With our creative, fashion minds wrapped around one word for the last three years — ‘surreal’ — Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe for a decade, finally agreed with AOC that it’s time to bust out of the creative prison of everything is either ‘surreal’ or not ‘surreal’. Our binary thinking approach is beginning to bite us in our fashionable ‘derrières’.

At least we got rid of ‘brutalist’ architecture for a season or two, but now everything and everyone is ‘iconic’. Fashion and creative life are a much more expansive, teeming with exciting new-discovery tableau.

Anderson seeks to draw attention to timely, complicated questions in fashion design — and they are not binary.

Talents Tang Wei and Taylor Russell are styled by Benjamin Bruno in Jonathan Anderson’s Fall 2023 Loewe Campaign, lensed by David Sims [IG]./ Makeup by Wong Chi Yee and Lucia Pieroni; hair by Lo Chu Sum & Duffy

Rather then saying, is it ‘surreal’ or ‘iconic’ this season, Anderson suggests that we not box ourselves in — especially when we’re being critics of runway trends on film or runway images. We haven’t actually seen or touched the clothes, we are writing about.

“How do you go out of a surrealist aspect to something which is more about how we see clothing now? I think it’s kind of like a type of reduction,” he said. “Wanting to refine, and refine.”

Anderson is playing with our own minds in a very digital world.

In his Fall 2023 presentation, Anderson employed much eye-trickery. As Vogue noted, what appeared to be ordinary cardigans were, in fact, adhesive printed paper. Those cardigans were stuck on the models’ skins, but online viewers couldn’t tell the difference. We only knew what they appeared to be.

With a decade under his belt, the designer is fascinated with seamlessly, molded jackets made from super-fine leather that was vacuum-formed. Do not call this ‘surreal’.

It’s a fantastic fabric innovation — leather that we’ve never seen before.

Only the top-tier luxury market can play with these new technologies that are very expensive. It’s not a philosophical quest driven by our obsession with some buzzword like ‘surreal’. It’s the refinement of these technologies for the luxury client.

It’s letting one’s imagination fly into what is possible — a historical concept of invention and refinement to invent again.

I mentioned last night that reading fashion press, I saw an obsession with the big shoulders at Saint Laurent. Yes, a jacket or two had large shoulders — and a painstakingly created fit line that was new and very modern.

To me the jackets were very fresh - they looked like hug-me pouf shoulders and not ‘don’t touch me’ NFL shoulder pads. Those jackets had carefully-controlled drape. I note that there are not in the first campaign release, which is sensual fluidity before all else.

Is it because I work on a large-screen super Mac and not an iPhone or small Macbook that these ‘big shoulder’ jackets didn’t look like retreads to me?

Jonathan Anderson notes that not only is he designing for a relatively small group who are seeing the collection live and perhaps in a pre or post-show meeting.

He is also designing for all of us who are seeing the show live and may never see the clothes in an actual store. Anderson wrote that his ‘ghost dresses’ were created to play with the minds of people like myself.

In the course of the designer’s passionate comments around the ‘eye trickery’ in his fall presentation, he also notes that even looking at the runway film or these campaign images on an iPhone vs a big monitor is a completely different experience.

“Printing a garment on a garment is not a new thing. But I was fascinated about the psychology of how we ultimately see things online. The blurry aspect in motion looks like a glitch,” he said. “It’s out of focus. Is it staged, or not staged? Is it the right color, is it photoshopped?”

Please don’t call it ‘duality’, Anderson pleaded. It’s the excitement of “classicism meeting something which is new.”

Sorry, but Anderson can’t distill all these gorgeous fabric and garment evolutions into a single word that confirms fashion genius status on all of us who use it.

We’re not all ‘icons’, no matter what my alma mater declares. Schiaparelli is and will surely remain ‘surreal’ to one degree or another, as part of its heritage DNA. But Jonathan Anderson of Loewe is done with the word ‘surreal’.