This show was peak craft-era Loewe. After it, Anderson shifted towards concept and art as drivers of his collections.
The spring 2018 lookbook helped cement Anderson’s intentions of linking Loewe not just to its lofty craft-driven history, but to its Spanish heritage. The charming lookbook was shot at Salvador Dalí’s house in Catalonia. The clothes helped establish Anderson’s menswear bonafides, remember this is the playful, quirky category he built from scratch at Loewe.
Speaking of setting intentions, that Anderson’s first collection for Loewe was menswear certainly helped set the tone for what was to come. It was the trousers colorblocked by white cuffed linings that, to me, set the path forward.
I remember this lookbook fondly for two reasons: the amazing mega show-on-a-t-shirt tee that displayed all the Loewe/Eye/Nature sustainable pieces, and the collaboration with the iconic NYC queer artist Joe Brainard. Anderson has made Loewe a destination for his audience to discover key artists in the community, be that through collabs or his show sets, and this is a prime example. Those leather harness trousers are also pretty good.
Anderson has made challenging proportions one of his signatures as a designer. This lookbook is a particular example of that fascination, with its gargantuan Puzzle bags and backpacks and that insane shaggy double coat. It doesn’t rate higher simply because Anderson has since produced many more compelling proportion studies, particularly in his ready-to-wear, though it’s always nice to see where the ideas started.
This was Anderson showcasing the bizarre and strangely funny places his mind tends to go. I particularly enjoyed the mash up of cute Disney motifs and other playful kid stuff with more grown-up silhouettes. “They make me smile,” Anderson told Tim Blanks of these cutesy doodles. They made me smile, too.
Jonathan Anderson’s second Loewe lineup, he told Tim Blanks, started with a classic musing: “why did I buy this?” Anderson produces the kind of clothes that are as fun to wear as they are sometimes hard to style. Not everyone can pull off his designs, and that’s what made him a cult favorite pre-Rihanna and pre-Challengers. This lookbook is an early example of his ability to make the strange somehow alluring.
It’s interesting to look back at these early Loewe collections and see how well they’ve aged, but also remember how new and strange they felt at the time. This lookbook is all the way at the bottom simply because this ranking has to end at some point, and its counterparts pushed it down for a variety of reasons that I hope you took the time to read already.