Jonathan Anderson’s Confidence and Ambition

In today’s newsletter, Rebecca Mead with a deeply reported portrait of Jonathan Anderson, the creative director who just announced his departure from the luxury brand Loewe. And then, E. Tammy Kim looks at the DOGE cuts that could harm military servicemembers, in her latest installment of the Deep State Diaries. Plus:

What Will Jonathan Anderson Transform Next?

Rebecca Mead
A staff writer, Mead has contributed reporting and criticism to The New Yorker since 1997.

There are worse gigs than being sent to various European cities to look at interesting clothes being worn by beautiful people. So when I was assigned to write a Profile of Jonathan Anderson, whose departure from Loewe as its creative director was officially announced yesterday, I was happy to take it on. I write only occasionally about fashion, and am always amused by the drama and performance of it all, as well as by the seriousness with which its practitioners and followers observe its rituals.

Anderson draws an especially fanatical crowd, and last September, in Paris, it was easy to tell which of the riders on the Metro to the Château de Vincennes were heading that way for what would turn out to be his last runway show for Loewe—distinctively proportioned pants (baggy, barrel-legged) and jackets (short, puffy) were a dead giveaway. Many among this crowd didn’t have a ticket to the show but were going there to watch the arrival of the celebrities who did: Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Jeff Goldblum, Josh O’Connor, Taylor Russell. The atmosphere of such events always reminds me of being on a high-school field trip—everyone out of context, a bit giggly, maybe showing off, and definitely self-conscious about his or her outfit.

At Loewe, Anderson has made garments of surreal potency, contrived to go viral. This dress features 3-D-printed “balloons.”Photographs by Nwaka Okparaeke for The New Yorker

The designer doesn’t dress the way his acolytes do, of course. When we met, a couple of months after the show, at the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, Anderson was wearing ordinary jeans and an ordinary sweater. (He favors Levi’s and shops at Uniqlo for basics. Hooray! So do I.) “There’s nothing better than when you see people who wear fashion, or clothing, and can pull it off,” he told me. “I love watching people wear clothing that I’m, like, ‘I wish I could do that,’ or ‘I wish I could have the confidence or the physicality to do that.’ ” As we walked around the galleries, he reflected on confidence and ambition—both of which he has in spades, despite his relatively conservative personal-wardrobe choices.

Anderson wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk directly about what had been a fashion-world preoccupation: whether he was about to leave Loewe and take over at Dior. But put an artist in front of some art and what he has to say will tell you something about where his head is at, which, in Anderson’s case, means figuring out what we want clothes to do for us—and what he is going to do about that next.

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E. Tammy Kim

Illustration by Chris W. Kim

Killing the Military’s Consumer Watchdog

“RIP CFPB,” Elon Musk wrote on X in early February, referring to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which monitors predatory behavior by banks, payday lenders, and debt collectors—and which the Trump Administration is trying to shut down. In her latest column, E. Tammy Kim speaks to an employee of the agency who works to protect members of the military—“a population that’s particularly vulnerable”—as he navigates the confusing stop-and-start of the Administration’s cuts. Read the column »

This is the third installment in E. Tammy Kim’s limited series on the effects of DOGE’s attack on the federal workforce.

The Briefing Room

A group photo of the L.A. Eight, on June 27, 1987.Photograph by Rick Meyer / UCLA Library Special Collections / © Regents of the University of California