“I’m interested in leather techniques and innovation,” said Jonathan 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 shoppers and the 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.
