and couture, including bags and shoes: 10 heavily freighted collections a year at what is now among the largest couture houses in Paris. Meetings are contrapuntal, and they move at breakneck pace.
“Then this was for the other reference you gave us,” Dalla Colletta says. “We’re going to try to do the jacquard by cutting all the fringes like that.”
Anderson yanks a hand through his hair and glares at the page. His working manner is generally that of a man outside the surgery of a village hospital, waiting for a doctor to appear with news. At his left elbow is, as usual, an outlay of personal effects, as if he has emptied a bag onto the table: an iPhone, a coffee cup, a bottle of Evian, a case with earbuds, a box of Tic Tacs, a box of cigarettes, a small tape measure, and a bright green zippered coin pouch that says “Dumb as a Dream”—a Loewe collaboration with the artist Richard Hawkins.