In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.
Jonathan Anderson has never felt like a traditional fashion designer. His brain is simply too big; his curiosity is too strong to stay constrained to one medium. So it wasn’t surprising to hear that just days after showing the Dior Spring/Summer 2027 runway collection at Paris Fashion Week, he’s already sorted his follow-up show — and it has nothing to do with fashion.
“A Composition,” a new group art exhibition he’s curated at his JW Anderson flagship store for Frieze London starting October 15, confirms Anderson’s status as a cultural force on par with the likes of Miuccia Prada. (She also works between two fashion brands and has deep art-world ties.)
The show will feature a new series of 30 wind chimes by Cerith Wyn Evans made specifically for the brand, plus ceramics by Akiko Hirai, paintings by Mary Stephenson, and sculptures by Shawanda Corbett. It’s an interesting mix, but focusing on how their respective mediums meld would miss the point, which is that this isn’t just Anderson curating another exhibition (he’s done a handful) or even the first show at the JWA Pimlico space — it’s a power move.
Anderson helped launch the Loewe Craft Prize and holds the keys to one of fashion’s biggest luxury houses at Dior (and has done countless artist collabs between both brands). Yet the cultural capital of his name has developed a strength all its own, built on relationships that aren’t siloed to any one label.
Crucially, each of these artists has already staked out a spot in Anderson’s orbit: Stephenson modeled for the JW Anderson Resort Spring 2026 collection, and her paintings were hung in the Pimlico space for its 2025 opening; Wyn Evans did a series of lights for Loewe Lamps at Milan Design Week in 2024; Corbett did a series of limited edition JWA blankets in 2021; and Hirai’s pottery has been regularly displayed in JWA stores since 2020. The common thread isn’t a brand; it’s Jonathan Anderson.
The dividing line between creative fields like fashion and art has always been flimsy, but few modern figures have worked as hard to dismantle those boundaries as he has. A group show that feels more like a meetup of a few of his favorite artists — held in a shop that sells artisanal Welsh blankets and 19th-century French watering cans alongside twisted denim pants and poplin shirts — affirms it.
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