JW Anderson Enters the Opera, and It Makes Perfect Sense

JW Anderson’s latest collaboration isn’t about a collection, a drop, or a runway moment. It’s about time. Memory. A life.

With Complications in Sue, a new opera premiering with Opera Philadelphia from February 4–8, 2026, Jonathan Anderson designs the costumes for Justin Vivian Bond’s first-ever title role.

It marks Anderson’s debut in opera, but more importantly, it feels like a natural extension of the world he’s been building for years: fashion as storytelling, clothing as a way of holding contradiction.

Photo Credit: JW Anderson

The opera unfolds in ten short vignettes, each set in a different decade of Sue’s life, from birth to death. Ten composers. Ten perspectives. No single, fixed narrative. Instead, a fragmented portrait of womanhood that mirrors how memory actually works is messy, nonlinear, emotional. Anderson’s costumes become the thread pulling it all together, helping the audience feel time move across Sue’s body.

Justin Vivian Bond has always existed slightly outside of categories. A cabaret icon, cultural provocateur, and long-time muse to Anderson, Bond’s work weaves history, politics, and care into performance. Their presence alone reshapes the space they enter. Seeing that sensibility placed inside opera, a form that’s often guarded, formal, and resistant to change  feels quietly radical.

The libretto is written by Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), whose work has consistently pushed musical theatre toward vulnerability and self-examination. Here, in his operatic debut, he examines a woman’s life not as a neat arc, but as a series of complications: ordinary moments sitting next to the surreal, the personal brushing up against the cultural.

What’s striking is how fashion functions here. These aren’t “costumes” in the traditional sense. They’re markers of time, emotion, and identity. Clothes as memory. Clothes as evidence. Anderson isn’t dressing a character — he’s dressing a lifetime.

Complications in Sue runs February 4-6, and 8, 2026 at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. It’s opera, yes — but not as a museum piece or tradition to be preserved. This is opera as a living, breathing form. Open to collaboration. Open to queerness. Open to fashion as something that doesn’t just adorn the body, but tells the truth about it.