Juergen Teller a pin-up for JW Anderson’s S/S22 unfiltered playbook

Jonathan Anderson has derived creativity and innovation from the years spent in lockdown and the hiatus from physical fashion shows. His analogue franchise of presenting his collections as a “show in a box” sees its final iteration as a reinvention of a pin-up calendar. Shot by his long time friend, and JW Anderson collaborator, Juergen Teller, it is a showcase of an unfiltered reality, “humanity in the mundane” and includes the iconic photographer immortalising himself as a black-brief clad pin-up model. Anderson says of the shoot, “There’s no retouching, it’s a totally unfiltered reality.”

Juergen Teller has never been a simple fashion photographer, his works and aesthetics have provided movements, subcultures and fashion movements with imagery and icons. His inimitable unfiltered lens, coupled with Anderson’s eschewing of pandemic-fashion norms, is the perfect last step in the JW Anderson pandemic playbook of publicity. Having eschewed the mainstream releases’ usage of edited shoots, films and strobe-lit-runways — their most recent intimate collaboration is the quintessential extension of Anderson’s physical delivery of intricate boxes of photos, prints, posters and cut-outs in “memory” boxes to fashion editors; an organic attempt to mimic the physical and sensuous experience of experiencing a physical show, and all of the attributed stimuli.

Speaking to Hypebeast Magazine about his Show in a Box presentations in 2021, Anderson spoke about nostalgia and a physical movement away from digital memories, saying, “I liked this idea of creating something which felt a bit like going back to school … When I was younger, we used to get our pictures taken at school and you’d get these packs of photos and frames. I liked that concept of each of the photos being able to stand on their own. You could even put it on your mantelpiece.”