Jonathan Anderson, the designer who brought success, cool and viral fame to the Spanish label Loewe during his 11-year reign, has been announced as the new creative director of Christian Dior’s menswear collection. Taking over from Kim Jones, Anderson’s first show for the brand will take place in Paris in June.
While this is confirmation of news that fashion insiders were long aware of, it will definitely bring new buzz to Christian Dior. Anderson, now 40, has become something of a unicorn in the industry, a designer with boundless energy and ideas who is able to create distinctive and original designs but also sell clothes.
During his time at Loewe, sales grew from €230m in 2014 to €1.1bn in 2024, Vogue Business reported. Hits include the £2,550 puzzle bag, which became an “it” bag over the last decade, as well as a bag shaped like an heirloom tomato, an idea that can be traced back to a tweet with a picture of a tomato and the caption: “This tomato is so Loewe I can’t explain it.”
Anderson is adept at ideas that spread on social media, whether through Loewe or his own label, JW Anderson which he will keep. His pigeon bag, which launched in 2022, became a favourite online, and copies of the £890 bag can now be bought on Ali Express for £16.81.
His adverts for Loewe also often went viral – with unexpected stars including an 89-year-old Maggie Smith, the pink-haired soccer star Megan Rapinoe or a geeked-up Daniel Craig. His collaboration with Guinness last year no doubt contributed to the drink’s revival with gen Z.
The designer was born and brought up in Magherafelt in Northern Ireland, a town with fewer than 10,000 people. His father is Willie Anderson, who played rugby for Ireland, and then became a coach for the national team, while his mother was a secondary school teacher.
Initially, Jonathan was interested in acting and was part of the National Youth Music Theatre. He moved to Washington DC at the age of 18 to study at the Studio theatre. After he lost interest in acting, his father said he needed to pay back the money for the fees, so Anderson got a job at Dublin’s high-end department store Brown Thomas.
While he was there, he met Manuela Pavesi, an influential stylist and collaborator with Miuccia Prada. Pavesi gave the then-teenage Anderson a job merchandising at Prada stores – creating the windows and instore displays – and helped him discover fashion. Speaking to System magazine in 2020, he said “she was the catalyst; the person who made me … I fell in love with her character and the more I learned the more I became obsessed by the business.”
After studying menswear at London College of Fashion, he launched his label JW Anderson, initially just with menswear, in 2008, when he was 24. It quickly became a favourite on the London fashion week schedule, and he launched womenswear in 2010. Anderson was loved for designs that tended to play with gender, such as leather frilled shorts and strapless tops for men in 2013.
These designs, if provocative, were not designed to shock but to challenge. “If all I was trying to do was shock,” he told the Guardian in 2013, “I’d make it really shocking. It would be easy.”
If Anderson’s knack for getting people talking dates back to this period, so do his unabashed commercial instincts. This can be seen in his collaborations and work with brands. He produced a sellout collection for Topshop in 2012, and worked as creative director at the contemporary basics brand Sunspel from 2011 to 2014.
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This element of his working life remains, one that can sound dizzying to anyone with just the one job. As well as producing items for Loewe and JW Anderson priced at four figures, customers can buy JW Anderson designs – a £29.90 shirt or a £2.90 pair of socks – at Uniqlo. He creates twice-yearly collections for the high street store. In addition to these collaborations, Anderson has worked on costume design for two of Luca Guadagnino’s recent films, Challengers and Queer, and regularly dresses celebrities on the red carpet.
Anderson became creative director of Loewe in 2013, with its parent company LVMH taking a stake in his own label. At the time, the Spanish brand was respected in fashion but – despite the tenures of designers including Stuart Vevers – not at the forefront of culture. Anderson changed that with a year-long, in-depth overhaul – which took in everything from the branding to the door handles in stores. “All of these questions had to be asked, because ultimately, you need to make people forget what the brand looked like before, and get them to believe that the brand was always like this,” he told the Guardian in 2015.
The strategy worked – when it was announced that he was leaving the brand, Dazed declared: “Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe era will go down in fashion history,” rounding up all the memorable items of his tenure, from Rihanna’s Super Bowl pregnancy-revealing outfit in 2023 to balloon heels on the catwalk and collaborations with the Japanese animators Studio Ghibli.
While he does not have the luxury of a year-long primer this time, Dior will be hoping Anderson brings his magic to its menswear – and, potentially, its womenswear, a job that is seen as even more prestigious. Rumours abound that the designer will be announced there too eventually, with fashion insiders speculating that Maria Grazia Chiuri, its current creative director, will leave after her next show in September. With HSBC analysts judging the womenswear to be “a bit stale and repetitive” in January, Anderson – a man who thrives on a rebrand and a giant workload – overseeing both collections at Dior may be the answer.
