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.
