J.W. Anderson scales fashion’s fizzy heights

“This is not a bottle, this is an icon,” says JW Anderson. “Of course it’s a bottle, it’s Diet Coke and I’m going to put my spin on it.” Diet Coke have just announced that the northern Irish designer will be giving their iconic bottle a makeover. Not a fan of the drink? Don’t worry, the designer has created two t-shirts, a tote bag and a notebook to accompany the bottle which will be unveiled at the end of July. According to the video below, Anderson is going to incorporate photography in his design, as well as inspiration from the knitwear in his AW15 collection. “You can expect something completely different with lots of cool surprises,” he told Vogue. 

Of course J-Dubz isn’t the first designer that Diet Coke have tapped: Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier are among former designers, as well as Marc Jacobs and Matthew Williamson. Lagerfeld was famously addicted to the soft drink: “I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed," he once declared. “I don’t drink coffee, I don’t drink tea; I drink nothing else.” In fact when the legendary designer visited the Great Wall of China, his loyal butler was waiting at the top of the stairs holding a tray with a chilled glass of the drink. But it's not all about Diet Coke – some fashion folk, such as Raf Simons and his Dior atelier, prefer Coke Zero. “I have never seen people drink so much Coke Zero,” noted “Dior and I” director Frédéric Tcheng. “They are literally obsessed with it. One day I saw a crate of hundreds of cans that had been delivered to the office, and the next day they had all gone, and another came.”