Just a couple of doors down from Jonathan Anderson’s Soho flagship, the lights of the Las Vegas Arcade hum and flash, beckoning you beneath the city with the promise of the elusive big win. Here you can lose yourself in something magic and transcendent, perhaps a sweat-dripping DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) battle, or maybe you’ll get lucky with the one-armed bandit. “The arcade after all, is not just for gamers,” offers the collection’s show notes.

They’re right, of course, and here, the arcade provided the most exciting stage for Anderson’s highly-anticipated return to London Fashion Week, kitted out with the kinds of alternate realities where the Northern Irish designer’s stirring visual language makes almost too much sense. These are places where deconstructed slip-dresses are held together by tough spaghetti straps (singular), where longline t-shirt dresses are designed not on cutting tables but the cluttered floor of a girl-on-the-go, where dolphin-print unitards and ripped rhinestone fabrics are de rigueur. 

A glitch in this matrix meant turtlenecks were worn upside down and outside of the body, balancing on a flimsy wire hanger, also up-turned. But if you think that’s nutty, Anderson then delved further into the madness, decorating tactile gowns and loose-roll neck tops with sizable keyboard keys, turning miscellaneous metallic knobs into their own blobject-y styles. He even blows up a bagged goldfish, the kind you rescue from a life of perpetual swimming at the hook-a-duck stall of a regional fair, into a silky mini-dress, tied in an over-the-shoulder knot to prevent any spillages. Ding, ding, ding, we’ve hit the jackpot.