Inflating Cornishware’s blue and white stripes to impossibly large proportions was only the beginning of Jonathan Anderson’s disorientation of the “normal.” For his eponymous label’s Spring/Summer 2024 show in Milan, domestic motifs were reimagined and remade with the designer’s playful touch. Knitwear dominated the runway, a cogent homage to the domiciliary. The choice fabric was also an exercise in Anderson’s affinity for finding the avant-garde in the ordinary: stuffed strips of soft fabric curled across torsos, reminiscent of spiral staircase banisters and woven baskets; sweaters collaged rib, cable, moss, and popcorn stitches into technicolor tableaux; interlocking panels of a vest evoked an Escher staircase. Anderson’s collection is the house you grew up in, but all the furniture has been glued to the ceiling. 

Following last season’s graffitied dick motif, Anderson’s domestic fixation might seem tame. But to assume that would be to underestimate the designer’s knack for detecting humor and beauty in the mundane. With mop heads imagined as t-shirt panels, rugby jerseys tailored into elegantly rigid silhouettes, and balls of yarn elevated to a fabric unto themselves, the lexicon of images Anderson drew from is familiar—yet his creations were anything but. With his latest collection, the master of craft has once again proved that his irreverence is also his inventiveness.