Jonathan Anderson, of Magherafelt in Derry, is the new creative director of both men’s and women’s couture at Christian Dior, one of the world’s most prestigious fashion houses. His transition into the role will make him the first person since Dior himself to steer both couture lines simultaneously.
Anderson announced the promotion on his Instagram with an image of a small ladybird atop a bed of variously sized leather appliqué shamrocks. He had already been at the helm of the brand’s menswear output, and before that, creative director at Loewe (a Spanish luxury fashion house best known for its accessories), where his 11-year tenure was credited with completely resurrecting the brand as a commercial and critical success. In that period he oversaw garments that adorned Beyoncé on her momentous Renaissance tour (notably the famous “hands” bodysuit) and the red jumpsuit and breastplate that Rihanna wore to headline the half-time show at Super Bowl 2023 – a garment perfectly designed to allow the singer to reveal her second pregnancy at the end of the performance. You may not know Anderson, but you’ve likely seen his work in action. He also served as costume designer for recent Luca Guadagnino directed films, Queer and Challengers (both 2023). In addition to sales figures, it is Anderson’s loyalty from these pre-eminent icons of popular culture and art, and the critical acclaim that seems to follow his every move, that have cemented his status as a polymathic force in couture.
Anderson’s is not the typical fashion upbringing. He grew up on a farm in Derry and his father is Willie Anderson, capped 27 times for the Irish rugby team – his brother Thomas (TJ) played for Ulster and Connacht. Jonathan, eldest of three, was born six weeks before his dad’s first run-out for the national team. Father and son have spoken about parallels between sports and art, comparing the palpable nervous energy at Fashion Week to that in the dressingrooms of Lansdowne Road. Ditto for philosophies of captaincy and managing design teams – sycophants can’t help you steer a winning vision, in a global artistic campaign or on a muddy pitch.
Perhaps his English-teacher mother is a more obvious artistic influence. Jonathan sounds like a classic, ahead-of-the-curve teacher’s kid. His father said: “We were lucky in that we never had to tell them to go upstairs and study. They were all very driven to achieve. They get that from us, I think.” Anderson’s reflections on his upbringing made me think about fostering young people’s creative passions. Increasingly, it seems that the main appetite we should fight to instil in children is one for searching out things they care deeply about and within which they can immerse themselves. And – perhaps equally importantly – not taking it personally when our kids don’t love what we love.
Anderson talks inspiringly about scavenging the world for influences, mentioning visual references as diverse as the luminous, “chiffon-like” colour of Renaissance painter Pontormo’s The Deposition of the Cross (1528), the candid Fire Island photography of the PaJaMa collective, and Glyn Philpot’s portraiture. This passion for process seems an especially potent consideration in a world in which it’s hard to know how technology will impact the future of work. Philosophising about which of us will or won’t be “replaceable by AI” is risky speculation. We shouldn’t encourage people away from work towards which they are naturally inclined without very good reason.
The right combination of process and purpose is powerful, and the moral and artistic dignity of meaningful work can be transformative, especially in a world heaving with careers that lack it
I recently watched The Quilters on Netflix, a documentary highlighting a group of incarcerated men in a maximum-security Missouri prison who make personalised, often enormous, quilts for local foster children. The men receive a letter with specifics about colours and themes and set to work creating masterpieces. Far from the rarefied domain of haute couture, this passionate design team navigate satisfying clients’ wish lists within the constraints of quilting’s complex sewn geometry.
At one end, we have a world of high-end design that enjoys global cultural attention as well as boundless material resources. The other manages with donated fabric scraps and is anomalous amid the more typical forced labour options in US prisons. It is easier to be excited about the quilts’ ultimate recipients than buyers of fashion accessories that few can afford, which are bleak (albeit beautiful) tokens of a world unravelling under inequality.
The highly emotional responses to thank you letters in The Quilters are a reminder that this kind of work, involving skilful manifestations of care for underprivileged people, benefits everyone. The men’s descriptions of the redemptive power of craftwork resurfaced while I read interviews of Anderson discussing his artistic influences. The right combination of process and purpose is powerful, and the moral and artistic dignity of meaningful work can be transformative, especially in a world heaving with careers that lack it – so-called “bullshit jobs”, as David Graeber put it in 2018. Work that feels purposeful seems to be in shorter supply than ever.
As a knitter, I’m sensitive to the fact that some crafts are professionally unsustainable except in special cases. Every time I knit a cabled baby jumper for someone, and they say, “You could sell these!” I think, “It took 30 hours, what would I charge?!”. However, most creative practices are not like this.
For argument’s sake, even if we grant that artificial intelligence could replace a lot of creative work we do now, should we passively facilitate it? The replacement of people by technology involves individuals and institutions choosing systems over people for this work. Creative work, all the way from high-end fashion down, involves unique brain-to-hand activities that have historically been what we look to when we want to understand the lives of people in other times and places. We should be very slow to allow it to be outsourced to plunderous programmes scraping data from images – usually without permission – made by the very people it aspires to replace.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a postdoctoral researcher working at Trinity Research in Social Sciences in Trinity College Dublin
