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.
