Disobedient Bodies

JW Anderson built Disobedient Bodies as a second exhibition on paper, pairing sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore with the fashion he designs for a living.

The book documents Anderson's 2017 exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, where he set works by Hepworth, Moore, Constantin Brancusi, Eileen Gray, and Sarah Lucas alongside garments by Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Dior, Helmut Lang, and his own label. Rather than reproduce the show's wall-by-wall layout, the publication recombines the material into new page pairings not seen in the gallery, an approach Anderson describes as asking his collaborators to be "disobedient" within their own disciplines. Bound with an elastic tie around a single interleaved section, the 142-page book was printed by InOtherWords in an edition of 2,000.

Anderson, the founder of his own label and creative director of Loewe, has built a body of work that treats the body's shape as unstable territory, an interest this project extends from the runway into sculpture and museum display. Disobedient Bodies remains one of the clearest statements of how he thinks across those fields rather than within any one of them.