[Photographs by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller, for The New York Times. (Left) JW Anderson windowpane wrap cape, $2,050, circular paneled jersey turtleneck, $290, wide-legged wool gabardine trousers, $950, wide-waist belt, $350, and sandals with tulle ties, price on request. (Right) Loewe pearl sweater, price on request.]

In her article for The New York Times Style Magazine, Nancy Hass says that the works of Loewe director and founder of JW Anderson, Jonathan Anderson, are “collections of clothes and accessories that possess both a couture level of craftsmanship and a distinctly raw, handmade energy.”  Though the fashion is elevated, the roots are deep in the simple yet profound heritage of handicraft. Hass writes:

“Both JW Anderson and Loewe have become his mad-scientist experiments in returning traditional handiwork to high fashion. It has proved to be a prophetic but provocative notion, partly because craft has always had an uneasy place in the world of fashion. Every now and then, a designer cultivates the genuinely homespun — Natalie Chanin, who in the early 2000s launched the sustainable American line Alabama Chanin, with its fine beading and embroidery on T-shirt cotton and denim made by local women in Florence, Ala., comes to mind.”

By utilizing organic fabrics, lush treatments, and artisan hand-sewing in garments that are designed and crafted to last generations, the work of Alabama Chanin are, as Anderson said of his own pieces, “both incredibly simple and incredibly intricate. [They were] made to be used but also amaze.”

[Photographs by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Suzanne Koller, for The New York Times. (Left) Jonathan Anderson, photographed in his London Townhouse. (Right) The designer’s collection of tea bowls by the English artist Ewen Henderson.]

Read and share Nancy Hass’s article “The Man Turning European Fashion Into Something Raw and Real.”

P.S.: Shop our new Collection here.