Jonathan Anderson talks about the inspiration behind his second collaboration with Uniqlo

A navy puffer jacket, a plaid puffer jacket, a plaid backpack, two colours of scarf, some knitwear, a sweater...” Ahead of his own label’s show at London Fashion Week on Saturday, designer Jonathan Anderson is listing the items from his autumn/winter 2017 collection for Uniqlo that he spotted people wearing from a taxi window earlier that day.

We’re sitting in the opulent surroundings of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, where new pieces from his latest collaboration with the Japanese high street hero are being revealed to an intimate gathering of press over dinner. As with winter’s offering, it is firmly rooted in British culture, Brighton and the seaside in particular — so this is a fitting venue.

“When I first moved to London and I was at university, I used to always come to Brighton,” he says. “Brighton has all of it, you know; this building, the Victorian aspect, something that’s a bit weather-beaten.”

The Northern Ireland native has come a long way since his days at the London College of Fashion; in addition to the Uniqlo partnership and his own eponymous label which he launched in 2008, Anderson has been the creative director at the Spanish luxury house Loewe since 2013. His shows are two of the biggest highlights on the London and Paris fashion week schedules, with taste-setting ideas and avant-garde designs that have the fashion pack clamouring to sit front row.

As somewhat of a trailblazer and a champion of new talent, it was announced last week that the imagery for JW Anderson’s spring/summer 2018 campaign would be crowdsourced, calling for photography submissions via social media; its London shows will also become co-ed (combining men’s and womenswear into one collection). For a designer whose catwalk collections and ideas always err on the side of the artistic, I wonder whether he thinks that high street fashion can also be an art form.

“One hundred per cent,” he asserts. “It’s a creative output. It’s crafted. I sometimes have this weird fantasy that clothing is 2D and then humans go inside them and they become 3D. You need this person to go inside to go ‘poof!’ to make it come to life.”

Of course, unlike with catwalk collections, at Uniqlo it doesn’t matter whether those humans are a six-foot-something size 6 or not, and spotting his designs going about their everyday business on the street is a big part of the thrill.

“Someone sent me this amazing picture where there are two people in a park wearing the exact same puffer coat with the same backpack on bicycles. What is interesting is that Uniqlo can work for any colour type, any walk of life, any age — actually age is probably the most exciting thing of all because it’s one of those things that it affects us all. We can all relate to getting old, we can all relate to being young, and finding product that can tackle that is interesting.”

Teaming up with Uniqlo holds an additional attraction for Anderson since he habitually shops there himself. “I’m a superfan,” he gushes, “and I will continue wearing it for the rest of my life”. By his own admission, his personal aesthetic is more along the lines of the neutral basics offered by Uniqlo than anything he puts out on the catwalk.

“The windcheater is the most me product; I will probably have four of them. I liked this idea that you could roll it up in your back pocket. It’s that classic British 101 — it is going to rain at some point in the day. You need it.”

He speaks with this zeal and enthusiasm about pretty much every item we look at in the unisex collection, from the sun bleached stripes on jersey tops and skirts, to the reimagined Fifties-style denim, and a seersucker fabric which was developed from a tiny swatch of Forties fabric and reminds him of a Helmut Lang suit of his own.

Uniqlo is at the forefront of fabric development — who doesn’t own at least one piece of its fantastic HeatTech range? — a detail which is important to Anderson. “The great thing about Uniqlo is that we can actually make anything. That’s what I love — it’s amazing to say ‘can we make it?’ And they say ‘yes, we can. Ta-da! There it is!’”.

Anderson’s passion for being British shines through in this collection, and although he lives in Paris for much of the time it’s London he calls home. “What I really like about London is just being inside my house. As boring as that may sound! But I like being in a massive city and inside this tiny space.”

In addition to a current obsession with collecting flower bricks — a very particular kind of Dutch-inspired blue and white ceramics from the 17th century — he spends a lot of time just wandering the streets. “As much as I’m very busy, I probably have too much spare time. I love walking from my house into central to go to galleries and bookshops. I love going to auctions, to museums, just wandering around. I love that moment when you can’t do any more and you have to get a taxi back at seven o’clock in the evening. I like that about London, that there’s so much to see and there’s always something new.”