What Will Jonathan Anderson Transform Next?
The Irish designer turned Loewe into fashion’s most coveted brand by radically reinterpreting classic garments. Now he seems poised to make over Dior.
By Rebecca Mead
March 17, 2025
At Loewe, Anderson has made garments of surreal potency, contrived to go viral. This dress features 3-D-printed “balloons.”Photographs by Nwaka Okparaeke for The New Yorker
In one of the grandest galleries of the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, two large canvases are displayed alongside each other—an “Adam and Eve” painted by Titian, around 1550, and another rendering of the subject by Peter Paul Rubens, made eight decades later. In both, a shaggy-haired Adam, seated on the left, extends an arm in a futile attempt to prevent an intoxicated-looking Eve from plucking a shiny apple from the Tree of Knowledge, in which a serpentlike creature lurks. The sizes of the images, the placement of the figures, and even the color palettes are close enough to make the works initially indistinguishable. But more careful scrutiny reveals that Rubens made deft alterations to Titian’s composition. Titian’s Adam leans backward on his right arm; his left hand, which rests limply on Eve’s upper breast, appears hardly capable of stopping her. In Rubens’s version, Adam leans strenuously forward, his midsection torqued in a desperate effort to divert Eve’s glazed eyes from temptation. Rubens reproduced many of Titian’s paintings, but Miguel Falomir Faus, the director of the Prado, has written that “Adam and Eve” is the only one that improves on the original.
“It’s ultimately about admiration, I think,” the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson said last December, stopping before the paired scenes during a visit to the museum. “You’re seeing someone learning from the master. In fashion, we always look at the idea of reinterpreting something as being sometimes negative, but we have been doing it in art since time immemorial. Ultimately, it is about the passing on of information or learning from depiction. So, actually, there’s something really contemporary in the idea of these two paintings sitting side by side in one of the greatest collections of art in the world.” Last year, Anderson received an honorary doctorate from University for the Creative Arts, in London, and in an address to the students he offered a similar message: “Authenticity is invaluable. Originality is nonexistent. Steal, adapt, borrow. It doesn’t matter where one takes things from. It’s where one takes them to. Devour old films, new films, history books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, whatever. Only steal from things that speak directly to you. If you do this, your work will be authentic.” He also noted, “This speech contains a lot of theft”—a sly way of acknowledging that his “steal, adapt, borrow” riff was on loan from the director Jim Jarmusch.
Anderson, who was born in 1984 in Northern Ireland, had never visited the Prado until 2013, when he was appointed the creative director of Loewe, a Spanish company established more than a century ago as a leather-goods concern. Under his stewardship, Loewe, which is owned by the behemoth fashion conglomerate L.V.M.H., has become both a darling among critics and a commercial dynamo: filings submitted to the government in Madrid indicated that the brand had posted a profit of more than two hundred million euros in 2023, a sixty-per-cent increase over the previous year. When my initial meeting in Madrid with Anderson, scheduled for several days earlier, was suddenly but apologetically postponed—his team informed me that he needed to be in London on a day that, I knew, coincided with the glitzy Fashion Awards—I should have run straight to the bookies. Anderson was named Designer of the Year for the second time in a row, for his work both at Loewe and at JW Anderson, his eponymous London-based brand.
With his multifarious commitments, Anderson has a schedule that is constantly subject to revision, and meetings with him are liable to be converted from one thing into another with next to no notice. This was why we were conducting our conversation not over coffee in a hotel lobby, as originally planned, but at the Prado, which I’d intended to visit alone before being told by his P.R. people that he would be joining me. Arriving a few minutes before Anderson, I watched him be escorted to the head of a security queue, with half a dozen harried-looking associates trailing behind. It was ten in the morning, and he had precisely ninety minutes to spend at the museum before he needed to head to the airport for a flight to Lisbon, where a Loewe ad campaign was to be shot.
Meeting him at the Prado made good sense, though. Anderson is a serious collector of ceramics and paintings, and he is also a patron of the arts: he inaugurated the now annual Loewe Craft Prize and is on the board of the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. I welcomed the opportunity to see the Spanish monarchy’s art collection through his eyes, even if it meant scurrying at his elbow through crowded galleries filled with Madrileños at the outset of a holiday weekend; Spanish museumgoers regarded with half recognition the tall, boyishly handsome Irishman striding swiftly through their midst, discoursing intensely and confidently about art history. A docent provided by the Prado hovered discreetly behind us, to steer us efficiently in the direction of works Anderson asked to look at (“Let’s do Van Dyck,” “Do you have any Canalettos?”), like a personal shopper handling a very important client at a high-end boutique.
The paintings by Titian and Rubens had arrested Anderson’s attention the very first time that he’d seen them, he explained. In realizing one’s own vision, he continued, an artist is in the position of Rubens: taking in the œuvre of an accomplished precursor, studying and emulating another’s technique before daring to create something new himself. “If you are learning from a master or from a great work, ultimately your job is to find a new narrative in it,” Anderson said. “It’s, like, the jean will always be the jean. You have to find a new way to represent the jean.” In recent Loewe collections, Anderson has repeatedly accomplished this feat. He has swagged the fabric around the front pockets of a pair of bluejeans so that the pants billow across the thigh almost the way the skirt of an heiress painted by Gainsborough does. Anderson has also wrapped denim into an asymmetrical form so that the fabric drapes diagonally from one jutting hip, falling as fluidly as an elegant gown painted by John Singer Sargent.
Contemporary society, Anderson said, now often fails to see the value of connoisseurship, and it fails to sufficiently appreciate the past. “It’s about learningfrom it,” he told me. “As much as Titian and Rubens were superstars of painting, ultimately, in this period, this would have been seen as a craft. You were not Francis Bacon—you were employed as a craftsman for Philip II.”
The patronage of monarchs is evident everywhere on the walls of the Prado. “It’s about power and regalia,” Anderson said, as we walked among halls displaying the works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, along with other court painters such as Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, who, in 1665, portrayed the fourteen-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa, of Austria, in a silver-and-peach silk dress with a pannier skirt almost as wide as she was tall. “I’m obsessed with the structures underneath clothing—the understructure of these garments is insane,” Anderson said. “You’re going to find boning”—most frequently, whalebone. “You’re going to find layers and layers of fabric and wadding. It was incredibly heavy. You’re not going very far in this.” In Loewe’s latest runway show, presented in September, in Paris, he featured his own series of structured, wide-hipped dresses, though his versions had drastically abbreviated, buttocks-skimming skirts, permitting considerably more movement. In lieu of whalebone, he’d layered long, floaty floral-print gowns over stiffened petticoats, combining volume with a summery translucence.
In a gallery of medieval religious art, we stopped in front of “The Descent from the Cross,” painted in the mid-fourteen-hundreds by the Dutch master Rogier van der Weyden. The complex composition shows the anguished Mary collapsing in folded blue robes before the deposed body of Christ. “I think this is one of the most amazing depictions of fabric,” Anderson said, noting the narrow gray trim on Mary’s sleeves, from beneath which poked what looked like a fitted, long-sleeved undershirt in a matching ultramarine. It was tempting, if possibly sacrilegious, to compare the effect to that of an illusory double cuff, created through inventive stitching, on a merino-alpaca sweater in one of JW Anderson’s recent collections. Anderson said, of the painting, “It’s the beginning of the depiction of humanity. You get this idea of clothing and the power of clothing. And you see, as you go through history, clothing ultimately dictates how we see ourselves.”
In the context of hundreds of paintings rendering sumptuous fabrics, the paired canvases by Titian and Rubens of the Garden of Eden were especially suggestive: each artist had captured the very last moment when clothing was unnecessary. Before Eve bit into the forbidden fruit, nobody had ever felt obliged to fuss about fashion. “It is, ultimately, the dream,” Anderson said, as we regarded Adam and Eve, their genitals obscured by a few strategically placed leaves. “It’s before any form of consumerism. Somehow, it’s, like, this is where we did not need it, until we decided we were not going to do what we were told. Maybe deep down there is an odd fantasy—would it just be better to be naked somehow?”
My trip to Madrid, with its whistle-stop tour of the Prado, was the first, but far from the last, time that I was asked by a professionally regretful member of Anderson’s team to accommodate the demands of his ever-evolving calendar. There was also the fitting I was supposed to observe in Madrid, eliminated just after I’d flown into the capital, because Anderson had to attend an L.V.M.H. corporate event. (A gorgeous bouquet from Loewe, sent to my hotel room, was at least some consolation.) A last-minute invitation to a promotional event in Paris, where Anderson lives part of the time, for the publication of a book celebrating his decade-long tenure at Loewe, came with a warning that, though I was of course welcome to attend, Anderson would be far too busy signing books to speak to me. (More lovely flowers were sent to my hotel room.) At the party, which took place at Loewe’s Avenue Montaigne store, I received a complimentary copy of the limited-edition book, large enough to fill my roller suitcase on its own. When I reached the head of the book-signing queue, Anderson inscribed the lavish volume with “Lots of love, Jonathan.” There was the meeting in London, where Anderson lives the rest of the time, that was confidently scheduled and then indefinitely postponed but never definitively cancelled. The prospect of it hovered tantalizingly out of reach for weeks, in a way that somehow made me think of Anderson’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection for Loewe, in which he offered A-line silk dresses printed with blurred trompe-l’oeil images of other, vintage dresses, one gown superimposed on another in a clever but slippery gesture. In the course of several months, it began to feel almost as if Anderson himself were a grand monarch of the Hapsburg Court—like one of Velázquez’s aristocrats, whose supercilious visage sneers down from the walls of the Prado—while I was a humble supplicant at the palace gates.
There was some explanation for his elusiveness, quite apart from the everyday hauteur of the fashion industry. For much of last year, it was rumored that Anderson was heading for the exit at Loewe, and that he was soon to be appointed the creative director at Dior, another house owned by L.V.M.H. This was the topic of gossip at the Spring/Summer 2025 runway shows in Paris in September, when Loewe lured throngs of fashion followers to the Château de Vincennes, a medieval fortress on the outskirts of the city, for a collection in which Anderson displayed his gowns with the voluminous petticoats. (Another witty creation was a khaki trenchcoat that, thanks to hidden wires in the hem, splayed open at the bottom, as if a strong wind were blowing.) The Paris collection was not just a show but a scene: outside, hundreds of live-streaming onlookers, many dressed in the previous season’s Loewe, bayed at the arrival of V.I.P. guests. These included Jeff Goldblum, deeply tanned and grinning in a leather jacket and taupe pants; he prowled around with slow-motion, photograph-me movements before sitting next to Anna Wintour inside a vast all-white structure that had been erected in a courtyard. Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz received similar adulation as they emerged from a town car and entered the fortress gates, both dressed in fuzzy Loewe sweaters. Craig had met Anderson while filming “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s recent adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella, for which the designer created the costumes; afterward, the actor modelled for a Loewe campaign, posing gamely in patterned sweaters and belted but unbuckled jeans. (Craig told me later, “Jonathan loves the creative world, and the fingers of what he does in his own world go everywhere. He’s not just one thing, Jonathan—he’s many, many things.”)
During our tour around the Prado, Anderson had declined to address the rumors of his departure. “At the moment, I’m very happy—next week, I may not be,” he said, adding that he intended to stay at Loewe “as long as they want me there,” an evasive formulation that did not exclude the possibility that L.V.M.H. might soon want him elsewhere. As the weeks rolled by, talk of Anderson’s future continued: “There are rumors flying, and we wait with bated breath to see,” Caroline Rush, the departing head of the British Fashion Council, the organization that gives out the annual Fashion Awards, told me in December. As the year drew to a close, it emerged that neither JW Anderson nor Loewe would be taking part in the men’s shows during January’s fashion weeks in Milan and Paris—which could indicate that Anderson simply wanted a creative break but could also indicate that a move was imminent. The pieces seemed to be falling into place when, in late January, it was announced that Kim Jones, the artistic director of Dior Men, was stepping down—with the snag being that Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of women’s clothes at Dior, was still in place, with shows scheduled through May. Nonetheless, Lauren Sherman, the fashion reporter at Puck, characterized it as an “open secret” that Anderson would be confirmed as the over-all designer for Dior. In early March, when the anticipated appointment had still not been announced, Sherman published a story saying that Anderson’s brief would be to increase Dior’s annual revenues from an estimated ten billion euros to fourteen. Other publications have reported that Anderson has been at the company’s headquarters, on Avenue Montaigne, in Paris, and has already started developing collections. (“We do not comment on speculation,” a publicist for Loewe maintained.)
Last week, while other designers were showing their latest collections on runways in Paris, Loewe staged a static exhibition at the Pozzo di Borgo—a grand mansion, in the Seventh Arrondissement, formerly owned by Karl Lagerfeld—with clothes displayed on dressmakers’ dummies and with bags atop plinths. The collection, which included gowns crafted from massed loops of beaded organza that resembled spaghetti and oversized leather waders paired with tailored suits, was described in accompanying notes as “a scrapbook of ideas . . . to be preserved as memories or to serve as an inspiration.” Anderson, who was not in evidence at the show, had the previous day posted to his personal Instagram a short video that looked very much like a highlight reel of his tenure at Loewe; many commenters interpreted this as the designer’s public farewell to the brand. On March 17th, he released a statement, on Instagram, announcing his departure from Loewe. The Dior situation remained unconfirmed.
A long line of designers, including Raf Simons and John Galliano, have sought to put their own stamp on the illustrious house, which was founded, in 1946, by Christian Dior. His début collection of full-skirted, sculptural dresses—designated the New Look—has become so canonical that it’s easy to forget that the gowns’ material extravagance initially generated outrage from a public accustomed to wartime parsimony. Dior, like Anderson, admired visual artists: in the twenties, he was the co-owner of a gallery that showed work by Picasso, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí. He was also a canny businessman, establishing outposts in dozens of countries and selling neckties and jewelry in addition to women’s wear.
Similarly, Anderson leans toward the intellectual while also being fiendishly commercial. His Fall/Winter 2024 Loewe collection offered a cashmere sweater that exploded just below the rib cage into a flurry of pilling, as if exposing a furry underside to the flat knit. It also included what Sarah Mower, of Vogue,characterized as his “never forgetting of the über-ordinary wearable item,” such as a shearling aviator jacket with overlong sleeves, fastened with a zipper and a row of white buttons with perfect white buttonholes. (The jacket’s price, it should be noted, wasn’t über-ordinary: just under seven thousand dollars.) Loewe’s Puzzle bag, which Anderson introduced in his first collection, and which is made from soft leather cut into patchwork pieces and then stitched back together at rakish angles, is a choice non-blingy brag. His emphasis on bridging fashion and craft, and bringing them both under the umbrella of art, makes the wearers of his creations feel as if they were doing something more cerebral and aesthetically elevated than merely consuming luxury goods.
From his earliest collections at JW Anderson, which started as a menswear line, in 2008, up to and including his most recent styles for Loewe, Anderson’s designs have appealed to consumers with a taste for the teasingly comical. In his first womenswear collections for JW Anderson, in 2011, he presented a paisley pajama suit fitted with a white latex clerical collar as daywear, as well as hefty hiking boots festooned with wisps of fur, like Muppet mustaches. Not long afterward, he produced a menswear collection that featured “ruffle shorts,” which were embellished around the thigh with flounces, in a transgression of normative gender boundaries that, a dozen years ago, gave people a genuine jolt. His early creations were “very honest and crafty and fun and exciting and impulsive,” Harry Lambert, a well-known London stylist, told me. Recently, Anderson collaborated with Pleasing—a brand, launched by Harry Styles, for which Lambert is a creative director. Styles is frequently captured by paparazzi wearing Anderson’s designs, such as a navy bomber jacket filled with enough puffer insulation to create an inflated silhouette. In early 2020, the singer was photographed wearing a JW Anderson patchwork cardigan in Lego colors. Replicating the chunky wool garment became a lockdown fad among home knitters, to the point that Anderson released the design as a not-for-the-fainthearted pattern.
Instead of sketching on paper, Anderson designs by draping on the body, and his innovations regularly concern form—experimenting with the structure of a pair of pants or a jacket, giving disconcerting new uses to familiar fabrics. On the runway, he sometimes shows garments whose wearability is beside the point. In 2023, JW Anderson released a series of hoodies and shorts molded from Plasticine, a British modelling clay common to children’s crafts and to stop-motion animation. The results were suggestive but silly—streetwear for Wallace and Gromit. As Anderson explained at the time, he was inspired by how every generation of teens puts its own inventive spin on the classic high-school wardrobe—literally remodelling the basic look.
Although Anderson’s creations tend to be sculptural, he has a particular genius for understanding how three dimensions will translate into two—as an image on the printed page of a high-end culture magazine, or blown up on a billboard, or, most important of all, on the infinite scroll of social media. “Weirdly, I adore the flat thing,” Anderson told me. “I adore the final image. Fashion is ultimately about trying to sell something through the image, and through desire.” His fascination with the still image, and with the way digital technology mediates desire, can translate into garments of surreal potency, contrived to go viral. For Spring/Summer 2023, he showcased a capsule collection of “pixel” garments in which hoodies, jackets, and pants were ingeniously fabricated to resemble a glitched 8-bit image from a video game: seen online, the joke became a meta-joke. Among those who actually wore a pixel hoodie was Marc Jacobs, the veteran designer, who dressed in one for his sixtieth-birthday party—a tribute from one master marketer to another.
Anderson prefers to characterize Loewe as a cultural brand rather than a luxury one, finding the latter term despoiled. “The luxury brand became as mass as the mass brand,” he told me. Instead, he argues, a fashion house like Loewe should offer its followers a form of aesthetic aspiration, and also a form of education, in part by introducing them to living and historical artists and to designers whose work they otherwise might not encounter. “Yes, luxury is élitist, and, yes, luxury is at arm’s length,” he said, at the Prado. “At the same time, I think you can look at luxury the same way as we look at that painting. We can still get enjoyment from it and have an emotional reaction to it, even though I cannot buy it.” Loewe boutiques now display works of art from the Loewe Foundation, in accordance with Anderson’s taste and with the guidance of Andrew Bonacina, an independent curator whom Anderson has been close to for years. In Loewe’s flagship store, in Madrid, a colorful abstract aquatint by Howard Hodgkin, more than twenty feet in length, hangs opposite the main entrance. Elsewhere in the store, a selection of fragile white ceramics by Edmund de Waal, which are not for sale, sit in cases above a shelf of the brand’s signature bags—the Puzzle, the Squeeze, the Flamenco—which most certainly are. For admirers of Anderson’s taste who cannot afford a pair of baggy leather pants that flow with otherworldly softness, like parachute silk, and cost about five thousand dollars, there is JW Anderson’s collaboration during the past eight years with Uniqlo—his own preferred brand for day-to-day dressing, along with Levi’s jeans. This fall, the Japanese company sold JW Anderson-branded “curved” pants for about fifty dollars, featuring a silhouette that, at first glance, has only a Titian/Rubens difference to that of JW Anderson’s “twisted” jeans, which, with their cunningly skewed seams, bestow on even the most perfectly proportioned body fashionably bandy legs.
Anderson is the second son of a celebrated athlete: his father, Willie Anderson, played rugby for the All-Ireland team in the eighties and served as a coach to the national team after his retirement from the field. In Ireland, Willie is legendary not only for his prowess with the ball but for an occasion, in 1989, when he captained the team in a match against the All Blacks, from New Zealand. Before the starting whistle, the New Zealand players performed a traditional pre-game haka, a Māori dance. Willie linked arms with his fellow-players and faced down the opposing captain, glowering at the antipodeans in headbands and teeny-tiny shorts. I asked Anderson whether he thought that his father’s profession had influenced his own understanding of masculinity. He replied, “In a weird way, rugby is so masculine that it becomes camp. It’s so exaggerated.” Of the recurring presence of shorts on his runways, he explained, “I love legs on people—there’s an interesting type of elongation or physicality. Length can mean so many different things in clothing. And shorts on a man is a way you can have something that is incredibly masculine and incredibly feminine at the same time. It just depends on what context you build.”
The context in which Anderson grew up was provincial and conservative. His home town, Magherafelt, lies more or less in the middle of Northern Ireland, surrounded by farmland. His paternal grandfather was a farmer, and as a boy Anderson spent much of his time among sheep and chickens. “I am glad I was brought up in Ireland, because I don’t think I would be who I am today without the idea of being on an island,” he told me. “The window is small, so everything outside looks big. The big world looks bigger.” During Anderson’s childhood, the region was still riven with sectarian hostility and violence. His family was Protestant, and as a sportsman Willie participated in one of the few areas of cultural life where the distinction between the North and the South was officially erased. (Even at the height of the Troubles, Ireland’s professional sports teams included players from both sides of the border.) Nevertheless, the civil strife was impossible to ignore. “In several moments of my life, the conflict came close,” Anderson said. “I went to school one day and the entire street was blown away. There were people being kneecapped. Someone would come in and have their head blown off in a bar.” In 1998, Anderson’s mother, Heather, a schoolteacher, was on a shopping trip in the town of Omagh and only narrowly avoided being caught up in a devastating explosion from a car bomb. It was the worst single attack of the decades-long conflict. Twenty-nine people, Catholic and Protestant alike, were killed, and more than two hundred were wounded.
Anderson’s family was more unconventional than many of their neighbors’; during his teen-age years his parents bought a holiday home on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where Anderson was introduced to a southern European culture of late nights and physical freedom, along with abundant sunshine. (Anderson told me that the typically cloudy skies of Ireland—“a country which has a lower horizon of light”—still shape how he puts colors together. He also noted that the mid-gray tones of his native climate look great in photographs.) His interest in the visual arts was cultivated especially by his maternal grandfather, who was an executive at a textile company and was, Anderson said, “obsessed by art.” His grandfather took him to museums in Belfast and Dublin; he also collected antique clocks. “The best he could afford,” Anderson explained. “He would also try to get the best one and then upgrade it to the next best one.” Anderson’s grandfather lived long enough to attend Loewe’s Spring/Summer 2020 show, in Paris, at which Anderson presented a series of transparent, structured lace dresses that evoked the crinolines worn by seventeenth-century Spanish nobility. “He found it completely mesmerizing and very confusing,” Anderson told me.
Anderson has inherited not only his grandfather’s appreciation for art but also his connoisseurship and targeted acquisitiveness. Visits to auction-house websites have become a “very dangerous” habit, he acknowledged. Thomas Dane, a contemporary gallerist in London, from whom Anderson has bought a number of works, said, of Anderson, “He’s one of the most interesting collectors today—his range of interest is extraordinary.” Among the artists Anderson collects are Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French Vorticist sculptor and painter, who died in combat during the First World War, at the age of twenty-three; Lynda Benglis, the contemporary American artist celebrated for her sculptures of poured latex and wax; and Anthea Hamilton, the British sculptor known for surreal installations containing giant versions of ordinary objects, such as butterflies. Anderson is adept at merging his enthusiasm for contemporary art with his creative production. Benglis has made a jewelry line for Loewe, and the cover of Anderson’s ten-year Loewe retrospective highlights not one of his own designs but a work of Hamilton’s—a vastly oversized pumpkin fashioned from leather and shot for the Loewe Fall/Winter 2022 campaign.
In 2017, Anderson tried his hand as a curator, putting together a show, “Disobedient Bodies,” at the Hepworth Wakefield, in West Yorkshire. He has since overseen several other museum and gallery shows. At the Hepworth, he juxtaposed sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas, among others, with fashion pieces by Jean Paul Gaultier and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo, as well as a handful of his own designs. Andrew Bonacina, who was then the head curator at the Hepworth, had invited Anderson to do the show. Bonacina recalled to me, “Jonathan came to the exhibition with such a reverence and excitement for the artists he wanted to include that, at the very start of the process, I sensed he had a resistance to bringing in fashion. Maybe it was that working in the industry meant it didn’t hold for him any of the mystery or magic he admires in what artists make.” In the course of developing the show, Bonacina went on, Anderson began to understand anew how a garment can be a form of sculptural expression: “I think he discovered some form of kinship with how artists think and make and was able to appreciate how equally radical fashion can be.”
Anderson, who is dyslexic, did not have the patience or the attention span for traditional academics, and his earliest arena for artistic expression was in drama. As a teen-ager, he joined the National Youth Music Theatre, which staged musical adaptations of such works as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “I was Additional Fairy Number Whatever,” he told me. At nineteen, he enrolled at the Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory, in Washington, D.C., where, for the first time, he lived away from home, in the basement of friends of his parents. The experience of being in a fresh environment was thrilling. “You are an Irish person in America, where everyone loves Irish people,” he said. “I didn’t have any landmarks. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know who I was. You’re meeting people at face value, and you don’t know what school they went to, and you don’t know the neighbor next door.” At home, Anderson had been an assertive teetotaller, a nonsmoker, and in the closet about his sexuality. “I was probably not the most fun person as a child, and I think that was all to contain everything,” he said. “When I went to Washington, I understood my attraction to men.” (These days, Anderson’s boyfriend is Pol Anglada, a Catalan artist whose queer imagery sometimes ends up on JW Anderson designs.) Anderson took up drinking and smoking, too: “ ‘Boogie Nights’ was on in the cinema, and I chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes through it.”
It also didn’t take long for Anderson to grasp that acting was not his métier. “I started not to enjoy it,” he said. “I realized that I could not escape my own self.” He returned to Ireland and worked for a department store in Dublin for a while, immersing himself in menswear merchandising and, eventually, applying to art school to study fashion. He was disappointed to be turned down by Central Saint Martins—the alma mater of Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, and other ambitious British designers. Instead, he enrolled in a menswear course at London College of Fashion, graduating in 2005. Essential to Anderson’s professional development were lessons he learned beyond the classroom—not only how to design clothes but also how to attract consumers. While a student, he got a part-time job as a visual merchandiser at Prada, working under Manuela Pavesi, a brilliant stylist who had been a friend and a colleague of Miuccia Prada’s for years. Pavesi, who died of cancer in 2015, encouraged the young Anderson to start his own brand, which he did before the age of thirty. Anderson said, of Pavesi, “She had a precision of how to put looks together that I had never witnessed. In the beginning, you emulate, and as you gain confidence from that you start to become your own thing. Doing the windows for Prada was probably the best decision I ever made, because you are learning from something that you find as important as Rubens did Titian.”
The demands on Anderson’s time and creativity grant him little opportunity for hesitation. “He rarely second-guesses his gut instinct,” Bonacina told me. Anderson certainly does not lack for confidence. When he arrived at Loewe, in 2013, he was so intent on trusting his instincts that he didn’t even want to consult the house’s archive, which contained objects and garments that had been saved and collected from more than a century of production. “But then I did look, and I thought, Well, we’d better capitalize on it before someone else does,” he said in 2015.
Loewe traces its roots to the mid-nineteenth century in Madrid; in 1872 the business, then a small workshop, was joined by Enrique Loewe Roessberg, a skilled German leather craftsman who eventually gave his name to the brand. (The company’s name is pronounced “low-eh-veh,” a verbal challenge to non-Spanish speakers which Anderson has turned to the brand’s advantage; a viral short film, written by Dan Levy, spoofed a competitive spelling bee, with Aubrey Plaza starring as a number of contestants through the years, none of whom could get the order of the vowels right.) By the end of the nineteenth century, the company had established a store on the Calle del Príncipe, and soon Loewe had become a supplier of leather goods to the royal house of Spain. Some of the oldest items in the Loewe archive, which occupies a climate-controlled warehouse outside Madrid, date to the nineteen-twenties: a box, shaped like an oversized clamshell, designed to contain several starched collars; a palm-size case containing three glass bottles that would not accord with contemporary carry-on regulations. Marta González de la Rubia, an archivist at Loewe who gave me a tour of the facility, told me that in the company’s early decades the retention of samples had been haphazard, and that this was especially true with the company’s packaging. One treasure, on display on a metal shelf, was a cream-colored box marked with the Loewe name, accidentally preserved from the early twenties. On the shelf above, a contemporary shopping bag from a Loewe store was being kept for posterity. “For us, it’s technically an historical object, even if it’s just a paper bag,” González de la Rubia said. (Even if it’s just a paper bag, it is hardly worthless; I saw a similar one being offered on the website Vinted with a price tag of ten dollars.)
Loewe first started offering garments, in addition to bags and other objects, in the forties, under José Pérez de Rozas, the artistic director who steered the company’s image for about three decades, until the seventies. The archive indicates that there was a collaboration with Dior in 1975 and that, in 1977, a young Giorgio Armani made some designs for the label. But there was little excitement about ready-to-wear, even after Narciso Rodriguez was appointed a design director, in 1997, a year after making Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wedding dress. If Loewe was not an entirely blank slate when Anderson arrived, there was plenty of scope for him to make it his own. His first collection, shown in Paris, in 2014, included shapes that would become signatures, such as slouchy pants with low-tied waists, and an abundant use of lightweight cotton and linen alongside the leather for which the house is best known. He explained that his plans for Loewe had been inspired by, among other sources, a 1997 photo shoot for Vogue Italia by Steven Meisel. It showed a handful of languid models on a beach—two of them, quaintly enough, reading books. (Here was another Titian-Rubens moment: the Meisel photographs are homages to paintings by Alex Katz.) “When I think of Spain, I think of being on a beach,” Anderson told Women’s Wear Daily at the time—an observation that the landlocked Madrileños working in the Loewe factory might have had some questions about, but which appealed to the young international consumer whom the brand would now target.
Although the company’s ready-to-wear operation moved to Paris under Anderson’s stewardship, the manufacturing of leather goods remains based in Madrid. The factory, which is on a light-industrial estate half an hour from the city center, employs hundreds of locals who are trained in specialized skills, including evaluating and cutting hides. (When a hide is draped over a trolley, for transport within the factory, the result looks like a donkey on wheels.) On a recent visit, I saw the complexity of a Puzzle bag’s manufacturing process. After the pieces of leather are cut into the correct shapes, they are sliced in half horizontally, glued with a layer of reinforcement on all but their outer edges, and then lined with suède, a process that allows the pieces to be thin enough along the edges to be stitched together without bulk but strong enough to withstand day-in, day-out use. A number of artisans were finishing up a batch of Flamenco bags, tying licorice-like tubes of black leather into paired knots. It was Anderson’s vaunted craftsmanship in action, but the work of the artisans was not entirely romantic. These employees, I was informed, can be stationed at this particular task for only two hours at a time before being rotated to another. Otherwise, they would develop repetitive strain injuries. The covetable object, and the desirable image, has its own hidden price.
Seven years through Anderson’s tenure, Loewe, like every other fashion brand, was faced with the challenge of selling clothing and accessories during the pandemic, with stay-at-home mandates denting consumer spending. “It made me realize I could lose everything,” Anderson told me. “If you were going to be in good shape after the pandemic, you had to be very good.” For his first, much praised post-lockdown collection, Anderson drew inspiration from the Mannerist artist Jacopo da Pontormo, in particular his monumental, pastel-hued painting “Deposition from the Cross,” from 1528. The collection included columnar dresses in dreamy, fuzzy shades of pale pink and blue and leggings with billowing openings at the knee, recalling the exposed legs of the bereft figures in the Pontormo. At the time, Anderson told Vogue, “If you’re going to reset after this period, you need to allow a moment to birth a new aesthetic. Start again.”
When we met in December at the Prado, starting again again was clearly on Anderson’s mind, however little he was inclined, or at liberty, to speak about it. “I think I need to find a new way to break something,” he said, as he walked restlessly from gallery to gallery. “I’ve built something—either I re-break it and rebuild it or someone else re-breaks and rebuilds it. I think I need to get outside of my comfort zone again and be challenged by aesthetics I’m not used to.” He went on, “I’m at that point where I need re-stimulation or new things. I want to be into new paintings or to find something new. Because the one thing I do know is I will never turn off until I’m done.” In the next year, he mused, he might change JW Anderson into a more conceptual enterprise. “When I started JW Anderson, I was kind of a bratty child who was, like, ‘I’m going to be a fashion designer, and I’m going to do these things to get my name out,’ which was the right thing to do,” he said. “I am now forty, so now I am trying to work out what is a radical act with my own brand. In a weird way, I am trying to make it harder again.” At a storied house such as Loewe, he told me, he sees himself as a guest, and so he might find some pleasure in allowing two fashion lines to “rebel against each other”—to present an idea at one brand’s show, then “contradict it two weeks later at another show.”
We entered the galleries devoted to Goya, who was both a court painter and a fierce social critic who used his art to document war and attack injustice. Anderson said, “I think what is interesting is that, in any creative form, if you’re really good, you have to have multiple stages of a career. We live in a society that gets bored with things within a week, so you have to be able to force yourself to reinvent yourself.” We soon found ourselves standing before Goya’s so-called Black Paintings, murals that the artist made late in life on the walls of a farmhouse outside Madrid that he retreated to in his seventies. The works are famously horrific. One depicts Saturn devouring his son—a wild-eyed, bedraggled figure gnawing on a raw, bloody arm of his offspring—and another, “Witches’ Sabbath,” shows a coven of hags congregating around the looming figure of a billy goat, their mouths agape. The darkness of these paintings has been attributed to Goya’s disillusionment after two decades of war, famine, and political upheaval in Spain. “You realize that sometimes the radical act—or the political or social act—can trigger something new,” Anderson said. “Francis Bacon would not exist without this. You cannot get Lucian Freud without this. Because you realize, through very limited brushstrokes in the faces, how someone is feeling.”
Anderson spoke with passion and urgency—with the investment of a fellow-artist, not merely the appreciation of a consumer. His identification with Goya’s aesthetic evolution was so apparent that I asked him if he ever painted. It was the only time during our walk through the museum that he seemed anything other than entirely sure of himself. “Do I? Do I paint? Not really,” he said, with a sigh. “I have painted.” He appeared suddenly self-conscious, as if he had been caught naked, like Adam after the Fall. “I think I would prefer to rearrange a room and paint the room than to paint a landscape—that doesn’t excite me,” he said, quickly trying to reframe the question. “I’d change the color of the walls in my house every couple of week if I could. When I am at home, I like to change things around a lot, because I get bored.”
I suggested that Anderson sounded reluctant to consider his own art in parallel with that of the fine artists he so admires. “I would love to be able to paint,” he allowed. “I would love to be known as a great painter. You can focus yourself on doing twelve masterpieces, and that will define your career. Fashion is a little harder than that. It’s a continual act. You have to make, in a weird way, so much output to kind of get the really good output, because we live in a consumer heaven, ultimately, or Hell.”
He went on, “At the moment, what I’ve done at Loewe—what I try to do with my brand, and what I would want to continue in my career doing—is try to understand: Why do we make things, and why do we have the desire to want them, even if we don’t buy them?” No longer the student, Anderson had become the master. “You realize you’re no longer eighteen designing something—you’re an adult. You’re not looking up to people anymore. You have to go off, in a weird way, like Rubens and make your own language,” he said. “You have to be at one with the idea that you are replaceable, and that is good. The great thing about fashion is that we all go out of fashion.” ♦
