Jonathan Anderson: Young designers are driving sustainable fashion

Young generations are pushing the pace when it comes to sustainability in luxury fashion, said Jonathan Anderson, the founder and creative director of LVMH-owned luxury label JW Anderson.

Speaking on Tuesday at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen, Anderson said it is “exciting” to work with young designers who are focusing heavily on sustainability in their collections. “I go into my office and I realise I need to up my game,” he said.

“In a weird way, I wish when I was at school this was a thing," Anderson said, referring to sustainability playing such a central role, “because I'm now learning it in a kind of backwards way”.

Anderson pointed to the LVMH Prize as an example of the extent to which sustainability is baked into the design process of the future generation of fashion talents, with conscious production methods consistently taking a central theme at the coveted competition.

When Anderson first joined LVMH as the creative director of Loewe in 2013, the topic of sustainability was rarely spoken about during designer interviews, he said. “Now, every single designer that comes to interview is asking these questions - and I think that shows huge progress,” he said.

Sustainability is about being open to new ideas

In 2019, Anderson launched the Eye/Loewe/Nature collection, which he described as a “sort of laboratory” that experiments with more sustainable processes in design and production such as recycling and upcycling.

“When I was at university, we were never taught to think about sustainability in that way,” Anderson said. “It’s been amazing to be able to work on projects like this. I've been at Loewe for 10 years and I see through that trajectory how much has changed and how fast it changes.”

Ultimately, sustainability is about being agile and open to new ideas, according to Anderson. It’s an “exciting” process of “looking at all these aspects of creativity and finding solutions”.

“And not all [of those solutions] will be perfect, but at least you’re asking the questions which were never asked before.”

The Global Fashion Summit is taking place in Copenhagen from June 27 and 28. Keep an eye out for more coverage from FashionUnited.