“Nouveau Chic” was the perfectly crisp term Jonathan Anderson coined for his eponymous collection. It garnered a vigorous nodding of heads backstage. Amongst all the confusion of the times we’re living in at the turn of the new decade, women’s fashion needs definitive signposts. This collection offered them with clarity, and variety—an answer to the complex desires and needs that sharp-eyed, sophisticated women factor into the business of getting dressed today.
Anderson said he’d been thinking about what it takes to enter a room. The ability to take up space with a strong silhouette is part of that—starting with the impression one can make with a coat. There were three iterations of huge trapeze shapes in donegal tweed, camel hair and black wool; blown-up classics with generous leather shawl collars that are guaranteed to grab social media attention. But alongside them were coats with Edwardian puffed shoulders and neat doubled-breasted torsos fluting into bubbled hemlines. And then, at wearable best, a game-keeper check single-breasted fit-and-flare midi coat with matching bootleg trousers.
It came with a puff of what Anderson called “antique celluloid” around the shoulders. It was part of a theme—nuanced, experimental—which played around the sleeves of a series of black dresses. In a strapless version, it fell like an angel-wing cape around the model’s arms.