Fredrick Anderson just celebrated a year of being in business. (Before launching his namesake label, he logged many years as the business partner of Douglas Hannant.) Now Anderson is clearly finding into his own voice. Much like the Park Avenue world of Hannant, Anderson’s girl is turned out, but younger, cooler and in his words, “worldly.”
“It’s not just New York, Dallas or Palm Beach,” he says. “You have to be able to think on a global scale now in terms of the client and her needs.”
For spring, he again focused on history, this time taking a look at his family in Tennessee, which then led him to the folklore of the American West.
“In thinking about my roots, I started thinking about what it is to be an immigrant, [about] the Scottish, the Irish and the Chinese — most of whom came here to help build the railroads of the west because there wasn’t enough labor,” Anderson said. “We have all the usual western references, but my job as a designer is to find a new way to reinterpret that.”
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The concept distilled into a collection that mixed parts of each of these cultures, deconstructed and than melded back together to make a new iteration of what one thinks of as “western.” Anderson used Scottish plaids with antique-looking lace underpinnings for a modern take on western blouses and skirts; light white tweeds came in easy-to-wear tops, dresses and coats worn over denim blue shorts and tops. He spoke of referencing Millicent Rogers and her modern way of mixing extravagance with practicality, and that sensibility ran throughout his work.
“I really considered doing a show for spring since it is my year mark, but more I thought about it, I don’t know that I’ll get a lot of value out of that and I don’t really want to disrupt the story I’ve been building the last year with purely using images,” Anderson said about telling his brand’s story. “I do my own Instagram and styling — I’m working on every aspect organically so it feels like an authentic version of me.”