J.W. Anderson

Well, that was a surprise. Just when you thought you had Jonathan Anderson all figured out—proportion-fiddling, abstracter-than-thou, formalist extraordinaire—he goes ahead and throws a curveball. A few of them, actually. His latest collection was a no-holds-barred homage to the New Wave 1980s, and though Anderson has coughed up retro reference before, particularly in his pre-collections, this was his first outing where the reference was absolutely plain and at the collection's fore. This season also found Anderson de-abstracting in another way: As he explained after his show this afternoon, the mix-and-match looks on the catwalk were meant as a celebration of the way women actually use their clothes, slapping ensembles together from bits gathered from here and from there. He eschewed the esoteric, in other words, and focused on the humane.

And yet this was an unmistakably J.W. Anderson collection, impressive most of all for the ways the designer inserted his signatures into clothes that might otherwise have looked scavenged from a thrift shop bin. The materials here reflected his wonkiness about textiles—spray-paint-effect sweaters were a fuzzy three-wool jacquard, patent leather was buffed to high-gloss, metallics were a mix of snake chain, ribbed Lurex knit, and printed lamé. The stripy material found in Anderson's swishy high-neck tops were coolest of all, a cotton that, as he put it, had been simultaneously jacquarded and dévoré-ed. Beyond the materials, the Anderson voice read loud and clear in the sculptural elements here: The shapes were über-'80s, but exaggerated and embellished in ways that freshened up the decade's familiar muscular silhouettes.

And the mere fact that Anderson was looking to the early '80s for guidance may have been the most signature element of his in the collection: Just as seemingly everyone else has their attention fixed on the tailored 1970s, Anderson goes ahead and lobs a grenade at the trend. He was celebrating the individualism of personal style today, but he was manifesting his own stubborn individualism as well. As New Wave band Yaz put it in song: "Goodbye Seventies." For this designer, at least.