How Jonathan Anderson became the billion-pound king of London fashion

Anderson’s mother, Heather, was an English teacher. He is the eldest of three: he designed his sister Chloe’s wedding dress, and his brother, Thomas, who also played rugby, now works at Anderson’s eponymous label. Anderson credits his father with his drive; his mother with a calmer, more creative side. Though, struggling with dyslexia, he didn’t have much success at school, his eye for art was evident from a young age. His maternal grandfather was a textile designer who worked at a factory that, among other things, made camouflage for the British Army.

‘My grandfather was very taste-driven,’ he says, ‘and had a massive influence on me. Being around him, you acquired a kind of taste.’

This was the Northern Ireland of the Troubles, where you might walk down a high street in the morning that was rubble by the afternoon. The Andersons were not religious, but the prevailing atmosphere was significant nonetheless.

‘Growing up in Northern Ireland, you realise that anything is possible,’ he says. ‘You don’t take anything for granted… Ireland had a complicated relationship in the end with Britain; [the IRA] were blowing up parts of it in the ’80s. When you see that in your formative years, you realise that anything can disappear very quickly.’

Anderson’s early fashion education came from magazines and the discount shop TK Maxx, where the most outlandish designer items would often have the heaviest discounts. The family had a holiday home on Ibiza, where the young Anderson went on a successful quest to find Jean Paul Gaultier’s house. Trips to London, especially when Willie was coaching London Irish, were an opportunity to dip into the fashion wellspring.

‘The minute you’re surrounded by anything it becomes part of the wallpaper,’ he says. ‘It’s like Paris, which seems like one of the most romantic cities, but if you live here’ – Anderson splits his time between Paris and London – ‘you realise it’s not.’

Despite this burgeoning love for design, at first Anderson wanted to be an actor. He studied drama in Washington and auditioned for The Juilliard School in New York, but was rejected. Returning across the Atlantic, he took a job at the department store Brown Thomas in Dublin. He applied for a course at Central Saint Martins, the traditional alma mater of UK fashion aristocracy. He was rejected again. He was accepted for a place on a menswear course at the London College of Fashion, but had hardly started when Manuela Pavesi, then fashion coordinator at Prada, gave him a job helping her to dress the windows of the London store. His studies took a backseat while he immersed himself in the dark arts of selling.

‘Great shop windows should reflect the city they’re in,’ he says. ‘Manuela’s windows always had such a spontaneity to them. There was a chaos to it, and an irony. If shop windows get too corporate, they become very high-street.’ You get the sense there are few worse things to be, in Anderson’s book, than very high-street, but the early focus on merchandising served him well later on.

‘By working with Manuela I started to realise what the end goal was,’ he says. ‘Windows is the end part, the last push to get somebody to be convinced to buy something.’