The Greats

Jonathan Anderson

Florence Welch

Lorna Simpson

Theaster Gates

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T Magazine Florence! Lorna! Jonathan! Theaster!

In our 2024 Greats issue, T celebrates four talents across music, art and fashion who, through patience and perseverance, have transformed the culture.

Read more about the making of the issue  

The Greats

By The New York Times

Oct. 17, 2024

The musician FLORENCE WELCH wears a Balenciaga dress, price on request, balenciaga.com; and her own shawl. Photographs by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid. Hair by Anthony Turner at Jolly Collective. Makeup by Thom Walker at Art + Commerce. Set Design by Afra Zamara at Second Name. The artist LORNA SIMPSON wears her own clothes. Portrait by Ming Smith. The fashion designer JONATHAN ANDERSON wears his own clothes. Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Hair by Gary Gill at Streeters. Makeup by Yadim at Art Partner. The artist THEASTER GATES wears his own clothes. Portrait by Jon Henry.

What does it take to be a great artist? A sense of stubbornness, a singularity of vision, the willingness to be misunderstood.

But perhaps most of all, it requires patience. All four of this year’s Greats — the artists Theaster Gates and Lorna Simpson, the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and the musician Florence Welch — found early success according to one metric or another. But it wasn’t until later, sometimes years later, that their work started not just being seen or heard or worn but understood. Our impulse is always to view new talent in relation to their predecessors and forebears — that’s the way art history works. But critics (and audiences) can be slow to admit when something is actually sui generis.

Sometimes this is because of age-old reasons: sexism and racism. Simpson, whose work spans many genres, recalls presenting her 1985 graduate-school project to the thesis board — “Gestures and Reenactments,” six photographs of an unnamed Black male model paired with her now-signature gnomic pronouncements — and being greeted with silence. They didn’t fail her but, she says, “It taught me I just have to persevere with my own agenda, and I don’t need to be in conversation.” Or look at Welch, whose first, transformative album with her band Florence and the Machine, “Lungs” (2009), confounded many critics, who, the novelist Lauren Groff writes in her profile of the singer-songwriter, “struggled to place her,” comparing her to other artists whose sounds didn’t really resemble hers but who were, after all, women.

But sometimes the artist stands alone because what they’re doing has no modern or popular precedent. Think of Gates: a truly uncategorizable artist who early in his career was an arts administrator at the University of Chicago and whose work now comprises real estate, performance, sculpture and, most passionately, ceramics. Or consider Anderson, whose restless curiosity makes us rethink what clothes are — nothing so simple or straightforward as sexy or wearable, his fashion challenges the point of fashion itself. Both found acclaim but, years into their respective careers, they’re still having to explain and defend what it is they do (and don’t do).

As an artist, it’s easy to say you don’t care about being understood. Believing that, though — living it — is quite another matter. These artists prove that, understood or not, the essential thing is to stay one’s own course — for as long as it takes. — Hanya Yanagihara

Jonathan Anderson, the creative director of Loewe and founder of his own brand, JW Anderson, photographed in Madrid on July 18, 2024.

Johnny Dufort

JONATHAN!

JONATHAN!

No other fashion designer today blurs the lines between the avant-garde and the commercial as imaginatively, or ruthlessly, as Jonathan Anderson, the creative director of Loewe.

By Nick Haramis

Oct. 17, 2024

JONATHAN ANDERSON WAS on an Italian movie set when he started to question everything. It was the spring of 2023, and the fashion designer was watching a playback on a monitor at Cinecittà, the film studio on the outskirts of Rome where he and the director Luca Guadagnino had been working on an adaptation of “Queer,” the autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs, written in the 1950s but published three decades later. Anderson, the Northern Irish creative director of Loewe and the founder of his own clothing line, JW Anderson, was overseeing the costumes. The two friends had worked together before on Guadagnino’s “Challengers” (2024), about a love triangle set in the world of competitive tennis, but their second feature collaboration, which follows a gay American expat, played by Daniel Craig, from midcentury Mexico City into the Ecuadorean jungle on a search for ayahuasca, was more ambitious, requiring period clothing for hundreds of actors and extras. As they reviewed the footage, Anderson, who had stepped into the frame to fix something on Craig’s costume, realized that he’d been captured onscreen. What he saw disturbed him. The prodigy with tousled blond hair who’d started his brand in 2008 at age 23 had been replaced by a man on the verge of middle age. But it wasn’t just that he looked somewhat disheveled: Anderson had been so busy working that he’d lost track of time. “I was like, who is that person?” he recalls thinking. “And what have I done in the last 10 years?”

On a crisp morning this past February, Anderson is recounting the experience in his townhouse in the East London borough of Hackney. Although he’s warm and self-mocking, he gives the impression that he’s never not at least a little on edge. “When you’re working all the time, you end up being addicted to the next show,” he says. “You’re so busy outdoing yourself that you don’t realize what you’ve done.” The early light cuts across a Le Corbusier stool, a white linen sofa by Axel Vervoordt and a pair of Georgian-style yellow armchairs in the living room. “You’re trying to be a normal person,” he adds. “And people are expecting you to be happy all the time and have an idea. But sometimes you just don’t.”

Anderson’s restlessness seems particularly intense right now, perhaps because it’s the year he turns 40, or because, despite having more than a few fears, the thing that scares him most is feeling truly seen. “I’m more of a voyeur,” he says. “I’ve never wanted to be like, ‘Here I am!’” And yet, for the past couple of years, it’s been difficult to avoid hearing his name or Loewe’s, which, until quite recently, most people probably couldn’t pronounce. (In 2018, the brand released a video of models struggling to get it right; it’s “Lo-WEH-vay,” the actor and filmmaker Dan Levy tells his co-star Aubrey Plaza in a recent promotional short.) In February of last year, Anderson was in a motel in the Arizona desert dressing Rihanna for her Super Bowl halftime show. The performer, who used the occasion to announce her second pregnancy, wore a red Loewe boiler suit and leather breastplate. A few months later, Beyoncé kicked off her Renaissance World Tour in a bespoke Loewe bodysuit embellished with strategically placed sequined hands. And this past spring, the “Challengers” press tour felt like one long fashion show, with all three lead actors — Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor and Zendaya — wearing Loewe outfits, including, in Zendaya’s case, shoes made from 3-D-printed tennis balls. “Actors are strange people in a good way,” says Anderson, who once trained to be one himself. “They’re like vessels. You can pour in whatever you want.”

The same might be said of his clothes. If some designers have become famous for introducing a new silhouette or landing on a signature look and then finding countless ways to reiterate it, Anderson has a reputation for being more mercurial. With each collection, he’s either adding a new layer to an existing idea (a mesh slip dress with a balloon motif one season; shoes made of real balloons the next) or rejecting it outright. His take on fashion isn’t exactly theatrical — some of the garments can be quite subtle — but his clothes tend to come with an element of performance. As the actress Greta Lee, who has appeared in multiple Loewe campaigns, says, Anderson’s creations have a way of activating “an elevated version of your essence.”

Two days from now, he’ll present his fall 2024 JW Anderson women’s collection at a gymnasium in London’s Marylebone neighborhood. “The show we’re working on is very British woman in suburbia,” says Anderson, who’s in the process of rejecting his louder recent offerings and the attention they received. “When it gets too much, my natural reaction is to go for a silent year.” As he sets down a pot of coffee on an 18th-century oak dining table in his kitchen, he makes a face that reappears, not infrequently, whenever he’s feeling agitated: a look of dread cut with a smile, a sort of breaking of the fourth wall that indulges his neuroses while also attempting to undermine them.

In conversation, Anderson can be an exuberant and compelling catastrophizer, and the more time one spends observing him, the more one starts to feel that his own relationship to fashion might be read as a kind of performance, too: At the end of his runway shows, when he emerges to take a bow, it’s always with his head down and shoulders slumped, almost as if he’s been forced into receiving applause. Designers, he once told me, are “kind of biblically hated,” and his view of the entire industry can seem equally bleak, even if he’s stating it for effect: The magazines that once held such sway are increasingly irrelevant; connoisseurship is dead; everything is generic. But rather than dispirit him, all of this only pushes him to fight harder. “I feel like we’re in this amazing moment where it’s going to be survival of the fittest,” he says. His voice has intensified into a high-pitched whisper, every word delivered as if it were part of a lurid blind item. He smiles again.

His ambition is clear: He’s determined to become the world’s best living fashion designer. What’s sometimes murkier is why he wants this. “I’m sure people would say that I’m arrogant,” he says. His goals, though, are simple and practical. “Bag sales need to get to here; the stores need to be like this. But these are just actions,” he says. “The big thing is, ‘What am I getting out of it creatively?’” Another question might be: How long can he keep it all up?

Loewe viscose circular-sleeve parka and lambskin bracelet ankle boots from the fall 2021 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Loewe two-layer mesh-and-knit top, cotton twill asymmetric pleated skirt with napa waistband and calf ankle-strap stiletto pumps from the fall 2016 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson silk A-line bonded top with flocked feather print, silk orbital layered skirt and cylinder-heel ballet shoes from the fall 2016 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Loewe draped dress in viscose jersey, $4,600, and boots in patent python calfskin, $4,250, from the fall 2024 collection, loewe.com.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson multibow top in silk and cotton and Cleo accordion skirt from the spring 2014 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Loewe half-cape silk dress with airbrushed squares, napa cross waistband trousers and patent leather train belt from the fall 2015 women’s collection and pumps from the fall 2016 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson windowpane check wrap cape with belt and high-waisted oversize trousers from the fall 2019 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson printed silk-Lurex scarf shirt from the fall 2015 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

IT’S BEEN JUST over a decade since Anderson was hired by LVMH to revive Loewe, a fashion house established in Madrid in 1846 as a leather-making collective. When the French conglomerate, which also has a stake in JW Anderson, fully acquired Loewe in 1996, clothing was responsible for about 10 percent of sales, which hovered around $200 million. For four years beginning in 1997, the American designer Narciso Rodriguez repositioned it as a ready-to-wear label, delivering simple, sellable clothes. Later, the British designer Stuart Vevers would shift the company’s focus back to handbags. So, unlike Saint Laurent or Gucci — where, some have speculated, Anderson might one day end up — Loewe was a bit of a blank slate. There wasn’t much of a heritage to adhere to, and Anderson started running it as if he were operating an experimental gallery, presenting customers with things they didn’t know they wanted and couldn’t quite understand. His debut women’s collection for the brand, held in an Isamu Noguchi-designed sculpture garden outside of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in June 2014, featured baggy leather pants in pale blue and bright yellow, macramé halter tops and latex T-shirts with a mallard motif. In the years since, he’s become an uncanny illusionist, producing trompe l’oeil garments and incorporating surprising materials — from makeup brushes to sink drain covers — that can feel almost like sleights of hand or, as one critic put it, “decidedly normal things made abnormal.” At his spring 2016 women’s show, he sent models out in pants covered with shards of mirrored glass; his spring 2023 women’s collection included dresses with bodices shaped like anthuriums. His interests, which are communicated through each garment, are varied. “He can discuss an inspiration trip to Naples — and, like, napkins — forever,” says Lee. “You could be talking about [the pop star] Charli XCX and then he’ll be like, ‘Look at this amazing Venetian artifact I found,’” says the actress and writer Ayo Edebiri. “The problem with the world,” Anderson says, “is that there are so many things to discover.”

A decade in, Anderson has transformed the formerly sleepy Spanish label into one of fashion’s noisiest and most innovative hype machines — and, frankly, its most meme-able — almost single-handedly reinvigorating red-carpet showmanship and shaping online fashion discourse more than maybe any other designer of his generation. Some of the clothes almost seem to project hostility toward the enterprise at hand — models have struggled to walk in molded Plasticine shorts; one floor-length dress, pierced at the neck with a giant sewing pin, felt more like a dare than an outfit — but there’s a playfulness to them, too. Plaza, known for her deadpan humor, says she felt “spiritually connected” to the “soft, buttery gown with an aggressive spear cutting through it” that she wore this past January for the 2023 Emmys.

According to Anderson, Loewe is now a roughly $2 billion business. (He wants to grow the company to $3 billion. It’s “really American of me,” he says.) In his ability to make clothes that are both avant-garde and commercial, Anderson has something in common with Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese designer of Comme des Garçons. Pieter Mulier, the Belgian creative director of the brand Alaïa, says that the two designers also share a sense of modesty. “The public doesn’t know much about Jonathan’s private life,” says Mulier, who lives near Anderson in Paris. “And I think that’s much more respectable than, let’s say, the older generation, where designers were nearly as big as the brands they worked for.” Describing her first impression of Anderson, Lee says, “This sounds kind of insulting, but he was so normal,” and compares his look (he’s almost always in jeans and a T-shirt) to that of a “hot fraternity brother” from a Midwestern college. “He’s not one of those reclusive artists who’s in his own cave.”

Levy, Anderson’s friend, says, “In an industry where test audiences and algorithms dictate a lot of what we do creatively, he’s somehow managed to work within the system but challenge it at the same time.” The Scottish stylist Joe McKenna, an early supporter of Anderson’s work, says, “The clothes weren’t repeating an idea, but you believed [they were] from the same hand as the previous collections you’d seen. A bit like Miuccia Prada, he’s constantly rummaging through his own language box to pull out new things.” Also like Prada, a hero and former employer of his, he’s more interested in exploring different materials and fabrication techniques than in creating another pretty dress. (Whether a garment is flattering is often beside the point — awkwardness, if not the goal, is encouraged.) “For some people, their drug is the idea of continuity,” he says. “That is not my drug. We have bags for that.”

But not everyone can pull off a stiletto with a cracked-egg heel (spring 2022) or a coat and shoes sprouting living grass (spring 2023), and Anderson also designs things for clients who aren’t quite so bold: The Loewe Puzzle, a handbag introduced in 2014 and made by jigsawing together geometric pieces of leather, has become the brand’s answer to the Hermès Birkin or Fendi Baguette; in 2022, a padded Loewe bomber jacket, shaped a bit like a leather-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss, sold out after Kendall Jenner posted a photo of herself wearing a green one. There are few designers who can exploit the internet so deftly: This past June, days after someone on social media described an heirloom tomato as being “so Loewe,” Anderson revealed a red leather Loewe handbag that looked much like the fruit in question. In 2022, the night before her album “Crash” came out, Charli XCX was photographed carrying the JW Anderson Bumper, a rectangular shoulder bag outlined with tubular padding; two months later, she became the face of the accessory. “The reason he’s able to attract all these different creative people,” she says, is because he’s one of them.

Designers have a long history of collaborating with artists, but what separates Anderson, who identifies as a snob, from some of his peers is that he’s genuinely curious about objects and other art forms, and deeply knowledgeable about the references he deploys in his work. A compulsive collector of art, he’s kept a portrait of a man sitting on a chair, by the mid-20th-century American photographer Peter Hujar, next to his bed in London; a large assortment of his other works — many of them by gay artists, including 1940s photographs of male nudes by George Platt Lynes and a 1960s Paul Thek wax-and-steel sculpture that resembles hunks of meat — will eventually reside at a house he’s been building in North London.

In 2016, Anderson, who’s also a trustee on the board of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, inaugurated the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, an annual award recognizing excellence among potters, textile artists and other makers. (The latest recipient was the Mexican-born ceramist Andrés Anza.) Over the years, he’s reinterpreted the work of other underappreciated or overlooked gay artists, including Joe Brainard, an informal member of the New York School in the 1960s, whose collages of pansies were printed on shirts and woven into cardigans for Loewe’s fall 2021 men’s collection; the homoerotic Finnish illustrator Tom of Finland, whose estate has partnered with JW Anderson on a few occasions; and the American artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, who died of complications from the disease in 1992 and whose work, including “Untitled (One Day This Kid … )” (1990-91), was repurposed for a clutch and a custom suit with ballooning sleeves worn by Levy at the 2021 Met Gala, which was dedicated that year to American fashion.

A cynical reading of Anderson’s work might accuse him of cultural vampirism: By positioning himself alongside history’s great embattled artists, he makes his own output feel all the more subversive. But there’s a delicateness to his approach; few designers, if any, care or know enough to challenge the artists they’re working with to try something new. The 82-year-old American artist Lynda Benglis, famous for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures — and whose massive fountains dominated the set of the spring 2024 Loewe men’s show — ended up designing jewelry for the brand. The Los Angeles-based artist Richard Hawkins, 63, whose collages of young heartthrobs, often either bloodied or sexualized, adorned sweatpants, beaded leather bags and knitted tunics for Loewe’s fall 2024 men’s collection, was skeptical when he was asked to collaborate. His concern, he says, was that his work would be reduced to “coffee cups and mouse pads.” Instead, Anderson added another dimension to Hawkins’s pinup universe, inviting the artist to create video works for the show featuring actors such as Jamie Dornan and Manu Rios, who sat nearby in the front row. He and Anderson included at least one actor with an OnlyFans page, but Hawkins says he was told to avoid depictions of masturbation. “I think Jonathan pushes [LVMH] as far as they’ll go when it comes to sexuality and queerness.”

A spring 2016 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2018 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2018 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2019 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2022 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2022 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2022 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2023 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2023 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2023 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2024 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2024 look from Loewe.

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TWO WEEKS LATER, I arrive at the Loewe offices in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement. When we last met, in London before the fall 2024 JW Anderson show — which ended up telegraphing an uneasy vision of English nostalgia, with models, some of them in curly gray wigs, wearing stodgy underwear and minidresses made from skeins of knitting wool — Anderson was edgy but focused, maybe even a little cocky. Now, three days after his fall 2024 women’s show for Loewe, he seems ready to murder someone.

“After a show, you don’t want to be near me,” he warns, smoking next to an open window on a cloudy afternoon in March. The Loewe collection, which offered a quirky take on aristocratic style with morning coats embroidered with tiny caviar beads and a crepe jersey shift dress with a blurry tartan motif, had been a success. (One of the three fashion critics whom he pays much attention to called the show “great” and “inspiring.”) But he’s standing next to his antique wooden desk — uncluttered except for a white vase of Creamsicle-hued buttercups and a mug with a drawing on it of a five-man orgy — trying not to explode. Before the pandemic, Anderson would fly to Miami or Argentina after his final show of the season; this year, he stayed in Paris with his boyfriend, the Catalan artist Pol Anglada, 33, with whom he frequently collaborates, succumbing to what he describes as nonverbal “death spirals.” That some of his fellow designers had gotten similar praise for work that Anderson sees as inferior to his — “You can’t just fake a formula”; “It’s the same product”; “It looked like Neiman Marcus” — infuriates him, as if the approval is meaningless when it’s not only his to receive.

As energized as he is by winning, Anderson feels like there’s no one to outdo. “I’m looking out there and there’s nothing,” he says. When that happens, he creates his own challenges. With “Queer,” for example, he decided that the cast would wear almost exclusively vintage clothing from the 1940s and ’50s. (“Down to my boxer briefs,” says the actor Drew Starkey, who plays Craig’s love interest. “It was nerve-racking,” says Craig. “If you spill coffee all over the suit, it’s ruined.”) One of the few times Anderson was jealous of someone else’s work — “It’s so amazing when you see a show and you’re like, ‘Damn it,’” he says — was in 2021, when Demna, the provocative creative director of Balenciaga, came out with his first couture collection. “I thought it was groundbreaking in terms of proportion and silhouette and nostalgia and non-nostalgia and angst,” he says, “and what couture could mean.”

Andrew Webster, an old friend of Anderson’s and the brand image director at JW Anderson, says, “Jonathan is an overworker, to the point where, even if we’re all fatigued and exhausted, he’s like, ‘I’ve got another idea.’” Unlike many members of his generation, Anderson doesn’t feel a compunction to find something nice to say about others’ efforts in the office. More than once, he’s interrupted a design meeting to tell the team that “everything’s a disaster”; he’s also been known to scrap social media posts and entire campaigns. The French stylist Benjamin Bruno, one of Anderson’s most trusted creative partners, admits that they’ve had some “extremely fiery and dramatic” disagreements over the years. “If you don’t argue,” says Bruno, “it means you don’t care.”

Each year, Anderson releases a total of eight runway collections for Loewe and JW Anderson, traveling between Paris and London. While it’s rare for a designer who runs a business the size of Loewe to still have their own label with a fully realized identity and fan base — Anthony Vaccarello suspended his brand after being hired at Saint Laurent in 2016; the late Virgil Abloh kept Off-White going following his Louis Vuitton appointment, but he didn’t design women’s wear there — Anderson treats JW Anderson as a kind of creative laboratory. If Loewe is eccentric and unpredictable, JW Anderson can feel downright volatile. The same year that a Loewe dress was structured into a car shape, BMX handlebars and broken skateboards were incorporated into JW Anderson tops and sweaters. “This is someone who has something quite bold to say,” Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta’s creative director, recalls thinking after attending one of Anderson’s shows. “If you really want to push the boundaries of clothing,” says Anderson, “you have to be a bit obsessive.”

IN A WAY, Anderson was raised to win. He was born in 1984 in Magherafelt, a small town in Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s to 1998 between the largely Protestant unionists, who wanted the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the mostly Roman Catholic nationalists, who wanted to secede. His mother, Heather, taught high school English. His father, Willie, was a star rugby player. (To this day, Webster, who describes the Anderson clan as “salt-of-the-earth people,” says, “It’s a very slow journey if you’re out with Willie because everyone wants to chat with him or buy him a drink.”) Before heading off to school, Anderson would check underneath the car for bombs. “I was so lucky that I grew up in that because [it makes] you realize you can lose everything in a heartbeat,” he says.

As a teenager, Anderson, who has an older brother, Thomas, now the operations director of JW Anderson, and a younger sister, Chloe, would trawl the racks of a local department store for dead-stock Jean Paul Gaultier. “In Ireland, the idea of standing out is a very unusual thing,” says Anderson, who nonetheless belongs to a long line of eccentrics who grew up there; like Oscar Wilde and Francis Bacon, who were antagonized or jailed for being gay, he’s learned how to wield his wit like a weapon. “Sometimes you can only reflect on how amazing a country is by getting out,” he says. “[James] Joyce had to leave Ireland to write about it.” At 18, Anderson relocated for a couple of years to Washington, D.C., to study performance at the Studio Acting Conservatory. Although his parents were supportive, he recalls their telling him, “Do what you want. Just don’t spend money you don’t have.”

Back in Northern Ireland, Anderson was kind of a loner, but in Dupont Circle, the gay neighborhood where he was living in the basement of a George Stumpf-style townhouse, he felt like everyone was his best friend. Instead of focusing on honing his craft, Anderson says, “it was literally Girl Gone Wild.” Within a week of being there, he’d started drinking and smoking. On one occasion, he went to a party in Baltimore for what he thought was one night; only afterward did he come to realize that three days had passed. “I’d gone from being this polite child to being a mental person,” he says.

A couple of years later, Anderson, who’d run out of money, returned to Ireland. He moved into a rental apartment in Dublin with Willie, who had been commuting from home to coach the Leinster rugby team. (“My dad was only there two days a week,” says Anderson with a smirk. And at that point, “I know exactly who I am.”) He got a job as a sales associate in the men’s wear department at a clothing store. It was an exciting time in men’s fashion: Tom Ford was doubling down on louche glamour for Gucci; Hedi Slimane had been proposing a new superskinny silhouette at Dior Homme. After work, Anderson would borrow outfits to wear clubbing and hope that no one accidentally burned them with a cigarette; one assumes that even if they had, he’d have put the garments back on the rack the next morning.

Eventually, when the luster of late nights had mostly worn off, he put together what he calls “a weird mood board of stuff” and applied to various universities. The one school that accepted him was London College of Fashion. Between classes, he worked as a visual merchandiser under Manuela Pavesi, Miuccia Prada’s close friend and trusted colleague, at Prada. Pavesi, who died in 2015, liked to wear pajamas with diamonds; knowing this, Anderson arrived for his interview in a vintage paisley dressing gown that he’d cut above the knee — “almost sort of slutty,” says Webster, who would become his manager at Prada — with tight Dior jeans underneath and a pair of Prada boots. While they were working on a window display one day, Webster recalls, Anderson disappeared; he later found the designer on the street, wearing a long coat covered with accessories that he’d designed, getting his picture taken for i-D magazine. “Jonathan was always a bit of an opportunist, really,” says Webster, later adding, “He has this ability to wrap you up into his orbit, and you’re not quite sure how you got there sometimes, but you’re in it.”

A spring 2024 look from JW Anderson.

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A fall 2024 look from JW Anderson.

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A spring 2012 look from JW Anderson.

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A spring 2023 look from JW Anderson.

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Anderson presented his graduate collection — which he describes as “woeful” and “the most ridiculous” — at a London nightclub in 2005; the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond, in an ermine stole and a headpiece made from netting and plastic flies, sang as the models came down the runway. (Anderson and Webster still play the recording of Bond and Kenny Mellman’s 2004 show at Carnegie Hall, “Kiki and Herb Will Die for You,” on a loop at the JW Anderson studio.) “Jonathan has the discernment to know that [the drag performer] Divine, although queer and much more contemporary than, say, [the 18th-century English painter Thomas] Gainsborough, is also, in their way, a masterpiece,” says Bond. “Knowing what’s extraordinary in many contexts — he’s really good at keying into that.” In his JW Anderson designs, some of which took inspiration from the early 20th-century Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin and William Gedney’s 1960s photographs of American teenagers, Anderson, who doesn’t sketch, laid the groundwork for what would become his pastiche approach. Even now, he says that the part of the process he loves most is “trying to get this weird thing — a color or a painting — out of my brain.” Seldom do the clothes come from something as straightforward as “shearling” or “sci-fi,” says Bruno, who has a background in art criticism and literature. “It’s a little more psychological than that.”

Not coincidentally, Anderson’s closest friends and collaborators — among them Bruno, Guadagnino and the rapper and fashion designer ASAP Rocky, who shares, he says, an “innate search for the peculiar” — are magpies and polymaths with strong but ever-changing visual identities. “He’s the right kind of crazy,” says Rocky, who created a JW Anderson capsule collection in 2016. “Anytime I’m hitting a brick wall, my guy is always like, ‘Maybe you should do this, maybe you should do that.’ And if he needs some advice, like, ‘Maybe you should think twice about inviting these corny-ass celebs to your next show,’ I’m there to voice that, too.” Bruno observes, “Jonathan trusts people, but only if he thinks they excel at what they’re doing.” As a leader, Anderson believes in “turning up the temperature just enough without breaking people,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to get people to go down your vision hole, and you’ve got to hold their hand to make sure they don’t waver.”

Things were much simpler all those years ago, when Anderson and Bruno would sit on the floor of Anderson’s London studio late at night, constructing what Bruno refers to as “ghosts of garments” with as many swatches of fabric as they could afford. Anderson was an early practitioner of genderless dressing — he has separate men’s and women’s lines, but the sense has always been that anyone should wear whatever they like — although that, too, was partly a practical decision. “We were just sharing the same patterns because he couldn’t afford to have the atelier make two,” says Webster. “His enthusiasm was so contagious and so naïve that you could only say yes to him,” Bruno says. “There was that kind of youthful hope that you have when you don’t know too much about life.” A decade into his time at Loewe, Anderson has learned some difficult lessons. “Nothing will ever be good enough,” he says, sounding just like an uncompromising artist. “It’s quite lonely working two jobs in two different countries every week for 10 years.” Still, the idea of giving up fashion seems just as impossible. It’s been the vehicle for all his creative explorations and collaborations. The product might be clothes; the point, though, is craft.

“FEEL IT, IT’S so hard,” says Josh O’Connor. In a suite at the Carlyle hotel on New York’s Upper East Side on the eve of the Met Gala this past May, the 34-year-old British actor is gesturing toward his custom Loewe white vest, which is covered with thousands of tiny caviar beads. But the 10 or so other people in the room, including Anderson, are distracted by his pants. Someone reports that Harry Lambert, O’Connor’s stylist, thinks his boots, which are also intricately beaded, with a floral motif, are too big, causing the pants to buckle at the ankles.

Lambert’s assistant enters the room holding a pair of plain black boots. “Is she kidding?” says Anderson — flowers must remain on the footwear somehow to adhere to the gala’s theme — redirecting his attention to O’Connor, who looks down at his legs with an exaggerated display of shame. “Let’s add more satin,” says a member of Anderson’s team, instructing another to widen the pant legs. But it’s Sunday night, they’re told; all the fabric stores are closed. “Then cut the top of the boot,” says Anderson with a measured impatience. “Well, no,” the employee says. It would create too big of a mess. “But we could try buttons?”

Except for the faint sound of a Dolly Parton song playing in the background, the room goes silent. It’s almost like watching the final set of a tennis match; neither opponent is prepared to yield. After what feels like forever, Anderson is the first to relent. “Buttons on the back,” he says with a shrug. “But make sure they’re not too round.” In the end, they agree to tighten the top of the boot with a string. Having averted a crisis, the crew starts packing up. It’s time for dinner and then a meeting with Lee, who will be wearing what Anderson describes as a “new type of structure” at tomorrow’s event — a white Loewe gown with floral appliqués and a neckline that extends upward and outward like an aerodynamic shield.

Anderson’s phone buzzes: His mother has been reminding him to send her some pictures from the party. The following week, he’ll be needed back in Paris to award the winner of the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Then he’ll unveil his latest collaboration with the running brand On and, shortly after that, he’ll present his new men’s wear collections for JW Anderson and Loewe. (The latter, titled A Radical Act of Restraint, is partly inspired by the work of Hujar and Thek.) In the coming months, he’ll release new Loewe campaigns starring Craig and Starkey — an unofficial kickoff to the “Queer” press tour, which could be even bigger than that for “Challengers.” As he goes through his schedule, a look of foreboding washes across his face. “You’re trying to be the son and the brother and the boyfriend, and you want to be a nice person,” says Anderson, who’s been doing breathing exercises when he gets stressed out. Then a big, boyish smile spreads across his face. “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

Model: Achol Ayor at Women Management. Hair by Gary Gill at Streeters. Makeup by Yadim at Art Partner using Valentino Beauty. Casting by Piergiorgio Del Moro at DM Casting. Production: Dobedo Represents. Local producer: Alana Company. Lighting tech: Alberto Gualtieri. Digital tech: Paola Ristoldo. Photo assistants: Dani Torres, Javier Roman. Hairstylist’s assistant: Rebecca Chang. Makeup assistant: Paloma Romo. Manicurist: Lucero Hurtado. Stylist’s assistants: Carla Bottari, Léo Boyère

The musician Florence Welch, photographed in London on July 5, 2024. Valentino dress, price on request, (212) 772-6969; and Welch’s own shawl and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

FLORENCE!

FLORENCE!

For nearly two decades, Florence Welch’s songs have offered a mythic view not only of pop music but of the glories and rages of being a female artist today.

By Lauren Groff

Oct. 17, 2024

O winged Lady,Like a birdYou scavenge the land.Like a charging stormYou charge,Like a roaring stormYou roar,You thunder in thunder,Snort in rampaging winds.Your feet are continually restless.Carrying your harp of sighs,You breathe out the music of mourning.

— from “Hymn to Inanna” by Enheduanna,translated from the Sumerian by Jane Hirshfield

PROPHETESS

ONE RISKS ANGERING the gods if one visits an oracle empty-handed. When I rang the Camberwell, South London, doorbell of Florence Welch, I held a tribute: “The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse” (2022), edited by Kaveh Akbar. It has a poem in it by Enheduanna, the first named poet in written historical records, a Sumerian princess and priestess who lived over 4,000 years ago. Ancient priestesses made their bodies a conduit for collective transcendence and, now that the old gods have abandoned us, we secular souls tend to find our collective transcendence at concerts. I’ve never seen Welch’s band, Florence and the Machine, perform live, only on YouTube, I’ve only heard her music streaming on repeat for years, and yet I often find myself carried out of my body by Welch’s enormous voice, her rage and power. There’s a sizzling line that starts with Enheduanna and runs all the way to Welch; they’re both performers of spiritual enormity who, through incantation of words, open a channel to vast mysteries.

What was I expecting? Impossibilities. A modern Madame Blavatsky all dressed in gauze, trembling shadows, eyes like dark whirlpools. Instead, on that July day, after her assistant let me in, Welch ran up from her garden a creature of flesh and blood, wearing a prim prairie dress with flowers speckled all over it. She is tall — somewhere near 5-foot-10 — ardent and elegant, with long red Pre-Raphaelite hair and the strong-boned face of a medieval saint. She has an incredible vigor to her speech, which is frequently crowded with images. She was talking even before coming into the room and spoke nonstop for hours, thoughtfully, in loops and circuits; I only interjected a few times. With other people, being monologued at like this might have been hellish, but Welch was a little goofy, quite funny — her laugh is deep, sudden, frequent and startlingly loud. On multiple occasions during our hours together, she paced in excitement. Once she sped off upstairs to fetch something, coming down the staircase with such fast footsteps that I was briefly afraid she’d tumble the rest of the way.

“Poems!” said Welch, flipping through the book I brought. “Great!” And then in a flash the book vanished, never to be seen again.

The singer on the Fleetwood Mac song that feels like riding a roller coaster.

Video by Jerome Monnot

In fairness, a single book would be easily lost among the stuffed bookshelves everywhere in her house. Welch is a real reader: She presides over a book club called Between Two Books and, in full disclosure, drew from my 2018 short story collection, “Florida,” when she was writing lyrics for the song “Florida!!!,” her 2024 collaboration with Taylor Swift. Her rooms replicate her maximalist, ecstatic music: high ceilings; many paintings and drawings; thick woolen Oriental rugs. Everything is layered and made of complex patterns, with William Morris prints and hand-marbled boxes in intense colors like peacock blue, goldenrod, raspberry sorbet.

Because the best way is often straight through, I tried to start our conversation with a question about mysticism, but she refused to be boxed in. She said, laughing, that she can read tarot, but she refused to define her spirituality, beyond repeating a quip of her mother, Evelyn Welch’s, a Renaissance expert and currently the vice chancellor of the University of Bristol, who called her daughter “an animist.” Maybe she meant that, to her daughter, things like sunlight and the ocean have a soul. Welch’s earliest spiritual moment came when she was an imaginative small child in Camberwell — where her parents lived, not far from her current house — just looking at beams of light coming through her bedroom window and feeling connected to something larger.

Chanel coat, price on request, (800) 550-0005; Valentino tights (worn underneath), $1,000; and Welch’s own dress, headband and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

This resistance to being pigeonholed would become a motif of our weekend: Welch wouldn’t say whom she was dating, only that he was a British guitarist, so that she wouldn’t be defined by her relationship (honestly, good for her!); she’s as vulnerable and honest as an incredibly famous human could possibly be: She gently but firmly resisted every time I tried to ask if she considered herself a pop star, or even what kind of music, actually, she would say she makes.

An aversion to definition is a great gift to an artist like Welch. It allows her to change and grow in public. But it’s an equal source of confusion to critics, who’ve struggled to place her since the first of her five albums, 2009’s “Lungs.” Of course, no artist is truly sui generis — art is built out of other art — but it’s odd that Welch so confounds critics with her mix of soul and goth-punk and ethereal power ballads, as well as the way that she presents herself as closer kin to 1960s rock goddesses than to the hyperproduced pop stars of today, that the aforementioned critics have only rarely likened her to the musicians who’ve been her truest influences. Among these are Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, whose live version of 1967’s “Try a Little Tenderness” Welch watched obsessively on YouTube in her early 20s when she was teaching herself how to perform, his energy building as the song goes until, she said, “he just tears the stage apart.”

Perhaps it’s enough to say that Welch has one of the most distinctively powerful voices in popular music. My friend the 33-year-old performer Ganavya Doraiswamy, who’s trained in both jazz and South Asian devotional singing — the only other person I’ve ever met with a voice whose power and distinctiveness could match Welch’s — said that she has uyir, Tamil for “life breath,” in her voice, which Doraiswamy was trained to listen for as the soul of vocal art. “It sounds sometimes like [she] is singing to herself and we get to listen in, like we are privy to someone singing to themselves, and they’re making the world less unbearable,” she said. Uyir seems to be something like Federico García Lorca’s duende, of which the great Spanish poet said in a 1933 lecture, “All that has dark sounds has duende. … The duende is a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.”

Uyir and duende may be lofty claims to make of a creator and performer of pop songs, but we have all been brainwashed to discount popular culture because of its very popularity, to believe that anything beloved by the masses is inherently lesser than esoteric art. This is a begging-the-question fallacy disproved all the time by great popular geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Toni Morrison, Lorca himself. The music of Florence and the Machine is ubiquitous — the night before I left Florida for London, some stranger covered 2008’s “Dog Days Are Over” at karaoke; the band’s 2011 “Shake It Out” was piped over the loudspeakers while I waited for my plane in the airport — and it is excellent. It’s absurd to have to insist that both popularity and excellence can coexist.

The music’s ubiquity is perhaps because of the fact that Florence and the Machine sound like nothing else out there in the musical landscape. It’s also, perhaps, because of the spooky vastness of Welch’s vision. Jack Antonoff, the 40-year-old producer and musician with whom Welch worked on her last album, 2022’s “Dance Fever,” said that she might be “literally clairvoyant.” And it’s true: Over and over, her songs predict the world to come. For instance, she wrote the lyrics for several of the album’s songs in 2019, including those of “Choreomania,” a song that Welch based on the 1518 dancing sickness in Strasbourg, where people actually danced until they died. The lyrics, with their frantic repetition of “Something’s coming, so out of breath” became prophetic when Covid-19 started spreading in 2020. “I didn’t know exactly what was coming,” Welch said, “but I knew it was dark.”

Welch may not call herself spiritual, but the thing she kept pulling herself away from speaking about is the thing at the center of her, which she sometimes calls “the monster,” sometimes “the beast.” She struggles to control it, but it seems to be the source of her creative energy. “The beast is very good when it’s onstage. The monster is really useful and full of rage and glory and power,” she said. But as soon as she began talking about the beast, she grew agitated; it felt wrong. Her spiritual sense “doesn’t feel like something I should advertise, because it’s really sacred,” she told me, and changed the topic once more.

When an oracle hears the voice of God and shares what she heard with others, she’s doing the same thing that an artist does while making art. Art is the alchemy by which grand abstractions become material. More than anything else, art requires the body of the artist, readied through time and practice and effort and some sort of innate spark, to become a sort of portal. Welch steps onstage and this portal is immediately available to her. To have the kind of transparency and vulnerability that allows such immediate access to the eternal, mysterious energy requires a great deal from the artist. Which is to say that art so powerful and immediate is demonic in its demands on the small, fleshly human that holds it.

Ferragamo dress, $5,000, ferragamo.com; Chanel hat, $4,500; and Welch’s own shawl.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

HARP OF SIGHS

HOW DO YOU build a modern priestess? Welch was born like ordinary humans in August 1986; she’s currently 38. Her father, Nick Welch, is a former British advertising executive and, as his daughter called him, “bohemian”; he was the one who introduced her to bands like the Ramones and the Smiths when she was little. Through her mother’s specialty in Renaissance history, as well as family visits to ancient churches, Welch was deeply impressed as a child by the glorious, gory, vermilion-and-gold Catholic imagery, with its St. Sebastians pierced by arrows and St. Agathas with breasts on platters. She loved Greek mythology, she loved history. But nightmares plagued even her daylight hours, and her only escape from the monsters, ghosts and demons that her anxiety summoned was into books. Her mother wanted her to be an academic, but Welch was a daydreamer and had difficulty at school, having dyslexia, dyspraxia and something close to dyscalculia, and she would sneak out of the classroom to sing in the school hallways where the acoustics were good.

Even when Welch was small, she had a Big Voice. She showed me a photo of herself as this little girl in a gingham dress, clutching a trophy for singing. The voice that “came out of that was oddly adult, sensual,” she said. Her mother was always yelling at her to shut up because she’d be singing at the top of her lungs while her mother was trying to write her books. It turns out that the Big Voice is as much a physiological gift as it is a vocation: Welch has a strong diaphragm, a large rib cage with huge lung capacity — which makes finding the vintage dresses that she loves tricky — as well as vocal cords of titanium. Once, fearing that she was losing her voice on tour, she went to see a specialist in Toronto, who looked down her throat only to respond, “Oh, yeah, your vocal cords are like a tank. You’re never gonna lose your voice,” she said. Music was the only thing she ever wanted to do, “Like, I will die if I don’t do it,” she said; singing was the companion that kept her from being alone with the terror. She longed to be in musical theater, but her mother was “the opposite of a stage mom,” Welch added dryly, and only reluctantly conceded to classical voice lessons. The singer trained in opera as a soprano and was only allowed to belt out a Disney song or show tune at the end of her lessons.

The first time she appeared onstage, it was in a school performance of the musical “Bugsy Malone” (1976), and she blew everyone out of the water. “From a really young age, probably like 10, we knew that she was going to be really famous,” said her sister, Grace, who is younger than Welch by three years. (They have a brother, as well, and three stepsiblings.) Welch was hurt after their parents divorced when she was 10, the couple suffering from “simmering, silent resentment but no fights,” she said. She developed an eating disorder when she was a young adolescent. Then, when she was 14, she had her first taste of vodka and felt herself rise, transcendent, out of her anxieties. “Somehow alcohol allowed me to expand, to have freedom from the constraints of the body,” she said. “The first time I had hard spirits, it felt spiritual. I felt warm, I felt free, I felt at peace. It freed me from the relentlessness of thoughts.”

All Welch wants is the grace that male performers get. The grace to age in public; the grace to put art at the center of one’s life and not have to be a woman or a mother first.

Suddenly she was a party girl, dancing barefoot over broken glass in nightclubs in ripped vintage dresses. She bartended for a year after secondary school and got deeper into the “doomed Dickensian pirate ship,” as she described it, that was the South London music scene in the early 2000s, when rebellious young artists lived in squats. Welch, like the rest of them, drank to excess and screamed onstage in punk bands. She entered Camberwell College of Arts but dropped out after one year. As a teenager, she also experimented with folk, country and hip-hop-influenced rock. She got her first gig by singing in a nightclub bathroom — more good acoustics — and called her band the Machine after the nickname of one of its long-term members, Isabella Summers, who was a close co-writer, producer and collaborator on the first few albums but hasn’t been involved in the most recent ones. While still a teenager, Welch co-wrote the first song — the punk-pop “Kiss With a Fist” — that, after the band was signed in 2008, became big for them worldwide.

“Lungs,” released the next year, is very much a first album, exuberant in its range of styles. “Dog Days Are Over” was the second single, and the first song that would contain everything that Welch’s music has become known for: intense and pure feeling; elliptical lyrics; strange, catchy drums; a tune that starts soft and builds into a great crescendo of sound. Again, critics didn’t get the album — they likened Welch to Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, Regina Spektor, Annie Lennox, Joanna Newsom, Sinead O’Connor, artists whose music has very little to do with one another’s but, well, they’re songwriters and women at the same time, so they must be similar! Some critics were weirdly condescending in their incomprehension: One wrote in Rolling Stone that the “best bits feel like being chased through a moonless night by a sexy moor witch,” which … what is that supposed to sound like? Screaming in terror while trying to run with an erection?

The pressure of new fame was so intense that the singer kept dancing with self-destruction. “In order to protect myself from the public gaze,” she said, “I shrank myself offstage.” When she and her band were working on what would become their first singles, her partying was so out of hand that she nearly blew it with the record company; she was too much of a liability, disappearing for three days into a bender and showing up at a pub mysteriously covered in blue paint. She was also in thrall to an eating disorder, a way to try to impose control on a life that felt uncontrollable. Grace became her personal assistant, and a great deal of the burden of the singer’s bad behavior fell on her. Grace loved her sister, looked up to her and now regrets bitterly how she enabled her. Welch lost days partying, blackout drunk, on drugs. Grace says now that the family has “this joke, like, ‘Thank God she was famous.’ She’s always been supercreative and supercomplicated and supertroubled, and if she didn’t have all that money and, like, a team of people propping her up in her 20s, she’d totally be dead.” Back then, Welch still lived at the family home in Camberwell; she’s an artist who needs to be rooted in place to make her art and hasn’t ever moved away from the neighborhood. Still, no matter how drunk or brutally hung over she was, she was always able to get up onstage and perform.

There’s a rigid cycle in music making: One starts in the studio, creating the songs, which at this point with streaming are practically given away for free; to make money, one has to embark on a grueling two- to three-year schedule of performances, a lifestyle that lends itself easily to drugs and alcohol. Performing in massive venues is hugely physically taxing, particularly when one does it with Welch’s commitment. She throws her entire body into her songs, dances barefoot because she needs to feel the ground beneath her. She has twice broken her foot midway through her concerts but never stopped, instead singing through the pain. A great performer is something of an energy worker, creating a collective experience through her voice and body, and energy needs to be rebuilt before it’s expended again. She tried to control her alcoholism by not drinking when she was performing, but that was worse: She began to binge when she wasn’t on tour.

In 2011, the band released the album “Ceremonials,” which Welch described as a “wall of sound, a wall of aesthetic,” a tumultuous wrestling with her addiction. “I was wandering around like a superhigh Gustav Klimt painting,” she said. The recurrent imagery is that of drowning; in the single “Shake It Out,” the line “It’s hard to dance with a devil on your back” repeats so often it becomes almost frantic.

Not long after, on the singer’s 27th birthday, her mother gave a moving speech, begging her daughter not to join the 27 Club, the group of tormented artists who’d died as a result of addiction, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and the radical exposure it requires to be an artist at that age: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. Welch had shown up to her birthday party drunk and high. Perhaps because of the immensity of her shame, she smashed her whole face into her birthday cake.

There was a moment in the months afterward, lying on the floor of her room, that Welch began to tell me about, saying that she was praying, “Help me, please help me, help me, help me,” but then she trailed off. One doesn’t speak about the holy. “It feels like a betrayal to the thing that helped me,” she said. In any event, after that night, Welch became sober.

For a year, the singer was a “completely broken person,” she said. She’d always loved clothes, had delighted in her dresses onstage, but now she wore the same “horrible blue tracksuit” everywhere. Later on, she had treatment for her eating disorder. When I asked her what had taken the place of the addictions, she told me matter-of-factly, “The performance. The music.”

The albums that came afterward were a kind of resetting. For 2015’s “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” Welch had just been broken up with and had herself broken up with drugs and alcohol. As a result, the music was stripped down instrumentally, the cover image was black and white and onstage she wore a more masculine suit instead of her previous flowy dresses. Welch was, perhaps not coincidentally, taken more seriously as an artist. When Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters broke his leg and the band had to pull out of headlining the 2015 Glastonbury Festival, Florence and the Machine were asked to replace them. She began to write more poetry. In 2018, Florence and the Machine released “High as Hope,” which is even more stripped down and intimate, with Welch’s poetry becoming its lyrics.

In addition to her albums, the singer has been working for eight years on a musical version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” called “Gatsby: An American Myth,” which I saw in June at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. She was drawn to the book, she said, by the drunkenness and hangover in it, the doomed romanticism, “the way the page sings.” The show got a standing ovation. I thought it was fine. At times, everything was so on the nose that I felt I was being hit with a soft right hook. The set is half nightclub, half car crash, just like the Roaring Twenties; all the characters’ costumes have dirty hems, as though to semaphore that none of them have quite risen above the muck of the American dream. The music is a collaboration between Welch and Thomas Bartlett, who, in addition to being a co-producer and co-writer on some songs on Florence and the Machine’s “High as Hope,” is a gifted musician who’s worked with everyone from Nico Muhly to Yoko Ono and Sufjan Stevens. The songs they made are excellent and surprising, with exciting and slithery Jazz Age rhythms. But art gets in trouble when it becomes polemical, which many of the songs were. I began to wonder if a musical would ever be the right vehicle for a story like “The Great Gatsby.” Musical theater is the most American art form that exists, all dazzle and jazz hands, but Fitzgerald’s novel draws its power from the lightness of its allusions. Things that are hinted at in the book — like Nick Carraway’s crush on Jay Gatsby, or Gatsby’s gangster past — get their own numbers. That said, songs are still being made and discarded. The version I saw, which might one day move to Broadway, hadn’t settled into its final form, and it’s a sin to judge art before it’s finished.

Welch’s most recent album, “Dance Fever,” is my favorite; I played it so often that my younger son began to call it “Mommy’s church.” I find it almost unbearably beautiful, a confirmation that Welch’s songwriting keeps getting more powerful. She had already written the first two songs — “King” and “Free” — and was in the studio in New York City in March 2020 with Antonoff when the pandemic hit, and they had to flee to their respective corners. The rest of the songs arrived as Welch’s anxiety spiraled in her London home, the project something of a diary of those years of isolation. Listening now, it feels like a wild, anxious, terrified, hedonistic catharsis of that awful time, a ritual cleansing of the collective grief that we still haven’t fully processed as a culture.

Louis Vuitton dress, price on request, louisvuitton.com; and Welch’s own dress (worn underneath) and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

PORTRAITURE

THE DAY AFTER I visited her house, I met Welch at the Tate Britain to see a John Singer Sargent exhibition. The turn-of-the-20th-century portraits were huge and dramatic and vividly emotional, the rooms thickly crowded. I said I loved the subjects’ expressions; Sargent was a master of distilling character in the subtle look on a face. “I love the fashion,” Welch responded and gestured at “Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer” (1889-90), depicting a young American girl with reddish hair and bangs like Welch’s, wearing a layered pale pink dress with a pleated underskirt and bodic...