Video games and surrealism in JW Anderson's SS23 collection When common objects become out-of-the ordinary clothes

The SS23 collection that Jonathan Anderson presented yesterday in London, in an old-fashioned arcade, possessed a surreal Alice in Wonderland vibe: clothes and looks seemed like alienating abstractions of common objects, ironic reversals of a reality that continues to swap with the virtual and vice versa. The reference to our relationship with technology remained preponderant with tops made only of keyboard buttons and prints taken from stock photos used as wallpapers speak of the «nature filtered by digital ego» in a world where physical plane and metaverse interpenetrate with paradoxical outcomes, amidst alterations of identity, in a liminal space suspended between the two worlds that is symbolized by the arcade that becomes a metaphor for a technology «where to fall and dive, headlong» e in which «people trapped in their computers [...] explore other dimensions».

All these visual and semantic acrobatics were based on a strict compositional essentialism: a jumpsuit, a top, a skirt, a dress. Each look included more or less two or three items removed accessories and shoes-and thus even the most imaginative and original pieces were in themselves simple items but cleverly constructed by focusing on «the essential forms, the exaggerated details, the simple yet complex obviousness». Which brings balance and simplifies a collection that has almost nothing simple but whose abstract, playful and surreal message is strangely stark and succinct.