A Provocateur Prepares to Show His Quiet Side
First Look at Jonathan Anderson’s Men’s Line for Loewe
Two days before his men’s wear presentation for Loewe, the first since his appointment as creative director last September, Jonathan Anderson was standing at the company’s soon-to-be-former headquarters on the Rue François Ier in Paris. It would be a goodbye of sorts to the place where he has spent much of his time these last eight months. The presentation will be held at the new offices, on St.-Sulpice. The space will be not only an office and headquarters, but for the first time, the home of the design team, which Mr. Anderson has imported from the label’s native Madrid.
“The building is nearly ready,” he said. “Two floors are done. I feel like I’m decorating a house.”
In many ways, he is. Loewe is what the French would call a maison — it comprises men’s and women’s wear, bags, shoes, small leather goods and more — but since taking over, Mr. Anderson has been rebranding one of the oldest labels in the LVMH portfolio from the most micro level up. Working with the art directors Michaël Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak of M/M (Paris),
he tweaked the logo, whose swirly Ls now appear on everything from shoes to the digital screens of the company phones, the shopping bags, the hangers. Now it is on to the clothes and accessories.
In some ways, Mr. Anderson was an unexpected choice for the appointment. His own line, J. W. Anderson, which he designs and shows in London (and in which LVMH has invested), is both provocative and conceptual. The line between men’s and women’s wear is never firmly drawn; on the contrary, the two inform each other. One men’s collection had boys in coat dresses and grannyish babushkas. At his most recent, he took inspiration for a series of blousy matching men’s scarf-and-shirt looks in striped silk from Frenchwomen of a certain age he saw on Paris’s streets.
What may be most surprising to J. W. Anderson devotees hoping for shock and awe is that there is little in his first collection for Loewe to spook the horses. There is much that can fairly be called forward-looking, like low-slung jeans with enormous canvas turn-ups and gridded leather-mesh shirts, but just as much that is indisputably, even austerely, classic: a great Perfecto jacket, a pair of espadrilles.
“When I first came to Loewe, I saw that it doesn’t have to be all about fashion,” Mr. Anderson said. “In my own brand, I exercise fashion. If I’m going to be challenged in a different way, it has to be about a cultural landscape.” (To imagine a Spanish cultural landscape without espadrilles, he added, would be impossible.)
He has worked to keep a clear connection to Spain, where Loewe is seen as a national treasure. “My association of Spain was Ibiza,” he said. “Very linen-y, very cotton-y.” He brought a team to Cádiz to shoot the lookbook, which will be bound, linen-wrapped and presented to show attendees.
There is a certain sanity-maintaining element to creating a quieter counterpart to his more extroverted J. W. Anderson collections, but he acknowledged that the new collection may surprise.
“Maybe people are going to want a full fiasco,” he said. “I understand that.”
But his goal has been to perfect the wheel, not reinvent it. To that end, when creating his first Loewe ad campaign, he approached Steven Meisel to shoot it, but he made an unusual request: to also use images, unchanged, from a 1997 spread in Vogue Italia that had been particularly meaningful to him.
Part of Mr. Anderson’s project at Loewe is to look beyond the front rows and magazine offices of fashion’s insular world and speak to a larger audience. It is why he is introducing the ad campaign in tandem with the presentation, to reach insiders and outsiders alike, and why, beginning the day after the show, a handful of items will be available for sale at some of Loewe’s European boutiques and website, and, mid-July, at Jeffrey New York, Dover Street Market in New York and
Loewe.com in the United States. (The label plans to open a Miami boutique in November.)
That ambition requires the support of a much wider world than the fashion one, but Mr. Anderson does not lack confidence. “I want it to compete on the top level,” he said. “I want it to compete in the group,” meaning LVMH.
Starting Thursday, the ad campaign blankets Paris. Outside on the Rue François Ier, in a black polo shirt stitched with the new Loewe logo, Mr. Anderson dragged on a cigarette. He wasn’t, he said, nervous or stressed. But he did acknowledge that these were “the last calm days.”
And the Puzzle bag has surpassed the sales of the Amazona (the most iconinc bag at Loewe) in a reported 27%.
I do believe it's perfectly crafted... but it's Loewe so it has to be that way.
