‘Her work is a compulsion’: Jonathan Anderson on uniting with artist Christiane Kubrick on a collection inspired by Eyes Wide Shut

There was a loving arrangement to divide Childwickbury Manor, the Hertfordshire home that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick shared with his wife Christiane. She, an artist, would have the back, where there was light through the day to paint, while Stanley, despite the frequent intrusions of paparazzi peering over the hedges, would take the front, working in a ground-floor office surrounded by filing cabinets full of scripts, documents and photographs. There was another promise between the two: when they married in 1958, Christiane, then an actress, asked that she never appear in any of his films. Stanley kept his promise until his death in 1999, and he is now buried beneath his favourite tree in the grounds of the manor where Christiane continues to live and work in relative solace.

The home is a handy half-hour-or-so drive to Elstree Studios, the location of many of the director’s film projects, and comprises a jumble of buildings first inhabited by monks in the medieval era (although the majority of the home dates to the 18th century). Inside, a warren of rooms lead off from a central kitchen, including a wood-panelled billiards room which appears straight from a Stanley Kubrick film set, and a library with crimson red walls, the mass of books providing a teasing insight into the director’s mind and fixations (there’s everything from witchcraft to cats). Glimpsed through an open door is a room decorated with the Venetian masks that appear in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley’s much-mythologised final movie.

On nearly every wall is one of Christiane’s artworks. Often flattened in perspective, and with a purposeful naivety, they capture both the quotidian and the dreamlike. In one, children lounge on hammocks and deckchairs in an Edenic garden of yellow flowers as a glowering grey sky is glimpsed in the distance; in another, 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 is losing embarrassment, it is losing any insecurity, it is losing a feeling about 500 different things that you’re ashamed of,’ she says in a recent short film, Who is the Painter?, directed by her filmmaker grandson Jack Elliott Hobbs. ‘So you have to do some work every day – start with one job and build it up, not stopping when you feel like an idiot.’

Fashion designer Jonathan Anderson found an affinity with her strange, engrossing paintings – which can be seen in various interior backdrops in Eyes Wide Shut – transposing them on to his A/W 2024 menswear collection for his label JW Anderson. Shown in Milan in February alongside his womenswear Pre-Fall 2024 collection, he said he was thinking about the idea of bringing something from the background into the foreground, and the collaboration continued the designer’s interest in shining a spotlight on lesser-known artists. ‘Her works are so quintessential, but they seem so strange,’ says Anderson. ‘There is something deeply personal [about them], to be able to be that age and for them to be so free, so contemporary somehow. I get the feeling that there is no other way – she has to do it.’

Alongside Christiane’s work, the collection also features a print of a 1998 painting by her daughter Katharina Kubrick, also an artist, of the family’s beloved cat Polly, gifted to her father Stanley on his 60th birthday (Hobbs, Katharina’s son, says you can tell the works of Christiane and his mother apart by the more traditional perspective of the latter’s works).

The catwalk show’s soundtrack featured fragments of dialogue from Eyes Wide Shut, which stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Bill and Alice Harford, a wealthy New York couple in a decaying marriage. As Alice admits to harbouring sexual fantasies for another man, Bill is swept into a paranoid, obsessive odyssey through nocturnal New York, culminating in a secret masked orgy in a country house. A famously protracted process, it would take 400 days to film. Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, six days after showing a final cut to Warner Bros and the film’s stars.

The impetus for the collection came from Anderson rewatching Eyes Wide Shut (which is set over a chilly New York Christmas) in the middle of summer. It was jarring to the designer, and it laid the groundwork for a collection that pulsated with the film’s restless sensuality, with its sliced red dresses, bulging satin-lined jackets and poinsettia brooches. The latter was intended to capture a sense of heady danger (‘it evokes a kind of toxicity,’ he says of the plant). Elsewhere, Christiane’s artworks appear on garments like apparitions.

One such print is an image of Hobbs as a child, lit up by the glow of a computer and surrounded by colourful plastic toys. Outside the window, snow falls, though the flattened plain of perspective lends it a disorientating, dreamlike strangeness. It’s a space Anderson so often inhabits in his collections: a kind of between-world, where archetypal garments are shifted in perspective to become something new. It’s an obsessive, consuming task, much like the work of the artist.

‘Her work is a compulsion – I look up to that because I feel like that when I’m working on clothing,’ says Anderson. ‘Sometimes I think the act of discovery of someone’s work is just as important as the work itself. This person is painting with purpose, and this is why I’m drawn to it, and this is why you as an audience can be drawn to it as well.’

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 using Bumble and Bumble. Grooming & make-up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Shiseido. Photography assistant: Keerthana Kunnath. Fashion assistant: Nathan Fox. Hair assistant: Haruka Koresawa. Make-up assistant: Lily Simmonds. On-set producer: Minna Vauhkonen. Production assistants: Archie Thomson, Ady Huq.

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