"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.
