STYLE Edit: Loewe unveils art-inspired autumn/winter 2022 menswear and womenswear collections, where creative director Jonathan Anderson gets surreal with shapes
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.
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.
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.
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.
The men’s collection had a similarly surrealist, experimental feel, with Anderson gleefully taking the staples of men’s dressing and injecting them with unexpected touches. The result is a range of deeply conceptual pieces, featuring innovations ranging from hoops and wire frames that stretch and contort them into wholly original shapes, through to LEDs and lights built into everything from coats and trousers to shoes.
The show’s setting was Flags, Paris 2022, a work created by New York-based artist duo Joe McShea and Edgar Mosa. Featuring 87 flags, each 3.5 metres by 2.5 metres, and made of a total of nearly 4,000 brightly coloured ribbons hanging on angled aluminium flagpoles, the work moved with the movement of the models and audience alike.
- 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