announced his appointment in September 2013. The fact that his
first men’s collection for the brand had proved such a hit only
served to increase the weight of expectation on his first women’s
show. His vulnerability before the judgment of the fashion
industry was something he mischievously played up when the
spring/summer ’15 women’s collection was finally unveiled last
September. It included two T-shirt prints created from illustrations
that Anderson had found in the Loewe archives. The first showed
waterfowl wading on a riverbank;
the second revealed a hunting dog
in their empty nest. “Sitting ducks
in every sense,” he comments drily.
In hindsight, of course, he needn’t
have worried. When we meet the
day before his second men’s
presentation for Loewe, his
women’s show is already a distant
triumph, which moved Suzy
Menkes to commend the
notoriously experimental designer
for producing a “credible” collection
and Tim Blanks to applaud the
“appealingly wayward imprecision”
of its key pieces.
The weight of history can sit
heavy on the shoulders of a young
designer tasked with rejuvenating
a heritage brand, but Anderson
appears undaunted by it. His new
Loewe has jettisoned the tagline
that used to sit beneath the logo,
Madrid 1846: we no longer need
reminding of the past. The “sitting
ducks” prints were rare instances of
direct reference to the archive, and
the designer has not been afraid to
re-engineer the icons of the house,
from the luggage to the logo. The
Amazona, Loewe’s signature bag, has been restored to its boxier
origins, while the Flamenco has had its frivolous tassels replaced
by sturdy knots. Simultaneously practical, playful and twisted
(figuratively as well as literally: they have a noose-like quality), the
knots also feature as highly tactile key rings and are as good an
index as any of the change of mood at Loewe. One element that
remains unchanged is the house’s signature oro hue, but even that
looks different. A blonde suede, in the past it was said to symbolise
Spain’s fields of wheat but now, thanks to Anderson’s shift of
emphasis, it could only ever stand for sand.
In his men’s collection Anderson took Loewe to the beach, and
his preoccupation with Ibiza’s hippy sensibility is evident in the
women’s clothing too: in the wide, loose silhouettes; in the
gathering and pleating; in the oro-coloured knit tops reminiscent
of macramé gifts from the island’s markets. Likewise, the bags and
dresses are woven from wide strips of leather. “I just liked this idea
of basketry,” says Anderson. “Those baskets that you’d buy on
holiday, that a guy would weave on a beach and then sell you.” But
by staging the women’s show in the UNESCO garden, Anderson
has brought Loewe back from the beach and into the city, albeit
still in a relaxed outdoor space. The location was all-important, he
says. He wanted to make a statement about “the interaction
between a silhouette and a landscape”, so the landscape had to be
right. The transnational status of the UN building was significant,as even though its ateliers remain in Madrid, the new Loewe has
its headquarters in Paris while its Irish-born designer lives in
London. Then there were the specifics of the architecture. The
garden was originally designed by the mid-century artist and
landscape architect Isamu Noguchi and is dominated by concrete
forms. “I liked that it presented this hy per-vision of concrete,” says
Anderson, “because ultimately clothing exists on the street.”
Cold, hard concrete is also a perfect foil to soft, smooth leather,
Loewe’s raîson d ’ être, which was
duly showcased in the collection.
The first look to step out, which
would return in several variations
later in the show, was a long dress
covered in roughly cut swatches
of leather. “The idea with those
dresses was to make the leather
look floaty and light,” says
Anderson, “to create this
fluttering effect as the models
moved, to invent a different
movement to leather.” Loewe is
probably best known for its use of
nappa, a soft leather that absorbs
dyes vividly and evenly, “and
those hues look even stronger
against concrete”.
The colours were at their most
vibrant in the wide-legged leather
trousers that appeared towards the
end of the show: intense shades
of tangerine, cadmium orange,
turquoise and sky blue, as well as
black, white and grey, all tied with
a matching karate belt. “Trousers
are important for this brand,”
declares Anderson, who to
understand Loewe looked to its
70s heyday, when it introduced
its swirling anagram insignia and the Amazona, a name that
resonated with the feminist mood that was hitting critical mass
among the European middle classes at the time. His initial instinct
had been to take Loewe’s womenswear in a more traditionally
feminine direction, but he quickly realised that a sense of independent
womanhood sat at the heart of what the brand meant to the world.
Hence the karate trousers: “I thought it grounded the collection in
more of a Play-Doh-meets-Mortal Kombat-fighter territory.”
Play-Doh, Mortal Kombat – such references typify the way
Anderson loves to throw in elements from leftfield to disrupt an
aesthetic landscape that might otherwise be too smoothly
coherent. A word he uses frequently is “off ”, as in “off kilter”. He
chose latex for the “sitting ducks” T-shirts, for example, because
“it’s a bit off ”. “I like the way latex has a similar quality to leather,
and the fact that there’s a fetish angle to both. I mean, you’d see
both worn in the same nightclub,” he says, grinning. The strange
little pullover cape made from two pieces of suede joined by a
gathered seam across the centre front and back are also “a little bit
off ”, he says, a bit “science fiction”, as if they’re metamorphosing
into some future form. Which is actually the point: of the cape, of
the collection, of his job as a designer. “You need that oddness to
be able to experiment with leather and find a new silhouette.
Because u lt i mately t hat ’s what you’re t r y ing to do at t he beg in n ing :
define the silhouette.” ■Loewe jacket,
$2,890, and
pants, $4,870.VOGUE.COM.AU – 173JAMES COCHRANE INDIGITAL DAVID SIMS