Disobedient bodies by JW Anderson

On that day of May my shortest way to happiness lay on the route Chatsworth – Wakefield, where I hoped to visit the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery. Although Wakefield has a significant collection of modern British art, it wasn’t exactly art which made we go another 60 miles inward the UK province. But it was the creative talent of my favorite fashion designer J.W. Anderson, who did. For me Anderson is the figure of direct relevance and enormous inspiration. And I wasn’t much surprised that he (a 32-old boy actually) curated an exhibition called “Disobedient Bodies” in collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield. Yes, the guy is young and still alive, but he already did his first exhibition. Art always interacts with fashion, fashion always follows art, and both need each other. It’s interesting how some people think that it is only fashion (read luxury) which needs art to lend credibility and to use endless referencing, but I’m sure that art also needs communication and some respond from the individuals outside its world. As a famous art critic Kenneth Clark once said about his British countrymen: they are such a literary people that the best way of persuading them to take an interest in picture is to find that it has its origin in a poem”. Putting it in my own words, I can say that very often the best way to educate me about art is to explain it to me via fashion referencing. My real fascination with Prada for example started with the visiting of the Fondazione Prada in Venice. And I really like the idea of luxury brands to reach the customers in the same way some museums do. But back to Jonathan. There’ve always been fashion designers who are many things in their professional life, they not only design clothes, they collect art, they curate, they create visuals not only in fashion. It’s not a secret that playing a role of a visual artist or a curator is beneficial for one designer’s profile. But the key thing is you can’t be an average designer to promote yourself through interaction with art. In this case young Anderson reminds me on Helmut Lang in the 90s, who not only redefined silhouette as a fashion designer, but also collaborated with the artists Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois exploring abstract sculptural forms and limitations of the human body. At the end of the day it seems very organic that Helmut quitted fashion in 2005 and became an artist (I bet McQueen would do the same if he were alive), as well as there are several Lang’s items among the pieces Anderson picked up for the exhibition. I can see that nowadays everyone in fashion is referencing either Lang or Margiela. But for me all that referencing ends up in the average derivatives, and there are only a few designers like Anderson who are really obsessed with forms and shapes on a conceptual level. We live in postmodernism fashion – said Jonathan from the stage in 2015 receiving both the Men’s- and Womenswear designer of the Year from British Fashion Council. For him postmodernism means unavoidable referencing and cliches, and that is what I like about him most of all: he doesn’t showcase any anxiety about “who did what first”, he openly talks about designers and things that inspire him, but at the same time he is the most authentic and talented designer of our time. So, what did I actually see at the exhibition? – More than one hundred objects of art (ceramics, clothes, sculptures, dance) which were supposed to explore how the human form was reimagined in the last century. First of all there were pieces from designers, Jonathan personally likes: Dior, Helmut, Rei, Yves, Margiela, McQueen, Westwood, Rick, Yohji, Gaultier, all those creatives who were innovative in their approach to the human body. And it is quite stunning, how differently you start looking at the Jean Paul’s iconic cone-bra dress when it is echoing the Henry Moore’s Reclining figure in the same room. You literally see how the form is found through the material. Eventually I understood the logic behind the design of Johnathan: as Henry Moore didn’t try to make a woman from the stone, but tried to find a stone which suggests a woman or tried to understand what the stone “wanted” to be, in the same quite radical way Anderson is dealing with shape of his androgynous designs. Just imagine an artist looking on the material: a stone, wood, ceramic, a piece of fabric. And now imagine a disobedient human body, which has its physical characteristics. As a fashion designer you have to take a piece of fabric and produce something which is still wearable, even if you are able to take a human body out of it, it still has to be utilitarian. Unlike any sculptor or painter you can’t afford being too abstract in form, but it is this sense of the right fit, that can be defined only in abstract terms or feel it looking at items by J W Anderson.