STYLE Edit: Loewe unveils art-inspired autumn/winter 2022 menswear and womenswear collections, where creative director Jonathan Anderson gets surreal with shapes

Sep 19 , 2022

Loewe’s autumn/winter 2022 shows took place amid art installations that heightened the clothes’ already-pronounced sense of surreality. Photos: Loewe

The brand’s connection with art has seen Christmas collections referencing the British 19th century Arts and Crafts movement and others channelling Joe Brainard‘s graphic works

This time the women were draped around Anthea Hamilton’s Giant Pumpkins while the men walked amid New York-based duo Joe McShea and Edgar Mosa’s Flags, Paris 2022

Loewe has long been close to the world of art, a rich source of inspiration for the Spanish luxury maison’s celebrated creative director Jonathan Anderson, himself an enthusiastic collector of contemporary artworks. One of the world’s oldest luxury houses, Loewe has a history stretching all the way back to 1846, when was founded by a consortium of Spanish leather craftsmen led by Enrique Loewe, and its artistic influences today range from the classical to the contemporary.

Creative director Jonathan Anderson made sure Loewe’s autumn/winter 2022 men’s collection featured provocative silhouettes.

There’s the ongoing series of Christmas capsule collections that take their references from the British 19th century Arts and Crafts movement, for example, while the graphic works of experimental 20th century American artist and writer Joe Brainard have provided a very direct form of inspiration for a range of pieces featuring prints and jacquards based on them.

Recently, for its autumn/winter 2022 women’s and men’s shows, Loewe and Anderson engaged a trio of contemporary artists to frame highly experimental collections that push the envelope of what’s possible from a fashion house.

Loewe’s womenswear for autumn/winter 2022 is similarly playful.

The womenswear collection, in keeping with Anderson’s long term aim to ignore all of fashion’s rules and write a whole set of new ones of his own, leaned heavily on surrealism, reflecting the unmoored culture of the era. It featured a strong influence from the world of kink, with plentiful use of latex, alongside a palette of other materials including leather, felt, tweed, resin and even 3D printed fibres. It also came with head-turning surprises, such as figure-hugging dresses with pairs of shoes stuffed down the front, and pieces with balloons apparently escaping from them.

The womenswear was presented among and upon the leather pumpkins of acclaimed British artist Anthea Hamilton.

They were presented in the company of works by Anthea Hamilton, an acclaimed British artist and previous Loewe collaborator who was shortlisted in 2016 for the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious visual art prize, and who is renowned for her surrealist artworks, often executed using the materials and visual vocabulary of fashion and design, and often realised on a monumental scale. Visitors were welcomed to the show by a giant reproduction of her 2010 work Aquarius, an image of a skimpily clad, idealised male body, while the show was laid out amid, or even upon, her Giant Pumpkins, half deflated leather sculptures of outsize gourds.