Jonathan Anderson is not failing. Fashion’s metrics are. And the wrong question it keeps asking in 2026.

Jonathan Anderson’s latest menswear and haute couture collection have drawn a familiar set of descriptors. Ugly, raw, unfinished, uneven, sloppy. The implied verdict is just as familiar. Is this good enough - is this Christian Dior Couture? What matters more is whether that evaluative frame still holds in 2026.

We are judging inside different conditions. In an era of accelerated production and AI-assisted creation, technical fluency and surface polish are no longer scarce. Perfection is increasingly default. The scarcity shifts toward judgment. Deciding what belongs, and why.

That shift is what Kant calls aesthetic judgment. Not optimisation, but a claim made under uncertainty - that something deserves to exist. Adorno warns how easily culture collapses into smooth, standardised pleasure once friction disappears. Agamben shows how systems erase human trace in favour of legibility. Read through that lens, Anderson’s roughness and occasional “wrongness” begin to read less as failure and more as refusal. A refusal not to be flattened into instant coherence.

It also clarifies why the bridal final look has been so widely praised. It does not merely offer beauty, it proves that the capacity for resolution is intact. The collection is raw not because it cannot resolve, but because it is choosing when to.

If we borrow from Hegel, emotion emerges through recognition, and recognition is not limited to pleasure. Discomfort and resistance are also forms of engagement.

Fashion is judged under commercial pressure, as both expression and product, which is why “unfinished” is read as failure rather than inquiry. Much of the backlash toward Anderson is a clash of frames - the demand for instant legibility versus a practice that insists on process and uneven development.

A similar tension surrounds JACQUEMUS, and his recent “Le Palmier” collection. Often criticised for unevenness, for materials and finish that don’t always live up to luxury expectations, yet undeniably gifted at evoking emotion, excitement, and genuine feeling. He reminds us that affect is not produced by perfection alone. As Matthieu Blazy shows his first CHANEL couture today, it’s worth holding that in mind.

In a moment where machines can generate endless “good” beauty, the more radical gesture may be to allow work to remain human. Uneven. Exposed. Not always right. Not perfect, but present.