The last decade has been very busy for Jonathan Anderson. Since taking over as creative director for Loewe in 2013, the 39-year-old designer has turned the Spanish fashion house from an also-ran at luxury conglomerate LVMH to a powerhouse that generates over $650 million a year in revenue.
Anderson has done so largely by collapsing the gap between high fashion and the art world. He has engineered thoughtful, high-profile collaborations with artists ranging from Julien Nguyen to Lynda Benglis to Richard Hawkins. And he has helped craft unconventional yet wearable collections that are replete with sharp and often funny references to visual art.
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Anderson’s imprint on Loewe is on full display at “Crafted World,” the brand’s first public exhibition, on view until May 5 at the Shanghai Exhibition Centre before traveling worldwide. While it charts Loewe’s 178-year history—from its 19th-century origins as a Madrid leather-making collective to its acquisition by LVMHin 1996 to now— the exhibition is undoubtedly the story of Anderson’s tenure at the brand.
“In the beginning, it was very difficult actually to get artists to work with a fashion brand. There was a preconceived idea of fashion as the Big Bad Wolf and artists as this island,” Anderson said at a press preview for the exhibition Thursday. “It was only recently that I realized that, through many, many years of trying to understand the nuances and to make people feel secure in collaborating with a brand and not feel overexposed by it, we now are in a place where I feel confident that the artist is in a safe space.”
Loewe’s years of working with artists form the center of “Crafted World.” While the exhibition begins by tracing the brand’s early history and includes a stairwell lined with video screens cheekily demonstrating proper pronunciation of the name (i.e. lo-ev-eh), it quickly shifts to a room filled with tree trunks hung with the brand’s Basket and Bucket bags alongside ceramics by Pablo Picasso and traditional handmade Spanish “Lebrillo” bowls. The ceramics, from the Loewe Art Collection, are typically displayed in Casa Loewe stores, which similarly juxtapose the brand’s designs with artworks. Some 150 artworks are on display in the exhibition, including other works from the collection, like Repressed Apple by the Irish sculptor Siobhán Hapaska, or pieces that resulted from collaborations, like British artist Anthea Hamilton’s Giant Pumpkin No. 6, a large sculpture of a winter squash that decorated the set for the brand’s Fall Winter 2022 show in Paris. There is also an entire room dedicated to winners of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, an annual prize of €50,000 given for an original work of applied arts.
“There is something in all the artists [on display] where there is something in the craft that they do that becomes quite twisted,” Anderson explained. “When you look at Picasso’s ceramics, they border on kitsch. They’re kind of funny. And I actually think some of Picasso’s greatest works are done in ceramic. They become this interesting bridge of make versus decorative versus painterly.”
The focus on Loewe’s ties to artists is perhaps natural, given that Anderson curated the exhibition, with assistance from around 100 other people spread across the brand’s team and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the London-based firm founded by Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis. Anderson and Loewe began development of “Crafted World” nearly two years ago, laying out the themes and content, before OMA was brought in last summer to design the physical space of the 17,000-square-foot exhibition.
During the initial phase of their involvement, OMA went through Loewe’s archive to get a “clearer picture” of the story that the show could tell, Ellen van Loon, a partner at OMA and the lead on the project, told ARTnews.
“It was interesting to see this whole story,” van Loon said. “We found out that this collaboration with artists has happened since the beginning of the company. There has always been an interest from day one in other arts.”
While the exhibition often appears like a well-crafted museum survey, with white walls and explanatory plaques to match, its most thrilling segments are the nine immersive rooms that make up “Unexpected Dialogues,” each dedicated to the work of a particular artist or collaborator and the resulting collection. The rooms are designed to accentuate the particular style of each artist. For example, the space dedicated to the Japanese ceramicist duo Suna Fujita features walls dotted with circular cutouts, beckoning the viewer to lean in to see the whimsical details on ceramic vases and teapots or a video of the artists at work. The carpets made by weaver John Allen fill a room from floor to ceiling, while sculptor Ken Price is honored with a recreation of his New Mexico studio. An entire wall is dedicated to a moving collage inspired by the works of Downtown New York fixture Joe Brainard, brought to life by a hand crank.
In discussing the various collaborations, Anderson said that, beyond simply working with artists whose work he admires, he privileges those whose work creates whole worlds or whose ideas reinforce or provide a counterpoint to his, as was the case in January when Loewe unveiled its Autumn/Winter 2024 menswear collection alongside paintings and digital collages by Richard Hawkins, a Los Angeles–based artist who creates images of queer desire.
“That just felt right to me,” Anderson said of working with Hawkins on the playful and sexy menswear collection. “We had a lot of work by [Hawkins] in the Loewe Collection. And it was just the right antithesis to the collection. It was able to take it to the next level.”
Among the more than 600 objects and products on display are any number that encourage attendees to not just look, but touch. There is a over six-foot tall Studio Ghibli sculpture made out of leather handbags and a life-size rump of Totoro to lay on, a rainbow library of colored leathers, tiles by William De Morgan and the disassembled pieces of Loewe’s famed Puzzle bag. In fact, almost nothing in the exhibition is behind glass, neither the delicate, intricate works by the winners of the Craft Prize nor the 69 runway pieces arrayed in a grid from Anderson’s first collection with the brand to now. Like everything else in the exhibition, that decision ultimately comes back to Anderson, who has long cited an affinity to Barbara Hepworth, the British modernist sculptor who was adamant that sculpture needed to be touched in order to be fully understood.
“I think the minute you put it behind glass, it creates this other way in which you approach clothing,” Anderson said. “If we put all the clothing in glass, it would lose its tactility. Even if you can’t touch it, visually I think it destroys it. For me it’s like taxidermy.”
At times, “Crafted Worlds” plays like a greatest hits of what is en vogue at certain museums today. The room dedicated to Arts & Crafts movement designer William Morris—long a guiding touchpoint for Loewe—pairs Anderson’s inspired 2017 capsule collection with an immersive video-screen floor that pulses and undulates with Morris’s ornate nature-inspired prints. A display of the Loewe 2021 collection referencing Arts & Crafts designer Charles Francis Annesley Voysey is set inside a hall of mirrors. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was cribbed from a Kusama design. One of the Studio Ghibli rooms feature twenty-foot screens stretching to the ceiling playing sumptuous clips from beloved films like Howl’s Moving Castle.
In each case, one imagines a not insignificant number of selfies and TikToks will be filmed there, which may just be the point. After all, while Anderson may have once told the Cut critic Cathy Horyn that fashion is not always about selling products, but “introducing ideas,” this exhibition is ultimately an extended introduction to a fashion and luxury-obsessed Chinese public. You do still exit through the gift shop. There’s books dedicated to Picasso, Cubism, and Goya alongside the Puzzle bags.