It has been more than a year since designer Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Spanish leather-goods house Loewe and founder of London-based label JW Anderson, last held a fashion show with a live audience. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, designers like Anderson have had to come up with new ways to present their creations. Most brands have resorted to digital formats, which mainly consist of audience-free runway shows or lavishly produced videos. Anderson is not a fan of digital shows, which have already started to feel old to editors, buyers and industry insiders who are experiencing a great deal of screen fatigue after months spent glued to phones and laptops. The designer has been at Loewe since 2013, a remarkably long tenure at a time when many creative directors leave their jobs after a couple of years. He has turned what was once a stale and dormant Spanish house into one of the most successful labels of the LVMH group. While much smaller than other LVMH-owned houses like Louis Vuitton, Dior and Fendi, Loewe has experienced steady growth and has managed to weather the crisis thanks to its loyal fan base, focus on leather goods and, in no small part, success in Asia. Anderson’s work has always resonated with Asian consumers, both for his own label and for Loewe. Before he took the creative reins, the house only had a presence in Europe and Japan but is now a household name in key places such as the US and China, the world’s largest luxury market. Will luxury groups persist with brands that lose money after the virus? There’s no denying that China has become a cash cow for luxury brands, but Anderson points out that it has to be a give-and-take relationship and not “just take”. “We live in a global world – you can’t just see it as one market. I don’t design for one market but a global one,” says Anderson during a recent Zoom interview. “I’m very humbled because Asia was very supportive of me. I don’t believe in this one-way street; you have to get involved in the culture. “Japan was the first market that ever bought my own product and I have loyalty to people who believed in me in the beginning. Most of Asia was there before anyone else was supporting me in the West. I owe a lot to Asia.” While Anderson is planning to hold physical shows once the pandemic is over, he struggles with the idea of doing a show just to tape it and release it online. “I find it detaching, incredibly uncreative, a tight parameter,” he says. Even after fashion shows resume, however, Anderson believes that things will be different. “You will have the show but you have to build on top of it because people will have changed,” he says. “For me, there are only learnings through this process that can help the actual end part, which is to transition through this period. “If you put your blinkers on and don’t embrace this moment and just want to re-enact what we used to have, you’ll come out of this pandemic not knowing the reality of what people went through.” In September 2020, for the unveiling of Loewe’s spring/summer 2021 collection, Anderson created what he called a “Show-on-the-Wall”. Guests who normally attend the Paris show received a series of life-size posters depicting each look, accompanied by tools including wallpaper glue, a brush and scissors, all meant to be used to discover the collection. The project, which also had a significant digital element, aimed to provide a tactile experience, an aspect of fashion that Anderson believes is still vital, especially for a craft-focused brand like Loewe. For the autumn/winter 2021 collection unveiled on March 5, Anderson has once again gone analogue, this time with “A Show in the News”. The brand released a 64-page newspaper printed with pictures of the entire range and distributed it worldwide in collaboration with leading newspapers. “You have to strive to find tactility, a way to connect to people no matter if it’s a presentation in the form of a newspaper or by working with fabric swatches or talking to a team in different ways,” Anderson says. “By using the novelty of printed material like a newspaper or wallpaper you create a tangible asset that is tactile.” During the pandemic, the designer, who normally travels constantly between London (where he lives and his brand is based), Paris (where the Loewe design studio is located) and Madrid (the site of the Loewe headquarters), has had to cope with months of lockdown, but has been able to find opportunity in the situation. “I feel that creativity and ideas usually come through parameters and those parameters can be different things,” Anderson says. “Like for my own brand, which is tiny – financially you have to be very tight with things, which you can use to your advantage. “You can use the pandemic to your advantage creatively because ultimately you have to say, ‘This is what we used to do and this is an experimentation of what we can do even though we have lost certain aspects.’” Anderson has also found new ways to communicate with consumers and reach new ones beyond his most ardent fans or the industry players who were able to attend his shows. “I have been able to connect to my audience and a new audience by talking directly to them,” he says. “This idea of democratising fashion has been the biggest thing during this pandemic. I do not believe in the old formula going forward. Shows should exist, but need to be supported with other content, which shouldn’t just be digital.”