A Restless, Radical Mind: How Jonathan Anderson Transfigured Loewe

Jonathan Anderson’s decade-plus tenure at Loewe, which officially ends today, has been defined by two passions: craft and curation. They have shaped one of the most distinctive, radical voices in fashion. It has challenged all sorts of orthodoxies, foremost the relationship between form and function. What comes to mind for some reason are the porcelain plates Japanese ceramicist Takuro Kuwata inserted into dresses in the A/W 2020 collection. I think of the perennial Rei Kawakubo question — Why? — and its equally enduring response — Why not? You can apply that same Q&A to any number of complexities in a Loewe collection: a cut, a silhouette, a sleeve, a pair of trousers, a jacket closing. Oh look, a lapel carved out of wood but gilded to look like metal. Why not?

If craft has been the pilot light in Anderson’s Loewe years, art has been scarcely less significant. He’s transformed the brand’s shops into dynamic gallery spaces. They’ve been major contributors to the so-called “Spectacle Store.” Playing favourites is impossible, though the huge blue Howard Hodgkins painting which is the first thing you see on entering the Madrid flagship had me planning an art heist in a flash. Likewise, the astonishing red globular sculpture by Anthea Hamilton on the first floor of the Bond Street store in London, or the multi-panel Arte Povera masterpiece by Giorgio Griffa on the ground floor. Each work is labelled, and there are anthologies of the in-store artworks.

Same goes for the shows. The intelligence of Anderson’s engagement with art for his physical presentations is matched only by Kim Jones. Think of that tiny Tracey Emin bird perched high above the audience in the round for Anderson’s last Loewe show, “encouraging us to imagine imminent flight, and ultimately its freedom,” prophesied the show notes. Or the small but perfect Albert York paintings that hung in the salons of the A/W 2024 show space. That he was a Jackie Kennedy favourite was a subtle reinforcement of the collection’s patrician commentary. I loved the early days, when a Loewe show would match a gorgeous Miró mural with walls of male nudes by George Platt Lynes. That perverse face-off led into Anderson’s post-pandemic flirtation with surrealism and Dada (possibly the most sane response to what we’d all just been through). Remember the ready-mades? The shoe heeled with a shattered egg or a single red rose?

I step back to Anderson’s amazing activations for Loewe during the show-less seasons of Covid-19. They included “Show on a Wall” (wallpaper!), “Show in a Box” (puppet show!) and “Show in the News” (newspaper!). Best of the lot was “Show in a Book,” which celebrated the life and work of queer artist and writer Joe Brainard. Knits and accessories in Loewe’s A/W 2021 men’s collection were inspired by Brainard’s collages and texts, and a 200-page book, designed with longtime collaborators M/M Paris, offered a substantial summation of the artist’s career. (He died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994.)

Anderson may be dyslexic but he loves a book. He has recorded his many collections for Loewe in glorious oversize publications that will one day decades, maybe centuries, hence, provide a seductive, mystifying record of whatever fashion was for one decade in the early 21st-century. His key photographic collaborators have included Jamie Hawkesworth, David Sims and Steven Meisel, but the scenario I cherish most is the magic show staged by the now 93-year old legend Duane Michals for Loewe’s A/W 2018 men’s collection. He was originally commissioned to make a dozen images. He delivered 60 prints. “I’ve got more energy than you,” he told whippersnapper Anderson, then 33.

Duane Michals’ magician was actor Josh O’Connor, who has been something of a male muse for Anderson over the years, appearing in a number of ad campaigns. But he is only one of the wayward cast of characters who have brought Loewe to life. They, too, are a creative capsule de nos jours, from baby heartthrobs Drew Starkey and Leo Woodall to monuments of their profession Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Anthony Hopkins. The list is a string of bizarre and extraordinary ‘gets’: Aubrey Plaza and Dan Levy, Jodie Comer and Greta Lee, “The Bear”’s Ayo Edebiri and “Baby Reindeer”’s Richard Gadd. Not only that, they do things for Anderson. Could Jamie Dornan and Daniel Craig look less like the public perception of themselves than they do for Loewe? Craig took his transmogrification one step further by showing up in Paris wearing his outré looks from the campaign. Kudos to the designer’s powers of persuasion.

I feel like I need to mention the beginning of this story, when Anderson was confronted by more than 150 years of Loewe’s Madrid-based history, and its stolid roots in leathery, bourgeois big-city sophistication. He swerved into his own experience of Spain when he assumed his new position in 2014. He summered on Ibiza with his family when he was younger, and it was the boho Balearic spirit he chose to celebrate, a sun-soaked, hippie, rave-y, hedonism. In years to come, he would absorb the ethos of Paula’s, the boutique that dressed Ibiza’s original lotus eaters, and turn it into a successful sideline for Loewe, 12-inch singles and all. Radical joy has been a thread ever since.

It’s also important to mention the Craft Prize, created by the Loewe Foundation to recognise and reward the work of artisans around the world. Anderson had already been with Loewe for a few years when the prize was first handed out, and given his own obsession with craft, it’s impossible not to see his supervision of a major international award dedicated to a future for young artisans as a meaningful legacy in the making.

Draw all these threads together and it’s obvious that Jonathan Anderson was a designer on a mission at Loewe, driven to expand and radicalise the opportunities that fashion offers a restless creative mind. His decade at Loewe enhanced the role of the designer. He forged an intense relationship with both art and craft, fusing creation and curation into one thought-provoking, aesthetically challenging entrepreneurial package. He’s also signed with a major Hollywood agency and designed the costumes for two of 2024’s better-looking movies.

It’s going to be fascinating, at the very least, to see if and how Anderson extends this substantial achievement into whatever happens next.

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