When Anderson was named to head Loewe, some wondered if a polymorphous niche designer whose only experience beyond his own company was a year or so in merchandising at Prada could manage to reconceptualize a moribund legacy brand (while also coping with internal politics and economic realities). But in addition to his endlessly fecund imagination, Anderson has a quality that few young talents of his stature, especially those in the vanguard, seem to possess: a head for business. Instead of chafing under a corporate master, as other renegade designers have — Alexander McQueen, famously, for one — he seems to savor the balance of commerce and culture; Loewe has experienced strong growth during his tenure. “No designer today can be completely detached from the realities of business. Maybe a decade ago, but no longer,” he says. “It’s about surviving, of staying around long enough to say all the things you want to say.” This embrace of the practical has inspired his latest project: remaking many of the brand’s 111 stand-alone stores into what he calls Casa Loewe, a showcase not only for his designs but also for the artists, artisans and even floral designers he admires. The New York City store opens in SoHo this fall, but you can see the result of his most recent efforts in London’s three-story flagship on Bond Street in Mayfair, which opened in April. There, the clothes and accessories share space with colorfully pocked vases by the Japanese ceramist Takuro Kuwata, Anthea Hamilton’s drippy blown-glass stop-sign-red 2014 Vulcano table and baskets woven by Hafu Matsumoto. Throughout the shop are obvious inflections of Kettle’s Yard, Anderson’s self-described spiritual home, the Cambridge gallery that was once the four-cottage residence of the 20th-century art collector Jim Ede and his wife, Helen (they donated it to the university in 1966), a model for hybrid domestic-retail environments. There, works by the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and the painter Helen Frankenthaler are displayed amid the Edes’ original furnishings, as well as with rotating shows of contemporary and modern artists.

But while the stores may be reflections of Anderson’s tastes and vision, the designer himself is not. It’s common these days for creative directors to embody their own aesthetic — think of Gucci’s fanciful Alessandro Michele, for one — but Anderson, whose uniform consists of loose jeans and a sweater or button-down, his sandy blond hair askew, is not a peacock. “I’m trying to dress better, but it’s hard for me,” he says. At home, he can’t bear the presence of anything he’s made. At both brands, he relies heavily on teams, perhaps more than some designers; they are enfranchised to transform his constant stream of inspirations — such as a 16th-century portrait miniature, which is translated into the puritan collar of a wool coat or the cravat-style flourish on a white silk blouse — into looks that can parade down a runway. Although he sketches well (his maternal grandfather, who worked as a manager at a textile firm and collected delftware, made Anderson and his younger brother sit at the kitchen table when they were children, drawing various teacups and vases over and over to teach them about volumes and dimension), he sees himself more as a curator than a designer. His working relationship with Benjamin Bruno, his longtime stylist, is closer to that of a partner, he says. He may be the only women’s wear designer who starts from men’s wear and adapts the shapes from there. “I’m a man who’s attracted to men,” he says. “So that’s where the energy is.”

That he has been able to maintain JW Anderson’s acute weirdness over the seasons as he rewrites Loewe’s long, sober story with leather into a tale both effervescent and enduring is, notes Amanda Harlech — an old friend and muse of Karl Lagerfeld, who brokered a friendship between the two men before Lagerfeld’s death this year — “a mark of a rare kind of genius, the sort of intelligence you saw in Karl, the sort of voraciousness.”