Loewe (Q5046)
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fashion house specialising in leather goods, clothing, perfumes and other fashion accessories
- LOEWE
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Loewe |
fashion house specialising in leather goods, clothing, perfumes and other fashion accessories |
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Statements
1945
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2019
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1973
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1979
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1997
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2003
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Jonathan Anderson rounded off his decade at Loewe with a show in the round. It began with a bouncingly light, flowered, off-the-shoulder crinoline dress, whose visible underhoops were also circular. Intake of breath: Corseting-free and hands in pockets, the models zipped around in two-tone oxfords and oversized, silver-mirrored aviators, for all the world as casually as if they were wearing sweatshirts and jeans.Anderson was about to mess with classicism, the relevance of old couture crafts, fashion realism, trompe l’oeil, and pop culture in the modern world: In essence, all the ways he’s been progressing and elevating since he joined Loewe 10 years ago at the tender age of 30. He’d sent an antique-looking gilded silver ring engraved with the brand’s name as a souvenir with every invitation. “I wanted this idea of something circular. The ring is circular,” he said.There was no elaborately constructed set this time. Only a single artwork by Tracey Emin stood in the center—a narrow pole with a little, ordinary bird perched on top cast in bronze. As the press release observed of its significance: “Caught in a moment of pause, she encourages us to imagine imminent flight, and ultimately its freedom.”So there we were, seated in a stripped-back arena of benches in a white box, from which to spectate upon nothing but his clothes. Out came a visual deluge of high skills and crisp editing. Mind-bending references to classical composers and painters on T-shirts—made, scarcely believably, in feathers—pictured Mozart, Chopin, Bach, Van Gogh’sSunflowers, and a Manet soldier boy. “I like this idea that they’re kind of like pinup rock stars,” Anderson said. “Like when you go to a museum or you go to a concert: experiential things that you want to take a memento of with you. The idea that music reminds us of moments in our lives.”Then there were his multiple reimagined French golden age couture dresses, all hoops and semisheer flower prints and trapeze-line silhouettes abbreviated to teeny-tiny minis. It’s been a long time since a fashion designer has taken on the grandeur of event dressing, respected the beauty and joy of it, and yet shown such a delightfully unpainful way to wear it—with sneakers. “I think it’s interesting when you strip out the fussiness,” Anderson said.There was no sense that this was a 10-year retrospective of Anderson’s work at Loewe.
But then again, the imprint of what he’s done for the formerly little-known Spanish leather house was all over the collection. It emanated maturity, modernity, and a calm ownership of sophisticated tailoring—blazers over elegantly draped voluminous trousers; classic leather coats carved with a turned-up fillip in the hem. This quite apart from creating all the commercial catnip signatures—ultra-desirable bags and the Ballet Runner logo sneakers—that are recognized and wanted by every girl and her mother worldwide.That is a massive achievement, one that brought Anderson a standing ovation, a massed round of applause from his designer peers Sarah Burton, Nicolas Di Felice, Kris Van Assche, Pieter Mulier, and Adrian Appiolaza, as well as Delphine Arnault and all of Anderson’s actor friends in the house.
27 September 2024
“I enjoyed this one because it was about doing precision. My own interpretation of precision.” A decade since his firstcollectionfor Loewe, Jonathan Anderson is still finding fresh lines of investigation to mine.Today’s show was set within a group display of works by creatives whose “singularity” he admires; these included a copy of Susan Sontag’sAgainst Interpretationjust next toEaselby Carlo Scarpa (scarpameans shoe in Italian). Pre-show, bulky security guards loomed with entertaining absurdity of scale over the macro sculptures of Paul Thek’sPied Piperseries. There was a Peter Hujar photo of a stilettoscarpathat Anderson said was a starting point for this collection. And as well as one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s chairs, there was a surprisingly industrial looking coat rack in oak and iron around which was laid a feather boa; a Loewe team member adjusted it minutely according to instruction delivered by head-set just before the show began.All of this reflected the group show whose disparate exercises in minuteness and precision delivered a series of what Anderson described as “razor looks.” Slim silhouette, very French C-suite tailoring with almond-toe leather oxfords in black opened the show. Anderson said that Loewe had developed the fabric in woven silk mohair to have a purposefully spongey finish. With movement, there was a very gentle sense of bounce. These suits were an example of: “things that are incredibly difficult to do but that which when you see them it feels effortless.”Perhaps tangentially informed by the thoughts of Thek, another singular Anderson theme this season saw him deliver garments that stretched your expectations of scale and setting. House labels were transformed into smocked shirts. Vests were fronted in sections of what resembled watch strap links, or mother of pearl.Shorts and t-shirts were painted with a cable knit shaped finish. Edged in golden piping and emanating a shiny gleam, they appeared almost ceramic. Cropped shirts and pants were linked with a double circled belt that spiraled down the stomach to the hip to create a garment that seemed both unified and divided. A short-sleeve shirt was fabricated in sections of tonal fringe that resembled a hairy houndstooth, while a long brown coat was made in nappa leather on its right side that gradually transitioned into ostrich on its left.
The deep unbuttoned neckline in a blue shirt extended below the waistline of the pants below it, while double-faced coats were stiffened so that their skirts unfolded or flew up to apparently defy gravity in a kind of frozen drape.Anderson said the gold or monochrome feathers were there to divide our view of the faces beneath them as part of his consideration of forced perspective. This was a collection that stimulated you constantly to question exactly what it was you were seeing.
22 June 2024
Sorry to be basic, but I must blurt this out: Jonathan Anderson showed a Loewe collection for fall that was, frankly, stuffed with brilliant clothes—chic flowing cutaway jersey dresses, immaculate tailcoats and tailoring, flower and vegetable prints, balloon-y pants, novelty amusement accessories, and bluntly ideal versions of the best, non-messed-about shearling aviator jackets and double-breasted military leather coats in the business.That’s what I saw. Anderson is effortlessly at the peak of his game. His ability to nail avant-garde pairings of things that ought not go together but suddenly do, his intense orchestration of craft, and his never forgetting of the über-ordinary wearable item creates a unique language of fashion thrills and practicality.But then, as we soon found out in Anderson’s postshow debrief, the critical framework of this show—set in a private exhibition of small landscape and domestic scenes by the reclusive late American painter Albert York—turned out to be whole lot more meta than meets the eye. It was Anderson’s meditation on the meaning of luxury; specifically a zooming in on the interior landscapes and extremely decorative antique objects collected by wealthy Americans. “I started exploring this idea of provenance and why we buy things and why things come to have meaning,” he said. “The idea of an outsider looking into a world that we don’t experience.”Anderson had discovered that Jackie Kennedy owned several of York’s extremely rare paintings (and he owns one himself,Landscape With Three Trees and a Pond,which he reproduced on a canvas print as the show invitation). Perhaps it seemed surreal to him that work by an artist so detached from society and dedicated to depicting the simple life—nature, flowers, and dogs—should end up as treasures in high-society settings.Anyway: Then Anderson’s wildly associative mind was shooting off, looking at the insanely ornate collectibles—elaborate china, tapestry embroideries of pets, Chippendale furniture—that women interior designers “specifically of the 1920s” placed for their clients in their Upper East Side apartments.And there we have the provenance behind the Loewe prints of chintzy fabric and wallpaper flowers, the painted radishes, buttercups, and foliage of English early-18th-century Chelsea porcelain. A silvered collar on a gray cashmere overcoat, masquerading as look-alike fur, turned out to be carved wood.
Trompe l’oeil “caviar”-beaded embroidery smothered everything from tracksuits and boots to curtain-fabric balloon trousers and bags. One was a fully detailed bunch of antique Chelsea porcelain asparagus. A replica of a replica from nature, served up once more as the ultimate luxury fashion object for the 21st-century collector.All this could have tipped over into the too much without Anderson’s brilliant styling of formal swallow-tailed morning coats, casual suede chino look-alikes, and exaggeratedly voluminous army pants in the mix. Of course, all of the above is also state-of-the-art Loewe luxury quality fashion—only attainable by the few. But Anderson’s knack is this: At the end of the day, for all his play on the unreal, the way he deals with fashion still transmits all sorts of ideas for how women will really want to dress.
1 March 2024
Jonathan Anderson’s fall men’s Loewe show was one of those highly enjoyable immersions in the dynamic contradictions of contemporary consciousness he particularly excels at. Playful and uncomplicated andcomplicatedand philosophical—all at the same time—it was alive with really great clothes, art content and (of course) packed with celebrities. “Collaged realness,” as a line in his press release had it.Anderson had collaborated with the American artist Richard Hawkins, whose layered paintings of young men—shirts off—are drawn from pop culture, art history and porn. Some of his paintings were at one end of the room, while twelve arched video installations—like stained glass windows—played self-portrait footage shot by a variety of Loewe’s male ambassadors and friends, Josh O’Connor, Jamie Dornan, Taeyong, Obongjayar and Omar Apollo among them.Anderson was reckoning with the ubiquity of social media and what it does to souse our brains with information and desire: the “algorithm of masculinity,” as he put it. “It’s 360 degrees—you can’t get away from media.” The stuff that we see everywhere all of the time “sort of levels everything out,” he said. “I think it’s sort of like looking at it as what it is, kind of going ‘I’m gonna reinterpret it—the norms.’ But by using trickery.”Trickery! Where did that come in? The parade of boys was wearing precisely what Anderson does best—his erotically-charged super-luxurious Loewe leather, shearling and suede, chunky, crafty home-knitting, elaborate one-off art pieces and the best-in-class plain basics (jeans, shirts, sweatpants)—all the elements that make Loewe a shopping hot-spot.The genius is in the styling equations, the visual isolation and proportions of items walking around among the naked torsos and bare legs “Gestural” (as Anderson has put it before) ideas are an unmistakable part of his knack for capturing and characterizing real life dressing habits.This season, it was the blatant suggestiveness of unbuckled half-belts; coats with piles of T-shirts caught inside (“as if a teenager’s just rolled out of bed with the laundry inside,”) and the fact that some of the garments—as he said afterwards—were actually fused together. “It’s sort of like the shoe attaching to the sock, the sock to the trouser, or the jacket to the trouser. So it becomes a one-piece thing,” he explained. “I wanted to have fun with it.
”You couldn’t see that (the trickery), but you got the sense of haste, maybe a touch of neo-grunge, couldn’t-care-lessness, and yet, of course, it was all styled camera ready for a street style moment. There was more information on the soundtrack—bursts of interviews about Sean Penn and Justin Bieber, and a blast of a Western movie score. “It was a lot about heroes and bad boys. And a lot about America. How The American Dream kind of became a global dream somehow,” Anderson concluded. “Though now, in a weird way, it’s not about countries anymore. It’s about the internet. We are just the internet.”
20 January 2024
Jonathan Anderson just solved the conundrum that faces fashion today: How do you give women a thrilling change in silhouette and a new way to wear things—while also doing “normal” clothes?His answer was a simple stroke of genius: super-super high-waist pants—reaching halfway up the rib cage—inserted into the universally recognized convention of classic shirts, trousers, and blazers.“Day looks. I’m loving daywear at the moment,” he said, explaining the brief he’d set for himself. “How do you twist something so it’s ‘oh, yes—I recognize the oxford shirt and white pair of jeans,’ but then it’s off in a weird way? There’s a subversiveness to it. But it’s very civilized.”Surrealism was a preoccupation Anderson worked into his post-pandemic Loewe collections and his JW Anderson brand in London. Bringing zing to generics—rugby shirts, knits, T-shirts—is the other side of his talent, plus his unerring knack for bags and accessories. Both of these came together—focused and reiterated—in 14 different ways of wearing his extreme high waists: as “micro-shirts,” as he called them, with a narrow English gamekeeper check jacket, wildly conceptual glittery flower breast pieces, chunky cropped sweaters, and part of a tailored suit.There was a killer bag in the equation—a totally desirable bourgeois classic shoulder bag with a foot-long gold chain nonchalantly swinging from it. Anderson knows who he’s addressing and dressing so well. It has an international sweep. Every woman who might loosely identify as American preppy, British posh, French BCBG—and then all the rest of us who just crave something out of fashion that’s easy, chic, and not boring.“I’ve been here for 10 years, so it takes a superlong time, but I feel like I’m at a point where I understand the attitude of the brand: the clothing, the woman, the man, the bag,” said Anderson. “You see that there’s something happening; that the look is becoming definitive.”He mentioned in passing how much the Spanish roots of Loewe inspires him. When you think about that, was there the subtlest hint of the matador silhouette behind those high-waist trousers? Anderson first showed them on men at Loewe in June. “There’s a small corset inside” to keep them up, he added—which happens to be an inner detail of a bullfighter’s costume too.
Anderson is renowned for embracing randomness; throwing spanners in the works of logic; making free with experiments, illusions, and oblique channelings of the confused mental states we’re living in today. There was a funny “accidental” moment when coats got caught up in bags. Other pieces came out skewered with huge metal pins. The sophisticated craft capabilities of Loewe were demonstrated both in the luxurious minimalism of raw-edged leather T-shirts and shorts, and in elaborately delicate dresses constructed from strands of some impossibly fine fringing technique.But when all’s said and done, what came out of this collection was clarity; a leading designer daring to put forward a new silhouette—and we haven’t seen that for a long time.
29 September 2023
You could not watch this Loewe show without seeing the three Lynda Benglis fountains that Jonathan Anderson’s curatorial enthusiasm had brought together for the first time. One was tall and looming, another an apparently kinetically charged wave mid-break, and the last (closest to the photographers) low and spreading like an unpruned shrub. The natural substance of the water inhabited space in liquid shapes defined by the man-made structures hewn by Benglis.Similarly but inside-out, the worn shapes hewn by Anderson and his Loewe team for this collection defined the shape and aspect of the moving human substance within them. Of the three fountains, Anderson’s collection most resembled the tall and towering columns of dimpled cones in the center of the runway. By pulling the waistband of his pants up so very high, Anderson said afterwards, he wanted to create a way of seeing this collection that was akin to viewing it from ground level with a fish-eye lens. Coating some looks with crystals that glinted in the skylight sunshine invited you to see another watery parallel with Anderson’s installed artworks.When not obscured by long coats (in a technically impressive multi-sized herringbone), or two hypersized swatches (complete with hypersized pins) of what looked like chintzy vintage wall upholstery fabric, that looming silhouette was generally undisturbed yet variously expressed. Sparkly polo shirts, chunky knits, argyle sweaters, trench coat shirts, and bonded gray rib knits with rounded shoulders or two dimensional side-tabs were all cropped around the southern reaches of the wearer’s ribcage. Two leather jumpsuits near the end, one scarlet, the other black, combined the trouser shape with the upholstery facade into a hybridized silhouette.Said Anderson afterwards: “It's always about trying to find contradictions in men and women: like how do you blur all of that? I feel like something in this is very precise in that message, it's very reduced, very luxe.” In its lack of any figurative identifying symbols but possession of a distinct design signature, it was also very Anderson.
24 June 2023
“It’s a bit like the ghost of fashion,” said Jonathan Anderson. “This idea of the past and where we are now. Couture classicism meeting something which is new.”Anderson was out to trick the eye of the internet with his Loewe “ghosts”—simple white duchess satin shifts over-printed with blurry images of 1940s, maybe ’50s cotton frocks, a mackintosh, a fur coat. Each had blank margins. “Printing a garment on a garment is not a new thing. But I was fascinated about the psychology of how we ultimately see things online. The blurry aspect in motion looks like a glitch,” he said. “It’s out of focus. Is it staged, or not staged? Is it the right color, is it photoshopped?”One of the reasons that Anderson is up there among the most significant designers of today is that he has such a sharp instinct for drawing attention to timely, complicated questions—in this case, the hyper-awareness he has of simultaneously creating an event for a small number of people real time, whilst also factoring in how it will be perceived by the much bigger audience watching his every move on screens.What’s real, and what’s fake? And more to the point, what’s constructive that can come out of that question? Anderson had fun with that, warping anachronistic haute couture techniques and generic dress types to make ‘T-shirts’ and ‘jeans’ entirely of goose-feathers, and three strapless velvet cocktail dresses calculated to look flat and normal on screen, but which had a stiff, tubular stand-away volume in reality.There was more eye-trickery when a couple of ‘ordinary’ cardigans—one pink, one turquoise—turned up: in fact, they’d been printed out on adhesive paper, and literally stuck on the models’ skin. Then there were tiny, seamlessly molded jackets, which Anderson described as “like Playmobil.” Unless you touched them, you’d hardly realize they’d actually been made from super-fine leather, vacuum-formed the same way as luxury car upholstery. Maybe not even then.Pushing techniques until they aren’t what they seem, through a combination of traditional skills, new technologies and a searching imagination is something that only a top-notch modern luxury house can do, of course. Still, for Anderson, the point of showing all of that facility was to drive beyond surreal effects. “How do you go out of a surrealist aspect to something which is more about how we see clothing now? I think it’s kind of like a type of reduction,” he said. “Wanting to refine, and refine.”
3 March 2023
“I do feel like less is more. But in a new way,” said Jonathan Anderson. “I don’t think we’re heading into modernity like it was. It’s not like ’90s modernity; there’s something more peculiar happening.”In the time of the normalization of giant fashion productions, and entertainment, and the blizzard of distractions which are thrown between audiences and collections, it often feels—peculiarly—that the last thing we’re all being asked to consider is… clothes.Anderson is one of the vanishingly few in the luxurysphere who believes that it’s enough to put clothes, and speculative thinking about them, first. It’s reached the point where it feels radical, avant-garde, and a huge relief that he chooses to show Loewe in a stripped-back way, in the traditional manner, with a file of models walking around a white space. “I think—I hope—that we’re going into a period where it is about being uncomfortable in design,” he added. “That we are trying to find something new.”This conversation was in his debrief, after a menswear show that proved, par excellence, that there’s nothing more absorbing and mentally exciting than simply being able to react to the meanings of what’s before you. And to witness configurations of stuff you’ve never quite seen before.In Anderson’s world, the subject of clothes is multi-layered but startlingly focussed on clarity; what be called “a reductionist act.” His collection was about exaggerating the materiality of fashion fabrication into the realms of pure-lined 3D sculpture—full metal jackets beaten by artisans from copper and pewter; stand away structured coats molded by hat-makers.We craned forward to understand what he’d done with the short, back-fastened shirts. Some of them were rigid, wrinkled vellum—the work of traditional book-binders. Others were delicately made in hammered silk, a match for the boxer shorts, worn with nothing but leather ankle-boots. “I wanted the idea of something which is quite sensual underneath, with something quite hard,” said Anderson.Some of these boys wore angel wings. That’s where the reference spun sideways into the multiple art-historical/homoerotic sensibilities that focus Anderson’s vision. Partly, it was about resurrecting to modernity the iconography of old masters painters, specifically, the work of the French romantic allegories of Prud’hon and—more obviously in the space—the link Anderson has made with the young contemporary artist Julien Nguyen.
His digital artworks—referencing traditional painting techniques—of Nikos, a favorite boyish model of Loewe, were blown up in the center of the stage.What might end up sounding complicated was as distilled and to-the-point as could be. Anderson glorified Loewe’s craft skills in leather goods in textures of suede and shearling, shaved into sensuously tactile bulbous silhouettes in this show. But equally as head-turning were his pared-back, brilliantly on-the-money Loewe desirables: long, slimline coats in leather, and the reiterated wool shapes with deeply plunging cowl necklines.They were worn with a gesture—one arm out, crooked in a way which played on the mind like a memory of classical portraiture. Simple, but way out of the ordinary. Anderson felt that arriving at that coat had hit the quintessential mark. “Sometimes, by getting that one look, it helps you to create a narrative throughout the show,” he said. “There’s something in that it says everything and nothing at the same time. “
21 January 2023
It’s useful to think of this Loewe show as a companion piece to the JW Anderson collection in London. Whereas there Jonathan Anderson was prodding us into questioning the fakeness behind our screens, here he set out to explore the fake in nature. A giant fiberglass anthurium grew out of a hole in the floor in his show location, and he adapted the unreal-looking flower for clothing, molding bodices that wrapped around the torso and bra cups out of the suggestive blooms. These were not femme fleurs in the way fashion used to conceive of the term—for one thing the anthurium’s nubbly spadix looks like nothing so much as an erect phallus; for another the flower is poisonous. The women who will wear these dresses fancy themselves more dangerous than dainty.There’s a new element of provocation to Anderson’s work since the pandemic, an upping of the fashion ante that had his audience on the edge of their seats today. Part of the attraction of Loewe is the show before the show. This season, it included the costume designer Sandy Powell, the musicians Oliver Sim and Dev Hynes, the actors Maude Apatow and Hari Nef, and, on the runway in look 1, Taylor Russell, who stars alongside Timothée Chalamet in the Luca Guadagnino filmBones and All(the trailer of which was released just yesterday).Russell wore a strapless black velvet dress with panniers jutting out from the hips, a silhouette lifted out of the Baroque period via the 1920s robe de style that is once again appearing on the runways. Anderson revisited it in three other colors. Repetition was a motif in and of itself here. There was another quartet of strange dresses whose fronts were swagged and suspended from triangular wire peaks that reached up toward the face. Still more short styles—you could hardly call them dresses—were made from enameled metal painted with flowers. As for the babyless baby carriers, they looked sort of like fabric-covered versions of the gold breastplates that made such an impression on the Loewe runway a year ago. It all goes back to the anthurium flower, which Anderson’s show notes described as “a product of nature that looks like an object of design and [was] treated as such.
”The difference between industrial design and clothes is the body, and Anderson’s experiments with fiberglass and metal pose a question: Do they prohibit movement or help the women who wear them take up space? Ambiguities aside, there were softer pieces that showcased the Spanish brand’s know-how with leather, like oversized shirtdresses and sweatshirt dresses with split arms that let the limbs swing free, as well as romantic evening numbers whose delicate fabrics were gathered with bows at the waist.Anderson called the tops and trousers in the pixelated squares of Minecraft glitches “this odd illusion that suddenly breaks the pattern,” like avatars from the virtual world made flesh. Real fakes. Anderson keeps pushing the limits.
30 September 2022
Fashion is on the brink of entering the Metaverse, and arguably our human consciousness is already fused with our digital devices: Jonathan Anderson marked the moment with a speculative exploration around the subjects of perception, nature and progress for his Loewe men’s show. “A fusion of the organic and the fabricated,” he called it.On the one hand, part of his collection was seeded, watered and grown over 20 days in a polytunnel outside Paris. Chia plants and cat’s wort, living greenery, were made to sprout from trainers, tracksuit bottoms, jeans, coats. A collaboration—a fresh form of ephemerally beautiful painstakingly expert embroidery, really—which Anderson forged with the Spanish bio-designer Paula Ulargui Escalona. “This amazing girl I found who’s experimenting with cultivating plants onto fabric and garments.”And on the other: there was Anderson, toying with manipulating tech and his set to make this physical show appear to be a non-real, computer-generated entity when viewed via his livestreamed video and lookbook. “I like this idea of high definition, the idea of that you remove everything away from the clothing, and it becomes about silhouette,” he said in his backstage debrief.When you could drag your eyes away from the fascination of boggling at how Anderson had pulled off the verdant decoration, all was simplicity and clarity. Luxurious leather coats and hoodies, sometimes minimally tailored, and sometimes exaggeratedly puffed up. His ultra-desirable oversized sweaters, teamed with second-skin sport tights. Iterations of Loewe Puzzle bags, utilitarian cross-body and basket totes, dangling on logo ribbons: all of the above underscored his enormously successful talent at focussing on desirable items for the house of Loewe.There was more to this picture than that, though: the ones who walked down the white, metaversial slope of the set with wraparound masks, or coats and T-shirts implanted with screens playing videos of people kissing, flocks of birds at sunset, tropical fish, flowers and winking eyes. “When you're sitting on a train or in a cafe, everyone is looking at the screen,” said Anderson. “And in weird way, I was fascinated by this idea. What happens when a screen becomes the face?”At its best, stirring up cultural discussion is the job that fashion can take on. Anderson’s show and the waves it will make do just that. What he presented was less of a judgment than a question, though.
“I think we should have a place to be able to talk about these things constructively,” he said. Pitting nature against tech isn’t a forward-thinking formula, as far as he sees it: “Maybe out of this through we can find progression somehow.”
25 June 2022
In times when reality becomes outrageous and nonsensical, it’s only logical that fashion should start to reflect illogicality—especially at the consciously art-adjacent brand Loewe. Snippets from Jonathan Anderson’s backstage remarks about his fall show included “pushing things toward something that could be irrational” and the wordprimal.Anderson’s clothes included the following: a mini trapeze dress with a car trapped in the hem; tube dresses with high-heel pumps stuffed down them; rough-cut shearling pervily butting against latex; shoes entirely sunk in some sort of drawstring-bag galoshes; and balloons—lots of balloons: red ones squeezed between shoe straps and oozing from bandage-dress drapery; brown and beige ones blown up as bras, the knots bobbling along as obscene parodies of nipples.“A balloon creates tension,” Anderson observed. “It will pop. It won’t last forever.”Surrealism—the movement that turned pre–WW II mass psychological tension into art in the late 1930s—has never been more unwontedly relevant. As a period, it’s already under new scrutiny: A “Surrealism Without Borders” exhibition recently opened at the Tate Modern in London. But Anderson was already going surreal-ward last season—reveling in the freedom of being unshackled from fashion rules, doing things instinctively, without reason. It parallels a time when it was only human to respond dementedly to the trampling of order all around us.But there’s plenty of method in Anderson’s madness. His opening series of short leather, cap-sleeve dresses, the skirts molded to seem as if swishing in the wind, had a lot of Réne Magritte about them. The polish and luxurious colors—chestnut, pale pink—also had a lot to say about Loewe’s fundamental materials and skills as a leather-based house.A kind of meditation on leather as luxury was dotted around the show. If you didn’t get distracted by the rubber balloons (hard, admittedly), there was also a juicy leather balloon-shaped bomber to contemplate. There’s a cool-headed continuity too in Anderson’s long, elegant tube dresses—an idea he began last season and is smart to pursue, especially when he wrapped one of them in the Schiaparelli-like embrace of a pair of female-slash-feline begloved arms, on Julia Nobis.Anderson mentioned that he’d also been looking at feminist art.
There were references to the surrealist Meret Oppenheim (the furry shearlings, perhaps) and Lynda Benglis, who uses poured latex (the rubber tanks, maybe), that art-knowledgeable people would clock as footnotes. Still, the biggest art-Anderson-Loewe connection was set out before the audience in the center of the show: a series of squashes by Anthea Hamilton. The British sculptor and Anderson have already got together on Hamilton’s art performances at the Tate. The squashes, it turns out, were constructed for her in leather by craftspeople at Loewe.There’s clever marketing in all of these interconnections, these compliments to the intelligence of avant-garde, art-appreciating Loewe women of the world. They buy fashion for such things as gallery openings and art fairs: Loewe, in all its wild eccentricities, is a uniform for them.
4 March 2022
There’s something so obnoxiously buzzwordy about “the metaverse”—the marketing machine’s new mantra—you almost feel sorry for the science fiction writer who coined it three decades ago. When Jonathan Anderson referenced it in his J.W. Anderson collection last week, he said, “I was using it more in an ironic way. The idea that it doesn’t really do anything.” For all its techy surrealism, his Loewe collection wasnota wardrobe for the metaverse. In fact, it felt a lot like it was trolling the very idea of our digital existence lived on phones, and the hoopla whipped up around trendy concepts like the metaverse.If our attraction to VR and AR and whatnot is founded in the idea of possibility, Anderson’s collection was a twisted take on how these imaginings translate into real life. He illustrated it in decidedly normal things made abnormal. Shorts were embellished with sparkles that looked like raindrops, as if it had rained crystals. A wool coat had a gilded stain on its lower back “as if you sat on a park bench and it was gold.” Coats and tops were punched with big bathroom eyelets like you’d digitally dragged your most mundane morning surroundings into your wardrobe. Shoes looked like bags, and transparent coats were actually made of leather. Executed with deliberate naivety, Anderson’s subversions were testament to the frustrating limitations of the digital age: We’re so close, yet so far.A series of garments satirized our relationship with technology. The sleeves and lapels of a furry coat had fiber optic lights inside them creating the illusion of wetness, the illuminated waistband of trousers made them seem like they were floating, and the entire frame of a coat was lit up. “It’s the idea that you become backlit because everything on a phone is backlit,” Anderson said, referring to the way we see things on our phones and the way our screens light up our faces. Balaclavas with heart-shaped peepholes played on the idea of digital frames.Similarly, the orbital hem of a shirt and the waistband of shorts were bent in separate directions so it looked like you’d skewed them in FaceTune. It evoked the DIY editing accidents you sometimes spot in people’s selfies where the person looks like a supermodel while the retouching process has turned the background into an abstract painting. We all follow someone like that.
And those T-shirts and jumpsuits with faces and bodies printed on them like optical illusions? They were worn by the models who posed for them, distorting and reshaping their physiques the way we do on those beautifying apps.Anderson’s collection was an exercise in the surreal, but a post-digital era take on the genre, which he said was more “psychotic” in an existential way. (Try hard to understand the metaverse, NFTs and crypto-currency for long enough, and you’ll make yourself psychotic.) “Who are we? Where are we going? Is it real, is it not real? Are we in that moment? Do we believe what we say?” In a world where we’re more fascinated with creating a metaverse than improving the real one, those were good questions.Poignantly, the designer included elements of camouflage in the collection—printed on thick, rubberized silk—as an extension of those thoughts. “There’s something about camo at the moment that feels very odd as a relic: what we don’t want; what it was purposely used for. We don’t even do war anymore, we kind of do digital war,” Anderson reflected. Many elements in the show ultimately served as little wake-up calls: snap-out-of-it mechanisms. He presented the collection in a venue lined with torn up flags and covered in crystallized sand. “It’s not about sand as a pleasant experience,” Anderson forewarned. “In the end, everything turns to dust anyway.”
22 January 2022
Jonathan Anderson is definitely not in the “back to normal and forget” camp of fashion. He was on a mission to mark his comeback runway show at Loewe with a massive creative change. “We’ve had the pandemic, and now we have to come out of it different,” he said. “I think it’s a moment of experimentation. If you’re going to reset after this period, you need to allow a moment to birth a new aesthetic. Start again.”It took place in a purpose-built “blank space.” No props, no artworks, no available rabbit holes of reference to divert attention: just clothes. Three long black column dresses to begin with. Minimal—except for the fact that each had a metal structure beneath, each one thrusting a different 3D geometric shape from stomach, shoulder, hip. Then three more ankle-length tube-dresses, one in a blurry pale blue and flesh-colored print; one pale gray, the next primrose yellow.So, was Anderson about to offer up an elegantly calm, relatively straightforward palate-cleansing antidote to the complexities and confusions of stepping out into the world again? Not so fast. He has a restless mind, always fighting against the too-obvious response. “In a weird way, I wanted the collection to be hysterical,” he said. “So that there’s a tension. Because this is a strange moment.”This conversation with Anderson had taken place a few days before, during a Loewe fitting. There were no mood boards around. Getting to the freeing point of structuring newness means flying mood-board-free, trusting in instinct, randomness, and what looks good—oddly good—as he and his team set about draping and editing. “It’s more… psychological, I’d say,” he offered.But he provided one clue, on his phone, to the passages of pastel blues and pinks, the swags and wraps of chiffon—and the wing-like shoulder structure that suddenly threw the collection off the straight and narrow. It was a picture ofThe Deposition from the Cross, painted by the Italian Mannerist artist Jacopo Pontormo in Florence 1528. Anderson liked all the “ hysteria” of the figures in the painting; something resonated.As it happens—if Wikipedia can be trusted—Pontormo was painting at the end of an outbreak of plague in Italy; one of many waves of contagion that decimated populations in Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. Anderson didn’t mention that. For what can it possibly have to do with the context of fashion as it re-emerges from the certainties of 2019?But back to what he called the “chapters” of his show.
His fresh-start innovation combined ribbed jersey T-shirt material with golden breastplates—an echo, perhaps, of Claude Lalanne’s work for Yves Saint Laurent in the 1960s. There was an elevation of everyday fabric—white tanks terrifically teamed with chiffon balloon pants—and conceptual reworking of athletic tracksuits in taffeta. “Elevating the normal” as Anderson put it.On the feet were strappy shoes with heels surreally made from birthday candles, bottles of nail polish, a bar of soap. Bags in lavender or red were made from stiff teddy-bear fabric. Nothing made “sense”—but that was the daring and the fascination of this collection. We’re living in surreal times. Jonathan Anderson gets that, and is reflecting it back. Such experimentation with fashion is truly rare these days. Bravo to him for that.
1 October 2021
It’s as blindingly obvious as a flouro-yellow T-shirt that fashion’s in the mood for raving this summer. No need to overthink: the long-forbidden pleasures of dancing in close proximity to hundreds of others in a club—the heightened idealism of togetherness-in-hedonism that rave culture stood for—is a post-pandemic fantasy. Jonathan Anderson projected it here and beyond with all the multi-manifested photography, printed matter, video and social media imagery that surrounds his Loewe menswear collection. “A message of electrifying hope and optimism,” he called it.On a call from Paris, Anderson said it felt like a collection “that’s more personal to me in terms of clothing experimentation.” As a boy going to Ibiza on holiday with his family in the ’90s, he was an awed witness to the rave scene: “I went with my brother to Manumission; I remember just watching people and thinking, ‘Wow, in this moment these people could take over the world.’”Anderson’s ability to drink in his Balearic holidays from a tender age and turn them into retail gold is already wildly appreciated by the many, many global fans of Paula’s Ibiza, the smash-hit side-brand he’s created for Loewe. But the rave culture thread in this main line collection is something that goes deeper to who he is—and who he was in his formative years as a gay teen coming from conservative Northern Ireland, a country which only legalized same-sex marriage in 2020. The visual and emotional impact on the boy Anderson must have been vast. Was that the point where he first linked clothes with euphoria and freedom? “There’s nothing better than when you see a look that transforms your mind,” he remarked in a video on the Loewe website.Anderson’s work in menswear always circles around the inspiration of looking at teenage characters, the awkward beauty of youth: Those few years when everything about identity, sexuality, and rebellion is indelibly intense. As a designer, it’s where he mines his liberation from all sorts of norms—from the conventions of garment shape, to shaking up ideas of ‘what goes with what.’ He said he’d had time to properly examine all of that in the past year-and-a-half. “Why do I make clothing? What does gender mean? Or why am I drawn to showing [gender] neutrality within menswear?”
26 June 2021
Could a buttercup yellow Loewe handbag be medicinal? Jonathan Anderson was talking to his stylist Benjamin Bruno about the fact that he, Bruno, had started turning up at the studio wearing colorful yellow or pink T-shirts during the depths of the winter. “Benjamin said, ‘It’s color therapy, you know, when you wear a bright color you feel better!’” Anderson recounted. “So I was just like, Maybe that’s whatIneed: a bit of color therapy. So for me, this collection is a kind of letting go—it’s about clothing to get high on, to get off on.”Well, if you’re reading this, you’re already here for the buzz of what fashion can do visually, viscerally, and—if you’re a Loewe/JW Anderson fan—for the entertaining rush of having your intellect tickled by some odd new ideas. This season, well, it’s all about mood-changing zigzaggy prints; the curiosity of avant-garde shapes; perfectly placed, succulently colorful accessories; and what Danielle Steel is feeling about fashion. Saywhat? Go to Loewe’s website, and there, to be sure, you’ll hear the world’s best-selling novelist in a podcast with Anderson. This is “the ‘why not?’ era,” she remarks. “I’m much more into fun things now…. I like silly stuff. I guess I get more eccentric as I get older…. Life is serious enough!”The collaboration with Steel came about through Anderson’s connection with her daughter Vanessa Traina. In a continuation of his printed-matter lockdown show alternatives, he came up with a Loewe newspaper, within which is a trail of the first chapter of Steel’s new novel,The Affair. Neatly enough, it’s a tale about a New York fashion editor in chief. The paper, with all the pictures of the Loewe collection, is “being distributed to a million readers” including readers ofThe New York Times,Le Monde, andLe Figaro.In other words, it’s time to embrace the fun and euphoria of fashion again—or at least to be able to imagine ourselves into the time when we can. “As much as people always see the cynical in luxury fashion, there’s something in it that releases endorphins that make you feel good,” Anderson said in a Zoom call from the Loewe office. For the shoot, he rolled out the yellow carpet in Paris at the Le Train Bleu restaurant, his own office at Loewe, and a private members’ club off the Champs-Élysées.
Elaborate settings for Anderson’s skilled composition of bold internet-carrying shapes (half-moon sleeves, plate-sized buckles), his subtly wearable pieces (a royal blue suede pantsuit, a yellow nappa-leather coat) and a gamut of bags and shoes that deliver quirk to the adventurous and classicism to the conservative. “I don’t see this as a collection about fantasy. I think it’s about this idea of projecting what a new reality will hopefully be,” he said. “I think fashion is going to be important in the next while, in making people gain the confidence of going back out and dressing up again. The whole point of this collection is: Believe it, and it will happen.”
5 March 2021
Things to see in this Loewe menswear lookbook: there are two collections, and the one at the bottom is produce from the company’s Eye/Loewe/Nature sustainable-practice department. Things to know: this time, the communication came as a show-in-a-book, wrapped up in a coffee-table sized monograph on the queer New York artist Joe Brainard, and as a show-on-a-shirt—a huge T-shirt printed with all the sustainable-practice pictures.Why Brainard? “I remember zines he’d done in the ’70s. We remade a book on him which we’ll be selling in bookshops, and the proceeds will go to the charity we work with all the time, Visual Aids, to help artists who have suffered from AIDS,” says Jonathan Anderson. “I felt like Brainard is so important. He was part of a huge movement, with his writing and his pansy collages—his work is now at MOMA and the Pompidou. I like his writing, it has huge optimism, questions sexuality and things like that. But he’s one of those underground figures.”Anderson talks through the collection in an open-access video on the Loewe website, where it’s easy to see the assembly of charming pansy patterns made into big cardigans, or vast rectangular trousers, or inset as leather marquetry on Loewe Puzzle bags. You also get to understand how the panels of a patchwork shearling are pieced together from reproductions of Brainard’s canvases. And how a tote bag is decorated with the artist’s painting of a whippet on a green background. It’s all adorable and completely wantable. And the extra kick to the feel-good sensation of buying it is that your money is also going to do somegoodin the world.“I think the whole thing now is about clothingandsomething else,” says Anderson. “I think the customer wants more than just the clothing now. They want to make sure you have a unique viewpoint and, at the same time, a moral viewpoint.” A joyful vision and a bit of a mad-creative take on fashion are also rare luxuries to enjoy vicariously these days, what Anderson calls “being imaginative with clothing.” His current work on extreme trouser shapes delivers all that. Besides the multi-strapped leather and grommeted punk trousers, the pieces that might read as maxi-skirts actually turn out to be pants too. “I did a lot of wide, wide, super-wide trousers. Kind of performance trousers—this idea of being in your bedroom and dancing on your own.” Which we know is an actual social phenomenon in these days of lockdown.
23 January 2021
Jonathan Anderson totally understands something vital about fashion’s role—the happiness it releases when it gives us something we didn’t know we were missing but recognize and adore when we see it. Just one glance at the exuberant, freewheeling gestures of the women in action in his Loewe look book sends that sensation surging back. “We have to start loving fashion again,” he declares. “We don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring. So let’s enjoy it!”From the clothes’ voluminous playfulness to the active involvement of 16 intergenerational women right through to the intricate handwork in the pieces, this was Anderson’s great big blowing up of all the creative limitations that threaten to drive fashion back to dullness in these dark times. “We were all in confinement when we were doing this. We had huge issues getting fabrics, so we used what we had. My brief was: Just make your fantasy of what you want! It was a massive team effort. Each look is to show craft and fashion.”There are mind-spinning, multidisciplinary, multi-platformed layers to unpack here. In a tangible sense, the Show-on-the-Wall was delivered as a kit of life-size posters, with a roll of art-printed wallpaper commissioned from Anthea Hamilton, a pair of scissors, wallpaper paste, and a brush. Hamilton is there as one of Anderson’s poster women, striking a semi-martial-arts pose in a puffy white dress ruched up with parachute tape. The video artist Hilary Lloyd, who collaborated with Anderson for a men’s Loewe show, and the painter Jadé Fadojutimi both swirl in generously layered black taffeta trapeze dresses.Others portrayed wear pieces that evoke Spanish and Dutch Old masters—a theme Anderson has been interested in for a while—in crisp scalloped-edge broderie anglaise dresses with wires sewn into the collars and skirts. A huge padded and ruched under-pannier is seen through a black chiffon overskirt. Pants and sleeves balloon. Quite literally, they speak volumes about women taking up space in the world. “Poetic armor,” Anderson called it, the idea of “escaping into clothes.” Handy, too, for socially distanced times.He also talked about “rethinking the models” of fashion—a comment you can take to mean both the expanded inclusivity in this season’s casting and the way he is remaking the Loewe business model to act as a “cultural brand.
” Integral to that is the focus Anderson trains on the craft culture of the house and the seamless, socially conscious interconnections he makes with contemporary art and artists. “Through this entire year, the idea of craft and making has never been more crucial,” he says. “It engages with people. It shows responsibility and protection of things that people are forgetting are important in this industry. It employs people and ultimately is about the legacy that we pass from generation to generation.”
2 October 2020
Fashion people have been bandying about terms like ‘experiential,’ ‘immersive,’ ‘multi-platform’ and ‘digital’ for years, but only now—in the midst of the horrendous crisis of the pandemic—have creative people started breaking through the walls of all that jargon. What Jonathan Anderson orchestrated on July 12th around the launch of Loewe’s spring 2021 collection and its women’s pre-collection felt like a long-needed quantum leap into the new world of open-ended possibilities. Where would a designer who’s always talked about Loewe as ‘a cultural brand’ and his links with artists and artisans go? How can the truth of tactility and emotion be felt when no congregational live event is possible?In a midday Zoom call, Anderson said that in the initial shock, he’d tussled with confronting how to carry on. “In the first two weeks of the lockdown, I hated being in the job I do. There’s been a couple of weeks where I’ve really struggled to know why I’m doing this; feeling powerless because you’re not saving lives, or because you’re part of a weird elite.” But then he rallied, “realizing you’re trying to save jobs through this, that there’s a whole ecosystem of families, people who’ve been making bags for generations.”On one level, what he came up with felt like dipping into a 24-hour Jonathan Anderson-curated worldwide live summer festival of arts, crafts, and conversations on Loewe’s Instagram page and website. “My whole thing is to do something in each time zone,” he said, from his London home, around 12PM British Standard Time. The program rolled from Beijing time onwards, connecting with (amongst others) crafts-collaborators Kayo Ando, who showed the art of Shibori, paper artist Shin Tanaka from Japan and the basketweave artist Idoia Cuesta in Galicia, Spain. There was music curated by Adam Bainbridge (aka Kindness), who showcased a calming ‘medley’ comprising different versions of Finnish musician Pekka Pohjola’sMadness Subsides, performed by Park Jiha in Korea, performer and producer Starchild, French-Malagasy pianist and bandleader Mathis Picard, and American harpist Ahya Simone. Lots more roved through live chats between Anderson and the actor Josh O’Connor, and, later, a conversation with contemporary textile artists Igshaan Adams, Diedrick Brackens, Anne Low, and Josh Fraught.
And on another level, there was the Loewe Show-in-a-Box, a cache of paper-art discoveries delivered as a tactile substitute runway experience to the doorsteps of the people who’d ordinarily have trooped to Paris for the show in the Before Times. It was a grander follow-up to the JW Anderson show-box he sent around last week. This one was a large linen-covered box file. Inside was a pop-up show set, a flip-book of photos of the clothes on mannequins, a paper-pattern of one of the garments, print-outs of sunglasses to try on, textile samples, a set of paper pineapple bags and looks to stick together to make your own 3D ‘models,’ and a pamphlet listing Anderson’s art history inspirations. Slipped alongside was a packet of cut-out paper portrait silhouettes he’d had made of Loewe staff members. “I like that they’re kind of immortalized in this moment,” he said.
12 July 2020
Jonathan Anderson’s reading of the fashion situation for women in 2020 is quite simply this: “We have to push it somewhere new.” Fashion might always seem to be about that—it’s why the system is built on seasons or, these days, on the frenetic speed of “drops”—but among all the churning out of market-ready product, the idea of luxury fashion as the medium of the avant-garde somehow went missing. Anderson is now fully committed to bringing it back. “Dressing to impress—I think that’s an exciting thing,” he declared, as he described his mission. “Looking at building new types of silhouettes that can work in an abstract way. Trying to take a risk, maybe in my own self.”What he began with—the volumized “entrance-making” shapes he showed in his terrific collection for his eponymous brand in London—was followed through with inspirational conviction at today’s Loewe show. It’s always a good sign of innovation—of things we haven’t quite seen before—when clothes can’t be easily described in stock fashion language. Loewe came up to that mark: What were they, these brocade dresses, gathered into matte black frontages? How do we talk about those horizontal pelmets suspended at mid-upper-arm level? How to capture the shoulder-extending device from which caped-back sleeves were suspended?Extra good is the fact that they don’t need labored explanation; they landed in that category of fashion desire that comes under the heading of You Never Knew You Wanted It Till You Saw It. Anderson said he didn’t quite know exactly how he’d arrived at them either. “But sometimes it’s nice to feel vulnerable when you’re doing a collection—that you don’t know what the outcome is going to be before you start.”In pushing across the frontiers of the norm, Anderson relies partly on spontaneity—things that happen to crop up in the draping process in the studio and look right. “Exaggerating by illusion” is one way he described the process. Yet the thing about Anderson is that his creative push is also part of his incredibly prescient long-term strategy to turn Loewe into what he’s called “a cultural brand”: i.e., one he’s constructed as a fashion home for the art-owning and gallery-going international constituency. Those who know their Zurburans from their Velasquezs and are appreciators of Loewe’s sponsorship of contemporary arts and crafts will thrill to the subtle Spanish semiotics Anderson embeds here.
Was that the hint of flamenco in the raw-edge tiers in a gray flannel coat and the triple-fluted sparkle-dusted sleeves of a ribbed-knit dress? Something Goya-esque in the form of the incredibly chic gilt-buttoned cloaks?The beauty of it is that Anderson has now brought a calm to all this. “I learned at JW how to cut out the noise,” he said, “the idea of stripping it back to a one-piece look.” That’s the high ground of leadership he’s gained through experience and commercial success. How great that he’s seizing it to exercise the freedom to make fashion a place where the creative idealism is still alive.
28 February 2020
That gesture of holding something in front of the mirror to see how it looks—anyone who loves clothes remembers what it was like to discover that heady sensation for the first time. Jonathan Anderson does—you could just see it the second a boy wearing a gold draped lamé dress fixed to the front of his outfit stepped onto the Loewe runway. Said Anderson: “I was thinking of ’50s couture—and a child trying something on. What do you look like in the mirror?” Thus the two themes that have been running through this menswear season were bound together in one collection: boyhood and the transference of ideas about haute couture into menswear.“A fantasy wardrobe,” Anderson called it. “Playful. Optimistic. Pretty boys.” The dresses—there were three in the show—were a kind of signifying accessory, attached, apron-like, with leather straps. They said a lot about the way Anderson has always worked in the studio, experimenting with garments in free association and trusting happenstance to trigger something aesthetically significant.The mirror image was it: his way to reflect and project the universal freedom young imaginations have to roam identities before socially gendering norms set in. The results read delightfully and cannily all over the show.Anderson put boys in coats that had “couture structures, on a woman’s block.” There was a white fit-and-flare shearling, a high-waist grey princess-line coat, one with a gathered neckline. Gesturing to an Op Art zebra-print double-breasted caped silhouette, Anderson chuckled, imagining what a kid might feel whirling about in it, “converted into a superhero.”The childlike-couture lens led him to blow up the elephant shapes of existing Loewe mini leather goods to become oversized tote toys; to sprinkle crystal bling on sweaters, dangle diamanté jewelry on black patent booties; to weave a coat dress from floral-print scarves. Anderson pointed out his own favorite—a shirt appliquéd with a pair of geese. It instantly brought the old English saying leaping to mind: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”That might almost be the design motto at Loewe. The point is that everyone, gender regardless—the geese, the ganders, and the tiny little Insta-chicks—is welcome to pick and choose from what Anderson designs and delivers to Loewe stores. The straight-up traditional appreciators of classic shearlings and countrified blanket coats are served. Women can shop across men’s departments, and vice versa, without even noticing.
And that makes clever, sophisticated business sense when it comes down to it.
18 January 2020
Ethereal, poetic,andaristocraticwere three words Jonathan Anderson used to describe his Loewe Spring collection, and he wasn’t exaggerating. From his first look out, a white lace tunic with a ruff collar over matching trousers, the visual accumulation of the exquisitely refined, minutely crafted clothes that followed was almost incalculably overwhelming. For once that whole set of fashion clichés truly applies: It was stunning, uplifting, incredible to watch.Anderson has already succeeded in putting craft and handwork at the heart of Loewe—his intuition that people would respond to the touch of a human hand in the digital age has proven spot-on. This time, he moved it onto a different plane, away from the earthy vernacular of the homemade and into the realms of “a different kind of craft, which is ultimately historical,” he said. “I looked at the 16th and 17th centuries, where the craft was in the tiniest thing . . . where you had to rely on precision.”Techniques of lace-making and fine embroidery that a modern audience might associate only with antique treasures and museum portraits were brought to life in layers of pristine transparency. It tested the eye and the vocabulary to capture what was being seen: Chantilly, guipure, and marguerite lace; drawn threadwork; sprigged voile shapes; and memories evoking christenings, weddings, chemises, nightdresses, and the laundered and starched household linens of the past.But not “of the past” at all. The real genius of Anderson is how subtly he embeds his references in a wardrobe that is wholly designed for today. Romance and escapism are all very well in theory, but when fashion brinks on costume, it will only ever live in fashion pictures. Anderson’s ambition for Loewe is far more applied than that—he’s a born merchandiser who wants his clothes to be bought and worn. The maximalism of the quality is streamlined into gracefully minimalist fit-and-flare shape, the silhouette he’s stamped on the house. “I thought: Keep the silhouette and expand on it,” he said. Profits are pouring into the bottom line because of that.And another thing to notice: Anderson is a brilliant practitioner of subliminal brand messaging. Loewe is a Spanish house, and that doesn’t just register in the stream of desirable and functional fine leather bags he continually tools for the label. The aristocratic Spanish-ness was right there too, even in the headline-grabbing pannier-hip dresses he sent out in this show.
Think about it; it’s a shape that reverberates with Spanish cultural significance—with Velázquez’s 1656Las Meninasportrait of the Spanish royal family. All his revivals of lace and linen fit into that context too—the marvelous fabrics depicted in the paintings of Goya and Zurbarán and the golden age of Spain, which line the galleries of the Prado in Madrid, Loewe’s home city.The class of contemporary art-world customers who Anderson has magnetized to Loewe will doubtless appreciate that signaling. This collection was an intelligent tour de force on every level. And as high flown and beautiful as it is, Anderson is determined that it will be delivered in every detail.
27 September 2019
Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe show drew a beautiful picture of the collective longing for spiritual escape into what he called “a childlike dream state” somewhere far, far away from the harsh realities of messed-up modern life.You could guess pretty well how his djellaba-clad procession of wanderers had reached that blissed-out plane. The first model, wearing a kind of white smock-shirt and wide cotton trousers, had a metal disc pendant on a leather thong strung around his neck and a couple of what looked like party favors, sprouting feathers, tucked behind each ear. Later on, another had strapped the same disc—which had a hole in its center—around his forehead. A portal into the mind, perhaps—a third eye.The symbolism resonated, because Anderson has created Loewe as a head culture all its own. It’s a place where he’s taken old hippie values—for tuning into eclecticism and handmade crafts—and levitated them as a 21st-century luxury-grade cult. The feeling in the room was palpable: His audience was made up of total converts to the entire trip and all its sensations—the complete picture of layered textures, stripes, and colors, and especially the sight of ultrarefined suede, cut into caftans with matching trousers. An alternative suit, if ever there was one.Anderson free-associates when he talks about his work. He spoke of romanticism, youth, the spiritual value of fantasy: “We have to be aware of what’s going on in the world, but sometimes it’s good to dream. Why should people not be in a fantasy state? Maybe they’ll find something.”All emotionally true, perhaps, but Anderson is hardly a designer with his head in the clouds. His view of Loewe as a super-refined Spanish leather goods company is totally grounded in product. This collection, with its huge inventory of inventive knitwear, Roman sandals, moccasins, espadrille boots, slip-on leather shoes, and array of bags shows how far fashion desires have traveled from wanting to conform to mono trends. Anderson promises, instead, a store in which you can “find yourself”—that old hippie path to individualism, now leading to an irresistible shopping experience.There was a telling insight into Anderson’s thinking at the end of his backstage briefing. “Obviously, Loewe’s first really big moment was in the ’70s,” he remarked. That was before he was born, but the Anderson family spent their holidays in Ibiza—a center of neo-hippie lifestyle to this day.
His experiment in launching Paula’s Ibiza as a Loewe sub-brand, spun out of thinking about the homemade market fare sold on the Balearic island, was kind of a test run to see how far he could go with artsy-craftsy casual bits and pieces. The answer is: Far, very far. The direction he took this collection blew people’s minds.
22 June 2019
Sometimes, it’s possible to feel a great big thought bubble rising up over an audience as a show is taking place—a palpable women’s consensus hovering right there, without a word being spoken. A huge, happy one, with cartoon rays of pleasure shooting out of it, bobbed up at Loewe, unmistakably carrying the words,Ah! It’s going to be okay!Whether or not Jonathan Anderson has deliberately set out to fill the Phoebe Philo void in fashion, his Fall collection for Loewe stepped in and did that in its own way—without the kind of “Old Céline” mimicry that has sophisticated women rolling their eyes. The proof: his knack for smoothing away the contradictions between simple, clean silhouettes and craft and texture, between a sense of now and an honoring of history. “It’s quite strict and crafted,” he said. “Craft under a microscope. It became about reducing things. How do we see silhouette?”In his own JW Anderson show in London, he had talked about “stripping away noise” to concentrate on fashion. The same applied at Loewe: There was no complex set to wander around, no special furniture or literature to try to appreciate—just a black-tiled floor in a white box. Only, on one wall, easily missed in the crush to enter, there was a line of Dutch, French, and English portrait miniatures painted in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.The relationship between these tiny exquisite works of art and the collection was both in the encouragement to look closely and in the tangential free association laced through shapes and fabrics. There were poet’s-sleeve blouses, coats with Puritan collars, severe black waisted coats with leather piping, dresses which started as cream roll-neck sweaters and ended in handkerchief-fine white cotton lawn.You could see something courtly in a sweater smothered in pearls but worn with stiff denim jeans—if you chose to. The finale piece, an incredible white lace-edged dress with zigzagged lappets and pearls pouring from the trumpet sleeves of a black linen coat might indeed have been studied from a portrait of a Cavalier lady—yet on second glance, it was “only” a shirtdress.This is the thing about the creative plane on which Anderson has arrived: What he’s now doing is modern clothing, not costume or “concept.” The reason the center holds when there’s so much variety going on is that Loewe is grounded in great product—see the coat with the simple chic of the “dripping” collar—with a brilliant frisson of eccentricity tossed in.
Unforced and easy to understand, it was one of the most highly smash-and-grab-able collections of the season so far.
1 March 2019
Jonathan Anderson has joined the ramping-up of menswear shows in Paris this season, taking Loewe men’s from an exhibition presentation to a runway format for the first time. “After five years, I felt like we needed to show it moving,” he said. “Menswear has quadrupled since we began.”Positioned as backdrop, setting the tone, there was a yellow ocher cloth sculpture by Franz Erhard Walther. His body of work—performances which involve getting people to assemble fabric on their bodies in unconventional ways—is an apt metaphor for Anderson’s knack for abstracting shapes and putting familiar/unfamiliar details in odd places.This time, he’d evolved what looked on first sight to be chaps, which flapped open to add an ’80s type of volume in the trouser leg. On second, third, and fourth sights, it became clear that they were actually unzipped boots, going all the way up to a belt. Over to Anderson: “We were looking at gaiters and fishermen. It was early-’80, kind of, when we unzipped them. It created kind of flaps—Western, but non-Western. It was how to take something fetish and de-fetishize it.” Plus, they served the purpose of flagging the message: This is a luxury leather house.Here’s the thing about Anderson, though. In one breath, he can be parsing the multiple meanings behind an object, and in the next be speaking merchandise: “How do you take basics, and make them fashionable? It’s about the border between these two. How do you get a customer to buy just a knit, and get the full impact of it?”The point is that Anderson’s high-concept approach is a deceptively solid framework for unerringly desirable pieces which have people running to get their hands on them. That goes for his own JW Anderson label as well as for the handcrafted ethos he’s installed as central to Loewe’s luxury attraction. Take the variety of knits—running the gamut from a kind of striped caftan to elongated sweaters to a skinny rugby shirt with cashmere track pants in a different striped colorway. Or the simple, genius quirk of a striped blue-and-white shirt with beige shearling popping out of its seams. Or any of the bags showcased here: a cornflower blue leather fanny pack, an enlarged men’s version of the women’s Puzzle bag, to name but two.We haven’t got on to the tailoring yet, but we must: It’s another high-fashion shot in the arm for Loewe’s fashion quotient. Looks were slim in the torso, with wide-ish trousers. A pin-striped iteration had one lapel in white satin.
“I like the idea of an Oxford bag, it’s very elegant, I think. We’d done the suit in the women’s collection—we kept the waist, and extended the back,” said Anderson. “There’s something quite chic and suave about it.”
19 January 2019
“It’s free; it’s sensual; it’s satin; it’s a mass of textures. I feel this is what the brand is becoming—its DNA,” said Jonathan Anderson in his show debrief at Loewe. “I had the idea about people walking through a gallery space who are individuals but connected by a common thread.”What is that common thread? Will bohemian, relaxed, grown-up, and classy do? It’s hard to put a finger on it while avoiding fashion clichés, but here it is: A sense of cultivated elegance is coming from fashion’s new guard—and Anderson is in the vanguard of it. Looking down the long barrel of history, it’s a movement that is stepping in to put the values of craft and individual choice back into that much-debased term, luxury. A psychological replacement for the role minimalism used to play.Anderson had his models walk among works by three disparate contemporary artists in the landmark UNESCO heritage building. It’s his seasonal curatorial practice, part of the subliminal flattery in being invited here. Ergo: You are now entering a zone in which you will be treated as if you have an intelligent art-attuned mind, and then I am going to tempt you to death with a beautifully made assembly of clothes and accessories handmade for the person you are.What we saw was a continuation of Anderson’s almost universally sympathetic fit-and-flare house silhouette, even-easier-to-wear caftans, and tons of woven and knitted textures. He did interesting yet not-too-deconstructed pantsuits and exceptional dresses—one of patchwork quilting, and another, a delicately crumpled pink nightie edged in lace flowers.Of course, Loewe is a bag show, and this time one of superb variety. Anderson used the word “totemic” to describe them, and yes, you could kind of see what he meant: the idea of a bag—be it in fringed leather, crocheted raffia, canvas, or basketry playing the role of a treasured portable art object—signifying belonging to the tribe of the refined and discreetly wealthy.Anderson is still too young to be accused of being “mature.” Perhaps, it’s just that he is of the new generation that can see “mature” ideas with new eyes. He’s certainly learned to understand the power of consistency—taking his time to consider, refine, and not rush on from one thing to another is a good thing, especially for customers who consciously reject the constant buffeting of trend for trend’s sake. He said as much: “It’s about not being antsy, thinking,Oh, we need to go here, we need to do that.
” And then, he distilled it all in a single phrase: “It’s a celebration of being beautiful.”
28 September 2018
Jonathan Anderson’s lookbook for Loewe menswear was shot by the great Duane Michals, the trailblazing American art photographer whom Anderson has always revered. The slightly nutty scenarios you see before you here—a boy with a bunch of clocks, one with an easel, another sitting atop library steps—are seen through the camera lens of a man who was shooting portraits of Surrealist artists in the last century. That connection inspired Anderson to source some overtly surrealist components for his static presentation. Once we’d shuffled across a showroom, the floor of which was strewn with pom-poms, we got to see the season’s exhibits in close-up. One of them was a pair of needlepoint gentlemen’s slippers with a pair of trompe l’oeil naked feet embroidered onto them. “We had them made in Africa,” Anderson declared.Care and invention in the making of things is one of the narrative strands Anderson has so cleverly woven into his creative direction of this old, established Spanish leather goods house. Clever, because formerly there was only the esoteric story of the fine leather production to talk about, and now there’s a whole tangible culture that Anderson has built on his zeitgeist-y instinct that certain types of art-engaged people are ready to be very interested in how things are made. He pushed for Loewe to start a Craft Prize last year; the second edition’s exhibition, held at the Design Museum in London, had, he said, “more visitors than they’ve had since the musem’s opening night.” Effectively, he’s overhauled a staid and worthy term—craft—and made it engaging and sexy for the first time in living memory.Now he’s taking it to the next level, speaking, by the by, about the intrinsic content of some of the clothes. What looked like a regular marled-wool crewneck sweater turned out to be knitted from tape made from shredded recycled clothing at a specialized recycling plant in Italy. A knitted sweater and matching shorts were made from undyed, organically grown cotton. Not everything was sustainably made, but the quality of what is produced makes it impossible to imagine as disposable clothing. More like lifetime keepers, whether it’s a tan shearling jacket with military frogging at the top of the luxury end or a woven basket with crocheted medallions, one of the company’s most accessibly priced items. The fact that not all of it is shown in the lookbook somehow adds to the allure.
Anderson is seeing through policies and theories people used to only talk about. It’s given Loewe a particular, quirky character that keeps surprising and reeling in folks who’d like to belong to a shared understanding of objects that are “good” and worth collecting.
21 June 2018
There will be coat wars ahead. So many collections, so much outerwear this season! In this vintage year, surely retailers are going to have to take their pick between what brands have to offer. At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson made a very strong pitch for owning the top of the field, with a score of no less than 15 coats on his runway—something to cover every possible use, from a walk in the country, to commuting, to school runs, attending private views, events, dinners, and the like. Why stop at a duffle coat, a tufty shearling, a black-and-white chevron-patterned fit-and-flare midi? There is evening, too: a quite elegantly beautiful black trapeze with puffy leather cuffs. Even to those of us who’ve barely been to an opera, the idea of arriving somewhere in that evening coat was aspirational.It’s possible to imagine that Anderson spends a lot of time plotting out this sort of woman’s lifestyle. The boxed, art-curated environment at the UNESCO building into which he invites his guests suggests he sees her as a complicated sophisticate; maybe an art collector or gallerist. This season, he had her listening to a recording from mindfulness guru Mt. Wolf. The audio bade us remember how simple and happy life can be, if only we connect with the fundamental human being inside all of us. All well and good. It made us observe Anderson’s clothes even more intently.It was good when he concentrated on furnishing this woman with clearly functional daywear—perhaps the country tweed suit with leather poacher pockets, the narrow tunics with flowing polka-dot jabots, the moment when he put a navy V-necked shirt over a long white lace skirt. As Anderson’s work reiterates, he is there to emphasize the finesse of Loewe’s craft skills in leatherworking. It was impressive to wonder about how such things as the white cotton dress had been constructed with vertical strips of dark blue leather which clustered from the torso, and then let go to radiate through skirt and sleeves.Something Anderson still has to learn is to hold back from over-complication. Some of the flesh-baring, suspended, craft-y dresses, and the open backs cut into suits, were puzzlingly self-defeating. The syndrome of trying too hard has messed up more than a couple of good young designers’ work this season. Anderson and all of them should know that all women want is essentially straightforward clothes with a purpose. He was halfway towards a great collection, but those distractions did hold him back.
2 March 2018
At a time in fashion when everything’s up for questioning, Jonathan Anderson has taken a completely unique tack when it comes to presenting Loewe for men. This time, in addition to setting up a static exhibition of products at the Loewe showroom in Paris, he was also exhibiting another coup: a black-and-white photo narrative series—imagined as a story about a magician—he’d commissioned from the celebrated 85-year-old American artist Duane Michals. “He had carte blanche,” Anderson said. “He came to Madrid and shot these tableaux in an old theater. He painted the backdrops and made the props.” The magician, played by the actor Josh O’Connor, makes the model Erik Frey appear in a new Loewe outfit with each new “trick.”Michals’s frames—tiny in scale—lined the room, making viewers peer in, spending time to take in the story. Why go to such left-field trouble to promote a brand? One reason: because Anderson likes following his instincts for researching art and craft. Another: because he can. His success at Loewe after four years has been exponential, lending the brand a distinct arts-and-crafts–based character and underpinning it with wildly successful product lines—the Puzzle bag being just one—in double-quick time.The products were impressively on display at the showroom. You could reach out and touch everything: the duffle coats with their tufty shearling yokes, the incredibly soft padded and quilted leather bomber jacket, the shirts collaged with sailor’s knots, and the super-popular Loewe loose-weave jeans. The style of it, if you had to put a name to it, would land somewhere in the area of rustic, with a preppy accent, yet borne of super-sophisticated materials. “For me, it’s about the internal workings of a brand like Loewe,” Anderson said, pointing out the top-grade suede the Spanish house had been famous for long before LVMH bought it. His smartness, however, extends to puncturing any sense of snobbery around this sophisticated label. Scattered throughout were tapestry embroideries, cute coin purses, and leather key rings variously made in the shapes of squirrels, ladybirds, owls, and even a rugby ball.Soft humor in a hard world, the experience of contemplating a great 20th-century American artist’s work for free—these are the byways of Loewe’s fashion that will stick in the mind as the rest of the super-turbocharged luxury-fashion highway thunders on.
18 January 2018
She’s a traveling woman, “a bit more bohemian,” Jonathan Anderson was saying backstage. “She's broken out of her domestic space and she’s freer.” On this notional neo-hippy trip of hers, this enviably serene-looking Loewe wearer had picked up all kinds of souvenirs. Liberty prints from London, paisleys from India, traditional handwoven fabrics from South America and North Africa, a patchwork quilt from the United States, and a mother-of-pearl shell pendant picked up (one fantasized) either in an expensive art gallery shop in the South of France or from a peddler on any beach from Bali to St Barth. From four looks in, there can scarcely have been a woman in the audience who didn’t want to just beher.And for some, that’s absolutely going to include her taste in crazy curly-toe trainers. What the . . . Jonathan? “They were based on a pair of Moroccan slippers I loved and had for ages,” he laughed. “They’re like elf shoes! They were humorous. There’s no sense to them. But they make you laugh!”The dash of out-there ridiculousness amidst the calm of this incredibly easily understood collection only served to enhance it. “Relatable” and “accessible” are often used as fashion-snob synonyms for inexpensive product. Yet Anderson’s redefinition of the hollow termluxuryhas filled it with tangible new meaning. On the one hand: On sight, you know where you could wear one of these T-shirt dresses or one of Anderson’s familiar long-midi fit and flare things. A romantic heart would sing to have one of those modern-day Tess of the d’Urbervilles cotton flower-print dresses. This is no-trouble fashion of a high-flown order. And on the other hand: You absolutely see it’s going to be incredibly expensive, and that it’s worth it. The level of innovative materiality going on in Loewe’s workshops—the craft, plus the sophistication—is astonishing. That is a subject Anderson really cares about: “If you don’t put the time into craft,” Anderson reasoned, “What’s the difference for the consumer who is going to touch the product?”This is a designer who thinks right through to the reality in a store. “You can watch the show—which is a funny thing,” he said, “but at the end of the day, I want something people will want to go in and touch.”The collection piqued that tactile curiosity, all right. There were mind-warping new applications of technique—like a half-shredded trenchcoat with the strands crimped into twirls.
Other treatments, like the crushed gingham panels on T-shirt dresses, the patchworking on jeans, or the bobbly white knit involved in a squashy bag, seemed to have a wholesome, country-peasant provenance about them. If there’s anything that will get grown women to shop again, this is it. Mad, curly-toe things and all.
29 September 2017
Perhaps there should be a study on the contribution fashion brands can make to upping national tourism statistics. An Irishman he may be, but whatJonathan Andersonis doing to promote the attractiveness of Spain through his work at Loewe should bring him to the attention of some government department—if it hasn’t already. Using Salvador Dalí’s house at Cadaqués in Catalonia as a background for his menswear campaign is the latest episode in his methodical underscoring of thelabel’s identityas a fine leather goods company founded in Madrid in 1846 (though, of course, it’s been part of the French LVMH group for a long time).The real-time communication with the press was via an exhibition at the brand headquarters at the Rue Bonaparte in Paris. “I think this is my favorite way of showing,” Anderson said. “After all the trouble we take to design, and then shoot the pictures, you want people to be able to see the work up close.” Smart: Because it’s all tactile, handcrafted stuff, accented with an off-beam quirkiness that tenuously relates to Dalí’s Surrealism. Thus we came across a bizarre pointed tapestry hat Anderson described as “a kind of fez” at the nonsense one-off end of the range, and leather key-ring charms in the shape of crabs, shells, and dolphins at the other, definitely commercial souvenir end.As Anderson pointed out, the menswear collection “never existed before at Loewe,” so it’s a work in progress. In the mix there were such things as a seriously luxe lavender mohair suit, but also—for Anderson is a pragmatist—lighthearted easy-to-wear sweaters (one with an anchor motif, another with a naive piratical skull and crossbones appliqué). It all contributes to the sense of a developing culture he’s growing around the brand—something involvingly warm and authentic rather than distant and forever inaccessible to a young person. The navy canvas shoulder bag stamped with the wordWelcomesummed it up.
22 June 2017
Fashion trades in temptation; in causing that uncontrollable, visceral impulse that something must be owned, no matter the price. That sensation is harder than ever for a designer to generate at a time when the fear of the future puts the brakes on spending; something which even affects people who’ve stacked up financial reserves a-plenty. Jonathan Anderson put a pithy British message on that subject on theLoeweshow invitation. Hand-embroidered on a linen square in charming white chain-stitch, it read: “You Can’t Take It With You.”“I thought it was very positive,” he remarked backstage. “And chilling at the same time.” Well, Carpe Diem—enjoy now, splurge now, for tomorrow we die—is a valid creative response to the times. We’ve been seeing that in the glittery escapism which is manifesting itself all over, but at Loewe Anderson took a sophisticated tack, plunging fashion people into the sensory shock of an art installation. To find their seats, they were forced to grope through a pitch-dark labyrinth illuminated only by spotlights trained on a vast collection of orchids positioned high up on the walls. There was something both decadent and primal about it: a beautiful, accusatory conservatory at the end of the world. What were we doing, sitting in this expensive and terrifying place? Have we done this to nature?But enough of things which can’t be seen in the pictures! None of the expense lavished on the Loewe setup would have been justified had the clothes not been great, but they were; an extraordinary variety of fabric-development, swishily attenuated midi dresses and handheld bags. What makes Loewe so interesting now—apart from its handmade textures—is the way that styles and patterns can be culled from so many sources without descending into chaos. With Anderson orchestrating, a puffy-sleeved, 18th-century off-the-shoulder dress can co-exist with a caramel cashmere coat; a patchwork dress with a flavor of the American West walks alongside something striped with burned-out patches filled in with black chantilly lace.All said and done: As much as Jonathan Anderson may be a nonnarrative collager, apparently pulling from this and that at random, every single Loewe product is seen through as a real product to buy. Amongst them is a big, funny sou’wester hat. On the side of it is a funny cartoony print of a loaf (abbreviated Cockney rhyming slang for “head”).
Is Anderson’s Loewe collection the best thing since sliced bread? Well, that might be a tiny bit of an exaggeration, but for a new breed of luxury-seeking shoppers, this collection is going to open those spending-valves.
3 March 2017
When Jonathan Anderson started at Loewe three years ago, he talked about wanting to make it a cultural brand. What seemed like a gnomic pronouncement at the time has now materialized into something actual—a tangible delivery of craftsmanship, individualism, and intellectual experience. Setting out his Fall menswear collection in an exhibition rather than a show gave viewers time and space to relate to the handcrafted nature of what he’s up to. Anderson described the content as being about, “a youthful eclecticism, something post-industrial.” You could reach out and touch a loopy hand-knitted Aran sweater—the stitch technique adapted to imitate sailor’s-knots, but also to echo the Loewe logo—and its matching neighbor, a giant Anagram tote. You could stroke the sleeve of a cornflower blue shearling coat and inspect the hand-sewing around the collaged linen elbow and pocket patches. You could see every needlepoint stitch on a shoulder bag depicting a jolly Jack-tar. You could smile as you picked up a tan leather key ring in the shape of an animal from the top of a hand-turned wooden ark. Burst out laughing, maybe, at the absurdity of a brass trumpet, a pair of carved dog’s heads, and a hand-thrown ceramic bowl being repurposed as jewelry.A new wave of fashion has hit Loewe. It’s quirky, human-feeling, and full of odd surprises, but the point is that it doesn’t feel like an arty-crafty facade, a fashion-y fig leaf for a classic brand that may be carrying on as it always has. In the “cultural” revolution led by Anderson, the emphasis is on authenticity—everything underscoring the handmade values of the leather goods company and its Spanishness. The lookbook was shot in a former steam engine factory, and a subterranean home and design studio built by the radical architect Fernando Higueras in Madrid. This follows a Loewe exhibition curated by Anderson, which opened in the Spanish capital in November last year—all of a piece with a thoroughly integrated multidimensional strategy of advertising on billboards and social media. Really, it’s the antithesis of the hard, cold luxury fashion brand marketing style that has held sway since the millennium. Somehow, Anderson’s ability to enrich the pleasures of product with meaning, tactility, and things to learn has transformed Loewe into the first brand to realize that human, experiential values are the antidote to a high-tech era.
The titans and philosophers of the luxury goods industry have been banging on about that at conferences for years, but Loewe, under Anderson, has beaten everyone else to the post.
19 January 2017
For a young man,Jonathan Anderson’sability to project himself into the mind-set of a sophisticated, older woman atLoeweis becoming ever more impressive. He’s transformed a brand that was once a minor player without much of an identity into a major attraction on the Paris schedule. His show now places an ever-expanding number of accessories in the context of a holistically believable, put-together look.He knows where his target customer lives, and it’s somewhere expensive. “I like the idea of thinking about this woman in her apartment,” he said. “And I like the idea of continuity, slowing it down.” The set—installed in the UNESCO House, an avant-garde landmark from 1958—had cream carpet, ceramics, lamps, and massive video screens playing an art film on a loop. This woman, then, lives surrounded by her collection of contemporary objects and art. Her latest acquisition, apparently, is a conceptual video piece, Offshore, by Magali Reus, showing two men swimming out into an ocean, endlessly struggling to bring floating oil barrels back to the beach. Whatever else it meant (man’s ceaseless fight against pollution? a chance to contemplate the sight of two hunky men in wet clothes?), it also brought in a sense of the outdoors—fresh air, summer—all suggestions of the environments these clothes will be worn in.As for those clothes: Rather than rushing on at a febrile rate, as he does with his own collection, Anderson is letting a single silhouette flow on from his fall show. Wise move—as women are really just getting into the mood of wearing that calf-grazing, fit-and-flare shape. Clotheswise, all the development was instead in the fabric and the textures: linen and burlap, cotton and nylon, patchwork and plissé, raw edges and fringes, jersey and smooth leather. Cleverly, along the way, he hinted at the Spanish heritage of the house: peasant blouses with balloon sleeves and gathered necks, shawls tied around shoulders, a blue-and-white tablecloth-embroidery skirt.The collection also included almost an entire exhibition of accessories as well. A whole gallery of shoes walked by—low-heeled boots, which fused sock with cutaway loafer; kitten-heeled summer sandals; Victorian ribbon-laced booties. Elsewhere, Ikebana-inspired gilded arum lilies became large sculptural bracelets.
And it was nigh on impossible to keep track of the variety of bags, from the capaciously practical, soft-sided totes the models held crushed to their sides, to the horseshoe-shaped ones swinging from their shoulders. As a collection—modern yet ageless, luxurious yet unflashy, complete as an image but easy to pull apart and personalize—it hit every mark.
30 September 2016
“You are completely relaxed, completely at ease . . . .” The instructions of a hypnotherapist on the voice-over doubled as an apt visual description of the put-togetherLoewewomen who wended their way around the Miró murals at the Maison de l’UNESCO in Paris this morning. Whether it’s for his eponymous brand in London, or here, at the heights of a Spanish luxury label owned by LVMH,Jonathan Andersonstands out for placing his fashion in a context, giving a sense of the environments and spheres of interest his customers might inhabit. Loewe’s targets are the classes who collect art and furnish the expensive places they live in. Perhaps this might have something to do with Anderson’s repeated use of the termcuratedwhen speaking about the fit-and-flare framework of this Fall collection, and the all-important placement of the house bags, art jewelry, and extra-large bug-eyed, gold-mirrored sunglasses within it.Of course, it’s always boring when ready-to-wear becomes a mere human canvas for accessory “exhibitions,” but Anderson is proving sharp at setting a fashion agenda at Loewe. That read in the waist-cinching silhouettes and handkerchief-point hems—a more graceful and grown-up image than he has tried before, and without such gimmicks as the plastic trousers he did last season. Instead, he devoted attention to tackling the “mature” subject of tweed suits, making them with deep fringes, and putting a tweed-sprouting Amazona bag (the house tote since 1975) in the mix. Perhaps the centerpiece, though, was a total look in dark tan leather—a coat, trousers, and two matching bags. The color is the Loewe classicoro, or gold. Anderson may be a designer who can spin a tale and move on to the next thing at the speed of light, but a mindful contemplation of that look leads serenely to the conviction that Loewe’s sights are set on being the avant-garde competitor of Hermès.
4 March 2016
Jonathan Andersonsaid his FallLoewecollection was all about scale. He’s a designer who thinks big, so that felt appropriate—but even Anderson’s gargantuan army satchels and quilted blankets pale in comparison to the rock formations of Ciudad Encantada (Enchanted City) in central Spain. Shaped by centuries of erosion, these towering monoliths formed the backdrop to Anderson’s lookbook and campaign, which, as always, was pinned up around Paris ahead of his presentation, like an advertisement extolling us to go view the collection in the showroom.Anderson collaborated with M/M to reengineer the Loewe space into a cave, blocking out natural light with printed hoardings of blown-up mineral surfaces. Again, toying with scale. It made it feel a bit like a shop—he’s just opened an unconventional one for his own label in London’s East End; Loewe has 121, directly operated. “It’s about consumerism, merchandising,” said Anderson of the decision to present his collections on racks (and racks, and racks—there’s always a lot of stuff) as opposed to via runway or live presentation. In contrast to his eponymous menswear, with its distinct and sometimes alienating focus on the total look, Anderson asserted that “Loewe has to articulate itself differently.”The focus here, then, was on snapping looks apart into individual items—high-top kicks, a frayed tweed coat, a Loewe Puzzle bag stamped with archive logos (they’ve had quite a few, it seems) and flaps in leopard-print shearling. The aforementioned macro-scale military knapsacks came from soliders’ garb in the First World War, as did khaki separates in quilted cotton, which had a hardy practicality. Teamed with sandals they made you think of trench foot, and the current sub-zero temperatures in Paris. As individual items, they were desirable. So too was a series of leather bags and jackets, hand-painted with strange images like sunrises, toadstools, a turtledove: an expression of Loewe’s handicraft. There was a punkish element to painted biker jackets, distressed boots studded with pyramid hardware, to hats cock-combed with a mohawk of tufted wool.However, was this bunch oddly desirable, or just odd? Anderson pushes his aesthetic in unusual directions, grounding it in a language of luxury at Loewe; en masse, it can wind up overwhelming.
Which is why breaking it into composite garments helps, making it easier to ignore the scrunched-down leopard-shearling beanies, the cardigans with trains, the macro sponge-fishnet, and focus on nice shirts and suede coats. Those distractions, however, were still present. They will never find their way onto anyone’s backs—or heads—and served to muddle the commercial message Anderson was communicating. The scale of Anderson’s Loewe endeavor was impressive, as always. But you wondered if scaling back and reining in might create more impact for a brand whose latest identity is still being formed.
22 January 2016
“I’m interested in leather techniques and innovation,” saidJonathan Anderson. “I want to work with that, and to sharpen the edge.” He was speaking at the conclusion of a Loewe presentation that threw out hard-to-define imagery—a bit spacey, a bit ’80s, but in another sense, totally grounded in a house reality. Give or take a couple pairs of plastic-wrap trousers and transparent pants, the show Anderson pulled together was essentially a brilliant walking exhibition of accessories. He is a curator with an eye for placing multiple products in an interesting context and making them wantable from many angles.Take the jewelry. Once you’d seen the gold bracelets with their gold fringes pouring down the hand, the eye was inevitably drawn to the bags and the variety of things that were happening with the signature Puzzle shape. “I wanted the bags to articulate the look, to electrify it,” said Anderson. The house of Loewe is an old, established Spanish fine leather company, but Anderson understands that nothing could be duller than to dutifully put a luxurious leather coat with a matching bag. His project is to de-bourgeois-ify the context, and that’s how he came up with the device of using man-made materials—PVC, injection-molded synthetics—next to the traditional: “I thought, what else could be like a second skin?”What’s really clever is the way every look can be parsed down to desirable components. Where there are impossibly wearable plastic wrap pants, there is also a regular sweater with a sheer yoke destined to go straight to retail. Where there’s a showpiece tunic, covered in smashed mirror pieces, so are there dozens of buyable shard earrings. Alongside the avant-garde Puzzles there are just as many made in beautiful leather and suede. Equally as smart is the placement of the wholly “normal” within this new hyper-styled arrangement. There was nothing at all outrageous about the superfine, patchworked suede tracksuit in this show—it’s the sort of “leisure” purchase Loewe has been selling to its existing customers for decades. Now maybe a fashion-bent trophy hunter will be looking for that sort of thing, too. In that way, Anderson is keeping everyone happy: editors and photographers who’ll want to shoot the extreme image, as well as fashion-conscious shoppersandthe people who’ve been buying Loewe as part of a lifestyle for years. Not to mention the brand’s owner, LVMH, which must be standing back and admiring what Anderson is doing for the bottom line by now.
2 October 2015
Jonathan Anderson is in a questioning mood. Can the past be more modern and challenging than the future? In a Hong Kong antique shop, he found an early 18th-century screen from Japan—koi jumping over waves—that he thought looked so damn modern, it flummoxed him. The new Loewe collection came from his efforts to process that feeling: something old, something new, something borrowed, and all the time wondering, "What is right or wrong for Loewe?"Anderson has already changed the company beyond recognition. The leather goods that were always Loewe's mainstay were today airbrushed with rockets and ray guns. Black leather karate pants and matching shirts were cut from almost paper-thin kangaroo. Aside from that Japanese screen, Anderson's other challenge to the conventions of here-and-now modernity has been the old Bruce Lee movies he's been watching.But there was also a sweatshirt sporting an image of Disney's Goofy in the collection. There were pajamas with a generic princess motif, which distilled a few Disney princesses, and elongated sci-fi suits covered with manga graphics. Menswear? Not as we know it. Among the jewelry were gold potato chip brooches. Playful kid stuff. "They make me smile," Anderson said. "It's not always serious, not always about winning."But he is serious, of course. The amount of time he spends developing fabrics is testament to that. Here, there was a double-breasted linen trench waterproofed with a special wax treatment that left it surreally soft and light. And the piece Anderson was most proud of: a double jacquard jacket, chenille on the inside, cotton/linen outside. From the beginning at Loewe, he has talked about "finding new classics." There are early indications he'll be able to do that, but he might find his question about the future answers itself. It will be more challenging than the past.
26 June 2015
You get the feeling there isn't an indecisive bone in Jonathan Anderson's body. That's why he's the most influential young force in fashion right now. "You have to commit," he said firmly, as he described the process that determined the character of his new collection. "It was finished in summer, the look was done, the image was there three weeks before Christmas." And that included makeup, hair, and sunglasses. With no wriggle room.So it sounded right when Anderson described his woman as "someone who wears the trousers." He gave them to her: big tweedy numbers, and more of those elephant pants in colored leathers he showed for Spring. But here they were covered by long, pale leather tunics in complementary shades. Anderson called them lab coats because he liked to think of his Loewe girl laboring over an equation. "She has to work herself out," he added.Lab coats or no, they highlighted the uniform nature of the collection. There was even a navy cape with a military flourish. And the models with their slicked-back hair and sunglasses had a glazed, android look. But there was actually less uniformity in that than in the way that Anderson was so fascinated by a very distinctive silhouette: oversize blousons, generously proportioned trousers. Somewhere in his head, that contributed to his notion of clothes that passed from day to night with a minimum of effort. Its most striking interpretation was in lamé, sunray-pleated in a skirt, or cut into a sinuous tunic. Anderson said he'd been imagining his woman hit by a lightning bolt, leaving her fiery and feisty. "Like Spanish women," he added. "They know who they are, they know how to have fun."As usual, there was a pervasive, seductive sense of oddness with Anderson's clothes. The materials ran the gamut from sober gray tweed to wingy fire-engine red patent. Anderson himself was particularly enchanted by that last look. "The bag is so contradictory," he said gleefully. But he was totally committed to it. So we believed, as well. That's a mark of genius.
6 March 2015
J.W. Anderson's second menswear collection for Loewe began with a typically Andersonian inspiration: "the clothes in your closet that make you wonder why you bought them." He indicated the checkerboard suit with the outsize pants hanging on a nearby rail as an example. There were others equally close at hand, primarily a mohair sweater in the most evilly toxic shade of green, and maybe the jacket in red and black kangaroo leather that wouldn't have been out of place in Michael Jackson's video for "Bad." Anderson excels at creating clothes that are slightly unsettling. Clothes that ask questions. Paris is currently adorned with Loewe's new menswear campaign, a photo from the '80s of photographer Steven Meisel kissing male model Sean Bohary. "It sparks a personal question and a cultural question," said Anderson. "It's giving people something more…provocation, excitement."Given Loewe's august and leathery past, Anderson's knitted palazzo pants, delicate knits (he described them as "like old stockings"), and drop-backed coat in a Lurex-threaded mint tweed were certainly provocative expressions of his feminized masculine ethos. But there were also expert pieces that drew on the Loewe legacy, like a motocross jacket artfully hand-painted to give it a worn-in look, a nubuck navy trench lined in leather, and a shearling-collared car coat in napa. The confidence with which Anderson straddles both worlds is the mark of a major talent. Besides, he said, the challenge of those misbegotten outfits in your closet is to work out how they all fit together. And that is just what he is doing at Loewe: rebuilding a brand from scratch.
23 January 2015
If J.W. Anderson's own collection in London was surprisingly, pleasingly straightforward, his catwalk debut at Loewe this morning suggested why. All that wayward J.W. action had gone south, to Loewe's headquarters in sunny Spain. Yes,sunny. Instead of the somewhat heavy, leathery Loewe those who know the brand might be familiar with, there were the Balearic lightness and sensuality that Anderson began to explore with his men's collection for the house. At first glace, the Isamu Noguchi garden at the UNESCO building where the show was staged might have seemed the very antithesis of those notions. But step back, check the sculptural stones and benches, and you could have been in the rocky fabulosity of Formentera. And that's where Anderson was taking us, to somewhere physical and primal. A sheath in the honey-toned suede Loewe calls "oro" was decked with random applications of hide, a 21st-century Wilma Flintstone. Right behind it, something black, bowed at the waist, with a handful of suede samples dangling from its yoke. Precision and chaos—the kind of dialogue Anderson cherishes in his work.The primal, organic nature of the collection asserted itself in the knots of a cotton tank laid over a navy skirt with brutal diagonal slashes, or in a raw silk knit tank over huge white linen pants. There was an appealingly wayward imprecision to such pieces. But the other half of the collection was something else altogether: high-waisted leather trousers in a rainbow of colors, tied judo-style at the waist. Anderson had imagined them crisscrossing on his complex set in a pleasurable blur. He wasn't wrong. And their leatheriness underscored just why Loewe makes such an appropriate, if peculiar, fit for Anderson. He is fascinated by skin. Here, there was a trench inorothat was simply gorgeous. Less so, the latex tees perversely printed with a game-bird graphic from the Loewe archive. But, as Anderson pointed out, that was a kind of skin, too.
26 September 2014
Jonathan Anderson is off to a flying start at Loewe. There are billboards in Paris featuring his first ad campaign, which eye-catchingly curates a selection of vintage Steven Meisel images. Anderson's first men's collection has been captured for posterity by his favorite photographer, Jamie Hawkesworth, in a lush volume he intends to be the first of many. And today the designer brought the world to Loewe's spectacular new HQ opposite Saint-Sulpice, one of the most magnificent churches in Paris, to unveil his debut in a presentation that displayed the pieces like precious artifacts.But it was immediately obvious that there was nothing precious about Anderson's revamp of the brand. Loewe's home is Madrid, and its traditional calling card is an expensive leathery sophistication, but he rooted his collection in an altogether different Spanish inspiration. His clothes—a rough linen tee, a long raw-silk tunic, turned-up jeans, a work shirt in Japanese canvas—had the bohemian flair of the Balearics in their pre-rave heyday. There's a visual history of legendary Ibizan nightclub Pacha, which includes a photo of Roman Polanski in a cotton shirt and neon Speedo. That was the sort of image that was dancing in Anderson's mind while he was designing.Of course, there was much more. Confronted by an archive dating back to the mid-19th century, Anderson had a clear choice: embrace or ignore. He chose the former. Like the golden tone called "oro," represented here by a suede trench and a softened-up version of Loewe's enduring It bag, Amazona. Or the solid shoes in crocodile, with the house's traditional white soles. And there was an ingenious updating of the company's leather legacy in a calfskin bag that was cleverly designed to be packed flat, and a fantastic jacket in waterproof leather. "It's hard to do that to napa without it looking plastic," Anderson said proudly.It was also quite obvious how much of Anderson himself there was in the new Loewe. He played with Meccano blocks when he was a kid (you were either Meccano or Lego), and the Meccano references in the new collection were, he said, representative of "a naive approach to rebuilding a brand." They led to a Pop-y, primary-colored touch. And, the naive aside, there was a jolt of Andersonian ambiguity in a piece as frankly feminine as the two striped silk scarves sewn together to create a top.
26 June 2014
The cinematic femme fatale has emerged in many designers' collections this season. Loewe is no exception; only here there was a very Spanish twist to such a woman. She also likes to be clad in animal skins on almost every occasion—this is a leather house, after all—although a nice silk shirtdress will do now and again.This femme fatale likes to stalk around the city of Bilbao wearing a lot of shearling. After featuring the sunny south of Spain for a series of collections, it seemed time for the north to have its turn with Loewe. And it can get quite cold up there. The sheepskin comes in variegated lengths at times—sometimes all at once, as in the first look. This Art Deco–ish spin on the sheepskin coat, with its graphic patterns inspired by the cityscape, sets both the scene and the feel of this collection. In fact, as in many of Loewe's offerings, feeling played as big a part as seeing today. The tactile nature of the intarsia leather graphic tunics; the embossed leather skirts with a thigh-high split contrasted against a flash of old-fashioned suspender and stocking; the long, shaggy scarlet shearling coat with large, smooth patch pockets that closed the show—each of these garments stood out for its sensuality and tactility.A tough form of sensuality has become something of a calling card for the Loewe woman, and as a result the collections have gathered momentum not quite seen before she appeared—leather is hardly a ladylike fabrication. The house's creative director, Stuart Vevers, defined this mood after his show. "You have to cut through the classic with something else: sensuality," he explained. "This came in the form of a filmic heroine this season; I felt like I definitely wanted a character. It also came from our work with the actress Penélope Cruz." Having studied her scenes in Pedro Almodóvar films, the narrative flow went on to shape the collection. And why not? The fact that the inspiration was a living, breathing person might be one of the reasons this collection felt so alive.
1 March 2013
Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, better known as Gala Dalí, was Stuart Vevers' inspiration for the Spring collection at Loewe. "As soon as I started at Loewe, I knew she was a woman I wanted to focus on at some point," explained the creative director. It is perhaps telling that after the tougher, less than ladylike take found in last autumn's collection for the brand, he finally felt able to tackle Gala for Spring.The woman who would get her own husband, Salvador, to seek written permission to see her—so many lovers she would have stowed away in Cadaqués, she needed the warning—was reimagined as a young, contemporary madrileña. This is the sort of girl who would appear in an Almodóvar story as much as at a meeting of the Surrealists. And she has a fondness for leather. Lots of it.The collection was a bravura display of that signature of the house and ultimately gave the offering a handcrafted, Spanish feel. With embossing and incised florals, mimicking the traditional handmade laceencaje de bolillos—it tumbled down trenchcoats, pencil skirts, and hooded jackets—there was a lightness to this workmanship, quite literally, as leather was taken to extremes of thinness at the house ("0.4 millimeters thinner than ever before!" as Vevers proudly pointed out backstage), making it perfectly permissible for summer. Add to that the aerated, woven techniques; the appliqués on fine, transparent mesh; and the floral-printed suedes, and if you are a fan of the animal skin, this is the collection for you.Perhaps what Vevers has now found at Loewe is the ability to focus on the things he likes and play to his own strengths. His background in handbags has also proved invaluable in the technical research for the clothing of the brand. Having an English sensibility, Vevers has finally given free rein to more offhand moments too, like a focus on the MA-1 jacket, that symbol of a multiplicity of British youth cultures, reconfigured for an aristocratic Spanish house. Above all, in these last two collections, the designer has found the woman that Loewe wants to concentrate on. It appears she is no pushover, and this season the lady may even be a bit of a tramp. Then again, it's a trend for Spring.
28 September 2012
Stuart Vevers has been at Loewefouryears already, and if it hasn't exactly been one of fashion's high-profile bells-and-whistles collaborations, today's show was proof of how much a designer can achieve with a quiet commitment to his craft and an empathetic relationship with the 166-year-old Spanish house where he is creative director. Vevers' quest to find new things to do with Loewe's mastery of traditional leather-working techniques came together beautifully in a finale of leather outfits embossed with "phantom" details like belts and pockets. It was an artful trompe l'oeil effect that appropriately left you wanting more at show's end.Before that, Vevers had found other creative ways to fuse past and present. Claiming inspiration from the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art in Jerez, he gave drama to items of formal riding attire like cutaway jackets and britches by cutting them from skins, then adding those key embossed or tooled details, particularly the half-belts that held jackets in back. But there was also a more casual story—varsity jackets worn with circle skirts, a utility jacket, a peacoat—which elaborated on another aspect of the interplay between masculine and feminine elements that defined the collection.With so much of it using glossily black, textured calf's leather, the danger was that a dark, tough chord would drown out Vevers' more refined notes, like the little tucks that drew in a shift dress or the scrolling baroque prints. It was touch-and-go at the start, but ultimately, Vevers struck a balance. And that finale brought it all home.
2 March 2012
Latest in an ever-lengthening line of extraordinary inspirations for Spring 2012: the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. Stuart Vevers found out it was the 75th anniversary of Escher's trip to Alhambra in Granada, where the artist's sketches of tiles became the basis for some of his most famous mind-twisting games with perspective. That Spanish connection was all that was needed for Vevers to launch his new collection for Loewe.Escher's maths-influenced motifs were reproduced in engineered prints on silk skirts and tops or cut out of leather pieces. Lizards, another of the artist's visual signatures, also appeared as prints or beaded in black on gray suede. They didn't really say Loewe-style luxury.But with the core of Loewe's business being leather goods, Vevers' challenge with a Spring collection is always going to be how to make skins lighter. He was proud of the fact that the Loewe workshops had come up with a reversible nappa that was the lightest yet. He cut it into a shorts suit or a button-through shirtdress. He also laced leather with tiny perforations, as in a skirt and matching sleeveless top.But something about the long lean silhouette conspired against the lightness Vevers sought. Paired with the vintage-looking platform sandals, there was a vampish, film noir-ish edge to the Loewe woman this season, especially when she zipped herself into a gold leather pencil skirt with a substantial kick pleat.Un peuold-fashioned.
30 September 2011
"A balance of the classical beauty that Loewe is known for, with some of my edge." That was Stuart Vevers' definition of his new collection for the Spanish brand that he has been steering since mid-2007. His own idea of edge was mixing fur with rawer materials like sheepskin, but there was also a strict sexiness to his designs that felt more London Now than Madrid Whenever. The very first outfit, for instance, matched a stock-tie blouse to a buttoned-up pencil skirt. Conservative, much? They were, however, both in a biscuit leather, and the outfit practically screamed "naughty secretary!" Vevers has always had a gift for that kind of carry-on fashion, but life in Madrid has clearly smoothed away the tacky edges, because his collection was a seamless, stylish update of the Loewe lifestyle. He clearly knew what he was doing when he followed proper leather coat-dresses in red, blue, and gold with an olive-toned sheath dress that buttoned all the way up the back. The label's signature brown leather looked austerely sensual in a box-pleated skirt paired with a fur-collared jacket. New this season was an emphasis on bonded skins,maîtresse-severe in a wasp-waisted black dress.Those skins were the main event, but Vevers added silk separates inspired by stained glass windows. Sacred and profane? What could be more Spanish than that?
4 March 2011
Backstage before his show, Stuart Vevers gamely supplied his buzzwords for the season: joyful, light, colorful. Spring, he explained, began with the palette, one with bright candy tones that couldn't be further from his somber neutrals last season. A reaction to Fall's beige-out? "Yes, we do all feel it as designers," Vevers said. "And the time is just right for it. It's Spring." He added that the brighter pieces the house did for his pre-collection were selling like gangbusters.You can't really find fault with any of the above reasoning, but on the runway, the look seemed to have overdosed on optimism, skewing very young. This particular brand of youth was a girlish and cheeky-cute sensibility that reminded more than a few present of Miu Miu. There were little color-blocked thigh-high shifts, leather T-shirts dotted with tiny laser-cut flower appliqués, and kitten-heeled pumps covered with more of those floral-shaped leather bits. Most of the high-ponytailed models wore either leather headbands with flat bows or elastics decorated with big leather cubes. Ladylike, structured handbags had flashes of neon trim.There were grown-up moments to be picked out, like a grass green sweater tucked into an "oro" suede A-line skirt, or a ponyskin coat in a dark leopard print, but it wasn't easy to fully extricate them from the top-to-toe vibe. And the butterfly scarf print—inspired by the house's Madrid archives—could easily go either woman or girl. But on the whole? While this about-face certainly made a strong (and yes, fun) visual statement, the new direction felt jarring.
1 October 2010
Stuart Vevers has unearthed a Hollywood heroine in Loewe's Madrid archive. "We recently found a visitor's book signed by Ava Gardner," he said backstage. "That's been a bit special." It explained why Old Blue Eyes was on the soundtrack of the Fall presentation. Gardner fled to live in Madrid when her marriage to Frank Sinatra was on the rocks, in 1955, after filmingThe Barefoot Contessain Europe. While amusing herself with, among other things, a virile bullfighter, she also found time to pick up the occasional handmade leather item in Loewe's Gran Via store.But what did thoughts of Ava bring to this show? A glamorous lacquered hairdo, a fur beret and demi-veil, and a ladylike gloss that sufficed to locate the styling in the on-trend decade of the season. Also: the new Ava bag, a two-handled purse that has been stripped of all hardware, leaving only the utterly smooth Spanish leather and a discreet embossed trademark to express its provenance.That, really, is emblematic of the kind of progression Loewe needs to be making at this point. Vevers has made efforts to bring irony and trendiness to this home of traditional Spanish quality, but flash and fun in a bag doesn't sit so well in a post-crash era when women have emerged with a fresh taste for the investment classic. That new sense of purpose seemed to have reoriented the ready-to-wear, at least partly. The conventional side of the collection focused on suits with fur dickeys tucked into the neck, high-waisted A-line skirts, and Spanish-military-influenced jackets with leather trimmings—as well as thick waffle knits that follow the same train of thought as Prada's Fall collection. It didn't quite account for the presence of a cream fox-trimmed parka or the chestnut leather X-backed pinafore that closed the show—not exactly on the old-school Hollywood movie-star track. Perhaps they're items that can find purchasers in Loewe's stores, but now the company's moved into runway presentations, and the pressure is on Vevers to commit to a totally integrated, coherent offering if he's to command critical attention.
5 March 2010
"Loewe is a leather house," Stuart Vevers shrugged. "But how do you make leather work for Spring?" His rhetorical question was answered in a rolling series of presentations, where the Spanish luxury company's extraordinary technological advances in finessing skins—like laser perforating, and cutting with a new high-pressure water gizmo—were shown alongside tweaked signatures. Vevers' baseline inspiration was the heritage: the distinctive "oro" mustard-gold shade of leather, a standard since 1975, and the classic handheld Amazona bag.The challenge has been to add a believable clothing offer, and in this show, Vevers began to get on top of it. His palette of sandy beige suedes, contrasted with a dash of orange, looked punchily chic in the opening passage of easy trenches, as did the Amazona, updated with patent orange handles. Those, and an oxblood coat that looked like a serious investment piece, seemed likely to please connoisseurs of classic quality, but the surprises were all in the little dresses. Paper-fine leather and suede dance frocks were treated to perforations of such delicacy that they looked like lace—one was a gilded fairy dress; another, a ballerina tutu in dark chocolate.There were also moments of humor: One model carried a clutch of brown paper shopping bags that were, in fact, made of caramel leather. Vevers also offered comparatively workaday pieces, like leather trousers and jeans with whip-stitched leather military stripes on the outside leg, but it was his "summer" leather dresses that marked this collection as noteworthy. Loewe may never be a collection that justifies a grand runway to frame what it's about, but this season's intimate presentation succeeded in conveying the specialness of the brand's craftsmanship.
2 October 2009
A leather-goods house taking to the runway with a ready-to-wear collection—with logos? Sounds like a high-nineties flashback, if not an anachronistic happening in days when so many other houses are scaling back or thinking better of having shows altogether. Yet here was Loewe, the Spanish leather-goods company (part of LVMH), which is design-directed by the British bag specialist Stuart Vevers, reversing its policy of sophisticated static exhibitions and deciding to use models in the standard way—swinging handbags, of course.Subtlety and extreme quality are the key qualities of Loewe's leathers, but the act of dressing girls top to toe and having them walk in front of an audience and photographers forced an inevitable shift of focus. The luxurious craftsmanship that goes into making fine leather pieces like the black jackets and coats, with supple, fused linings visible in the folded-back lapels, isn't in question. But was it really timely to start branding a sophisticates' resource with perforated lettering declaring "Loewe Madrid" across the breast of leather poufed-sleeve T-shirts and shifts, or to emboss it boldly on a coral suede shoulder bag? Probably not.Up till now, Loewe's artily lit static presentations have been characterful, sociable events, allowing for the close-up viewing—and even touching—of its fine-grained textures and workmanship. That encouraged the idea that this is a niche brand for grown women who consider it smart to invest in a timeless, underexposed product that deliberately sets itself apart from fashion. It wasn't that Vevers plunged the whole thing into a vat of vulgarity today, but the pressure to make statements for runway cameras (feather skirts, woven ribbon and leather pieces) inevitably blew away some of the mystique he's cultivated with his previously more personal approach.
6 March 2009
Stuart Vevers has been at Loewe just a year, moving from a gig as Mulberry's hit bag designer in London to a new life in Madrid to take on the luxury leather goods label. He's learning. "I was a bit notorious for overweight bags with giant hardware before," he laughed. "But here I've made everything soft and light. There's 160 years' worth of know-how, so I'm really concentrating on bringing out what we're good at." For pre-fall, Vevers pointed to a glossy brown leather coat with a plain man's belt tied around as "quintessential" Loewe, a lifetime classic. But finding a profile for the woman who might buy it is a work in progress. "The attitude is super-groomed but a bit tough. She has a definite shape, a waist, likes bold jewelry." She might also like to shrug on a mannish topcoat in a blurry herringbone or snap up a pair of super-fine suede gauntlets. The real test of Loewe's right to command the high ground, though, is the bags. Vevers said he'd studied a sand-colored suede carry-on piece, originally made in 1975, and applied the principle of soft structure to his ideas. That means puffy napa pouches, squashed ostrich hobos, and a lot of chain-handled lizard bags. The Vevers punch is in the proportion and details: This season the fastenings are bolt heads and the chains are as fine as can be.
25 January 2009
Stuart Vevers' Spring Loewe collection really needs to be seen up close. What he's doing at the Spanish leather-goods house is imbued with the kind of luxury that only fully reveals itself when touched: the butter-soft, wafer-thin suede elephant gray trench ("suede that's like velvet," as Vevers puts it); the malleable matteness of an ostrich zip-front skirt, or the pristine white softness of the classic "Amazone" tote bag he's retrieved from the archive. And there's much more. A self-confessed detail fanatic, Vevers, who moved from London to company headquarters in Madrid earlier this year, says he's been so obsessed with orchestrating bags, clothes, shoes, and jewelry that he's only had one day off a month.Vevers came up with a general styling theme for Spring, loosely pegged on "Chris von Wangenheim photos, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, and a touch of Memphis design," but, he points out, "the real inspiration is Loewe itself." In the clothes, Vevers played with military-cum-naval themes and then used the symbols: brass buttons as handbag chains and bracelets, ropes as gold belts and cuffs, Plexiglas anchors for pendants. Worked in there, too, was a perfectly on-trend outbreak of dots and spots: first on a perforated, tobacco-colored cotton dress, and then more prolifically on polka-dot bag appliqués or paint splashes on suede. "What I like," said Vevers, "is how 'classic' and 'sexy' are good bedfellows. I thought there was no point in joining a 'proper' house without doing it properly and respecting the integrity of what it is."
30 September 2008
Since he packed his bags and left Mulberry in London, Stuart Vevers has immersed himself fully in the culture of Loewe's base camp, Madrid: learning to speak Spanish, how to eat at midnight, how to find his way around the nightlife, all that. He's also approaching the job with full appreciation of the luxe leather-goods background of the house. "I want to discover a modern take on status. Something grown-up, elegant, and provocative," he said. Clothes-wise for Resort, he's worked up a military-cum-nautical theme that he calls "a reinvestigation of classics," slipping in remixes of archive scarf prints by Julie Verhoeven and jewelry by Katie Hillier—two of his London friends. As a bag-meister (who formerly worked at Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta), it's his vision of the future of covetable leather that really counts, though. "I keep saying it's not about the It bag anymore," said Vevers. "What's next is things that have authenticity and beauty." Having Loewe's craftspeople to work with is his main thrill. It's meant he's been able to design a python bag with a square base inspired by a supermarket carrier bag, come up with discreetly chic patent envelopes trimmed with fine gold chains, and play with napa leather so fine-grained that, to the naked eye, it almost looks like matte satin.
1 July 2008
Autumn is the time to turn up the heat, and José Enrique Oña Selfa didn¿t disappoint on that score. Gone were the A-line shifts, lush floral prints, and mod silvers of spring, and in their place were tough-chic black motorcycle leathers, fur coats, and chubbies, and a turquoise suede skirtsuit as supple as it was bright. All that fit in with the vampy, slightly eighties vibe of the season, as did a black dress with gold sequin embroidery, the Lurex touches on a long tank and a crisscross bodice dress, and the matching heavy-metal eye makeup.So what exactly is the identity of this historic Spanish leather-goods brand? Beyond the exotic-skin bags buffed to a high shine, it¿s hard to tell. Should LVMH ever want it to rival the French luxury houses in its stable—or simply make it a competitor in the U.S., which was not well represented at the show—Oña Selfa will have to learn to take a lead on trends rather than simply follow them.
27 February 2007
With scrubbed faces and hair held back by rolled and knotted white scarves, the models at Loewe looked fresh from a day at the Eden Roc spa. That impression was backed up by Spanish designer José Enrique Oña Selfa's concentration on timely, short silhouettes—tunics, sack dresses, wraps—and further locked in by the details. The show's colorful silk floral prints, for instance, were trimmed with thick white piping that put one in mind of terrycloth robes.Loewe began 160 years ago as a Madrid saddlery, and making sense of the house signature in a spring collection isn't necessarily an easy proposition. Oña Selfa didn't offer any definitive solutions, but working that same flower motif, he finessed the challenge, embroidering super-lightweight suede with silver thread or appliquéing foil-thin silver patent onto a halter dress and a coat. If his dresses got tricky with their cowl necks and double-belts, or tangles of yarn-like fringe, his leathers never did.
3 October 2006
Madrid-based leather goods house Loewe—owned by fashion conglomerate LVMH—is attempting to work that now-commonplace fashion strategy: hire a young, critically acknowledged designer to create a buzz-generating ready-to-wear line, thereby boosting a venerable brand into a global powerhouse (see also Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine, etc.)José Enrique Oña Selfa's maiden effort as the house designer was a decent attempt. He seemed most comfortable when he stuck to his home ground of knitwear, or played up the house's ability with skins. Simple sportswear shapes rendered in butterscotch or vanilla-toned hides and fitted shearling coats with seams detailed in contrast leather didn't break any style ground, but will certainly speak to luxury leather fans everywhere. And though Oña Selfa lost his way with awkward knee-length hobble skirts and release-pleat wide leg trousers, the creamy wide leather belts and smartly constructed bags that ornamented many of the looks could be the start of a beautiful business.
7 March 2002
Narciso Rodriguez took his final bow as Loewe's designer today in order to concentrate on his newly revamped signature line.Rodriguez wavedadiosto the Spanish luxury-leather house with plenty of the strong, graphic—and saleable—clothes with which he put the label on the fashion map. There was nothing superfluous about his brief, to-the-point collection, executed in black, white and silver. Fitted leather shells toughened up flimsy georgette slip-skirts; wrap jackets and gabardine coats were tightly bound at the waist; a couple of leather coats flirted with an Empire silhouette. Metal-studded shifts looked feminine and chic rather than punky.Rodriguez closed his show with absolutely clean white jersey-and-crepe evening skirts, flyaway tops and a couple of sequin dresses that would put a giant disco ball to shame.
13 March 2001
Quiet, understated luxury is Narciso Rodriguez's forte, so women who are not interested in fickle clothes that come and go every few months will feel at home with Loewe this season.The twisted shapes that have dominated other collections were nowhere to be found here; instead, Rodriguez opted for clean-shaped blazers, shirt dresses and leather skirts with gently gathered waistbands. Suede T-shirts, kimonos and camisoles felt as light as the ecru linen wrap tops and jersey dresses; wide leather belts and hard silver cases with red or black enamel stripes gave the looks an edgier feeling.For evening, Rodriguez kept it simple with beaded geometric dresses in bone, black and red. Aside from a couple of long, shimmering skirts, the look was short, uncomplicated and sexy.
12 October 2000
"The constructive ideology…calls for the highest exactitude of means of expression," read part of the program for Narciso Rodriguez's sleek show for Loewe. Don't ask.Pretentious theory aside, Rodriguez's show was a study in controlled elegance. His graphic little shift dresses and neat coats and pantsuits had the look of Jackie Onassis' sporty-deluxe wardrobe during the Ari years.Deft leather work is the specialty of this classical Spanish house, and Rodriguez capitalized on the superb craftsmanship with contrast-insets in a Mondrian grid on those leather shifts, and refined chevron work. Subtle touches of hidden luxury included a warm-pink satin lining on the camel jacket of a mini suit, and matte caviar sequins on a chiffon evening mini. Rodriguez kept to an appropriately Spanish palette of black, honey-tan, palomino and a dash of lingerie-pink, and focused on understated luxury.You win the pop quiz if you can count the number of chevron black-and-white mink coats we've seen this season, but Rodriguez's held its own. His top-heavy shearling tops with skinny leather pants looked hipper still—a palatable take on the '80s.
2 March 2000
White was the overwhelmingly dominant color at Loewe, with sporadic splashes of tan, sapphire, and yellow. Buttery leathers and suedes gave an opulent edge to form-fitting jeans, sexy jumpsuits and beaded overcoats. There were also delicate shift dresses, practical vests with zippers and python ensembles. For evening, Narciso Rodriguez showed a series of suede and leather dresses encrusted with glittering crystals. Overall, it was an unencumbered, consistent collection that did not forget Loewe's tradition of simple and luxurious chic.
7 October 1999