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.
