For the last few seasons, Jonathan Anderson has been meticulously scaling back his Loewe shows in what he has been calling “a reductionist act”. A continuation of his deep dive into contemporary surrealism as a means to answering some of fashion’s big questions: What is the purpose of a fashion show? How are clothes viewed online, as opposed to in person? How does craft, a pillar of Loewe, evolve in a time of digital imagery? Jonathan’s chosen venue for his AW23 show seemed to suggest some answers: a white cube, which could be anywhere really, built in the courtyard of an old chateau on the outskirts of Paris. Oh, how he likes to tease us!
The first few looks of his collection, too, set the tone for his reductionist eye-trickery: a handful of ostensibly two-dimensional duchesse satin dresses printed with mottled prints of other garments — an antique dress, an LBD, a tea dress in floral chintz — slightly glitched, perhaps even pixelated, as if the ghosts of those old garments were Xeroxed onto carte blanche paper cut-outs. They were followed by a made-in-Spain brown leather tunic that was hybridised with a bag, a chain strap hitching up the skirt over the shoulder — a tongue-in-cheek reminder that despite the eye-trickery and laboratory-like experimentation on show at Loewe, Jonathan is ultimately the creative director of an LVMH leather house. He designs fashion, not just merchandise; he’s commercially successful, as well as avant-garde. Plus, this show was full of desirable, outfit-making bags, big and small. He really can do both.
After those first few looks, the collection expanded on the idea of reduction with outfits that were elementally styles, often emphasising one piece, reduced to the bluntest shape possible. Out came feathered t-shirts and jeans (Loewe’s version of Bottega’s Is it Cake? casuals), sculpturally draped knitwear, and a handful of what Jonathan described as “robot doll” garments — chubby, padded leather with embossed pockets and buttons, opaque in their Lego-like “stress ball silhouettes” — as well as a couple of ostensibly ordinary cardigans that were actually stickers, simply applied to the skin. All of these are still garments, mind you, are the result of experimental techniques and design innovation — even if they might not look like it at first. They rely just as much on the skills of Loewe’s craftspeople as the house’s best-selling bags and leather goods. Jonathan has previously described his fashion shows as laboratories, spaces for design and craft to bubble up into sartorial “”Eureka!” moments.
You get the sense that you’re not really supposed to realise this all from just looking at pictures of the clothes, which I guess makes it the ultimate contemporary proposal of ‘stealth-wealth dressing’ clothes that only you, or a knowing few, know are intricate, layered and cerebral. Once upon a time, it was brands like Goyard and Hermés that occupied that space, but now there are millions of TikToks that have demystified those once-IYKYK houses. Loewe offers something far more esoteric than logo-less design. The flatness of the silhouettes on display in this show was intentional, architecturally engineered to be sculptural in person and obscured online, like those printed satin dresses.
These are clothes with Easter eggs that go unnoticed by the naked eye, only to be discovered and experienced on a rail in a boutique. They encourage you to figure out how to get your body into them, and how to take a good selfie in them. “We’re in the room, so it looks like one thing, but then we have an online audience that sees it in a different way,” Jonathan reflected after the show. “I feel like it’s about how you get newness when you go in store in six months. My biggest obsession now is how we consume imagery so quickly. We see so many shows and then we were kind of over them. I think it’s how these collections are not for right now, but for in six months, and I think this is a very hard thing for the designer because everything becomes overexposed very quickly.”
Therein lies the genius of Jonathan Anderson. Like the compounded cubes of confetti that were dotted around the show space — they were the work of Italian artist Lara Favaretto — not everything at Loewe is as it seems. And that’s what makes its vision of luxury, as something to be personally appreciated rather than just worn on one’s sleeve, so compelling in this age of bling-bling ostentation and snowballing excess. Although Jonathan says his shows are about reduction, in many ways, they are actually about renewal, and his inherent, anxious refusal to repeat himself or become complacent. He changes it up every season, while expanding on the bigger-picture themes he’s interested in. Backstage, he asked himself: “How do you reinforce the language, but at the same time, not get trapped by a language that you built?” It’s a double-edged sword for talented designers like Jonathan, interested in both the zeitgeist and timelessness. And yet, it is one that he manages to harmoniously balance every time.
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Images via Spotlight