Adam Jones AW25 is an Homage to Ibiza Beaches, TV Dinner, and Grandma’s Living Room
Written by Jude Jones
In the 1970s there struck a quiet consumer revolution: that of the cheap jet flight, which democratised European holidaymaking beyond its blue-collared demimonde and, for the first time, to a general British public. Now, for a comparative price to a train up to Skegness or Rhyl, it was possible to sail the skies to an exotic Ibiza or sunbaked Majorca, abetting in its wake a surprisingly comprehensive realignment of the European landscape (That is, the transformation of the latter locations into teeming, semi-colonised tourist traps; the exacerbated decline of the former into spaces of economic dearth, now further strangled out of their principal financial lifelines, the family holiday).
It is this opening of the national psyche to a broader, continental world of saturated sunsets and billowing palms that Adam Jones AW25 reifies. Continuing to work with his sartorial throughline of celebrating nostalgic British kitsch and the stereotypical small-town lad, the designer chose this time round for his chromatic palette a garish selection of oranges and ochres, equal parts evocative of Spanish sun and that suffocating 70s wallpaper that’s as omnipresent in grandma’s home as those strange ceramic knickknacks and her faithful sepia archives of family legend and lore.
Remaining faithful to his traditional silhouettes and shapes – jumpers, sweater vests, and skirts – Jones also adds playful twists to his forms this season, a logical extension of his sartorial grammar. So, sleeves on Beano striped jumpers grow a little too long, like a younger sibling swallowed in hand-me-downs or those of the prodigal tough kids who terrorise town streets. And it is through this reverence to the so-called “low culture” that Jones’s collection shines, reimagining a constellation of found objects and “low-brow” references – Only Fools and Horses, matchdays at middling league stadiums, sticky pub mats and carpets – into a literalised, maximalist form of capsule collection. That is, a collection that is a time capsule to simpler, warmer times: of sitcoms on tele, sunshine in summer, and weekends at grandma’s, with teeth wobbly, elbows muddy, and knees gloriously grass-stained and grazed.
