The story behind the collaboration between Christiane Kubrick and JW Anderson

There has been a loving agreement to divide Childwickbury Manor, the Hertfordshire home that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick shared with his wife Christiane. She, an artist, had the back, where there was light all day for painting, while Stanley, despite the frequent presence of paparazzi peering over the hedges, took over the front, working in a ground-floor office lined with filing cabinets surrounded by scripts, documents and photos. There was another promise between the two: When they married in 1958, Christiane, then an actress, demanded that she not be allowed to appear in any of his films. Stanley kept his promise until his death in 1999 and is now buried under his favorite tree in the grounds of the mansion, where Christiane continues to live and work in relative comfort.

A convenient half-hour drive from Elstree Studios, where many of the director’s film projects were filmed, the house is a jumble of buildings first occupied by monks in the Middle Ages (although the majority of the house dates from that period). the 18th century). Inside, a warren of rooms leads off from a central kitchen, including a wood-paneled billiards room that looks straight out of a Stanley Kubrick film set, and a crimson-walled library whose plethora of books provide a tantalizing glimpse into the director’s mind and fixations (everything from witchcraft to cats is included). Through an open door one can see a room decorated with the Venetian masks that appear in it Eyes wide closedStanley’s much mythologized last film.

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

One of Christiane’s works of art hangs on almost every wall. Often with a flattened perspective and with deliberate naivety, they capture both the everyday and the dreamlike. In one, children lounge on hammocks and lounge chairs in a paradisiacal garden of yellow flowers while a gloomy gray sky is visible in the distance; in another image, flames erupt around a central figure, a depiction of the artist’s grandmother, who escaped the firestorms of Hamburg in 1943 wearing only her nightgown. She continues to paint daily. “Nobody has confidence because it loses the embarrassment, it loses all insecurity, it loses a sense of 500 different things that you’re ashamed of,” she says in a recent short film. Who is the painter?It was directed by her filmmaker grandson Jack Elliott Hobbs. “So you have to do some work every day – start with a job and build it up, not stopping when you feel like an idiot.”

Fashion designer Jonathan Anderson found an affinity for her strange, intriguing paintings – which can be seen in various interior settings Eyes wide closed – and transferred it to his A/W 2024 men’s collection for his label JW Anderson. Shown in Milan in February alongside his Pre-Fall 2024 women’s collection, he said he was thinking about the idea of ​​bringing something from the background to the foreground, and the collaboration continued the designer’s interest in bringing lesser-known artists into the spotlight to move. “Her work is so basic, but it seems so strange,” Anderson says. “There is something deeply personal about it [about them]that they can be this age and that they are somehow so free and contemporary. “I feel like there’s no other way – she has to do it.”

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

“There is something deeply personal about Christian’s work. I feel like there’s no other way – she has to do it.

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

In addition to Christiane’s work, the collection also includes a print of a 1998 painting by her daughter Katharina Kubrick, also an artist, of the family’s beloved cat, Polly, which her father gave Stanley for his 60th birthday (Hobbs, Katharinas Son, says you can tell). the works of Christiane and his mother, apart from the more traditional perspective of the latter’s works).

The runway show’s soundtrack included fragments of dialogue from Eyes wide closedin which Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play Bill and Alice Harford, a wealthy New York couple in a crumbling marriage. When Alice admits to having sexual fantasies for another man, Bill falls into a paranoid, obsessive odyssey through New York at night, culminating in a secret masked orgy in a country house. Filming was notoriously lengthy, lasting 400 days. Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, six days after showing the final cut to Warner Bros. and the film’s stars.

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

The impetus for the collection came from Anderson’s renewed viewing Eyes wide closed (set on a chilly New York Christmas) in the middle of summer. It bothered the designer and laid the foundation for a collection that pulsed with the film’s restless sensuality, with its slashed red dresses, bulging satin-lined jackets and poinsettia brooches. The latter was intended to capture a sense of intoxicating danger (“it evokes a kind of toxicity,” he says of the plant). Elsewhere, Christiane’s artworks appear like apparitions on clothing.

One such print is an image of Hobbs as a child, illuminated by the glow of a computer and surrounded by colorful plastic toys. Snow is falling outside the window, but the flat perspective gives it a disorienting, dreamlike strangeness. It’s a space that Anderson inhabits so often in his collections: a kind of in-between world where archetypal garments are shifted in perspective to become something new. It is an obsessive, laborious task, much like the artist’s work.

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

“You have to do some work every day – start with a job and build it up, and don’t stop when you feel like an idiot.”

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

“Their work is a compulsion – I look up to it because I get the same feeling when I work on clothes,” says Anderson. “Sometimes I think that the act of discovering a work is as important as the work itself.” “This person paints with intention, and that’s why I’m drawn to them, and that’s why you as an audience can be drawn to them too.”

Models: Jemma Stevens at PRM Agency, Sophia Enggaard at Present Model Management, Guo Jike at Elite London, Leo de Grandmont at The Squad Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Kei Takano with Bumble and Bumble. Skincare and makeup: Faye Bluff from Of Substance Agency with Shiseido. Photo Assistant: Keerthana Kunnath. Fashion Assistant: Nathan Fox. Hair Assistant: Haruka Koresawa. Makeup Assistant: Lily Simmonds. Producer on set: Minna Vauhkonen. Production assistants: Archie Thomson, Ady Huq.

This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Wallpaper* Available October 10th in print on newsstands, in the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and for Apple News+ subscribers. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)

(Image credit: Photography by Kalpesh Lathigra, Fashion by Jason Hughes)