Loewe’s Twisted Normality S/S´24 Show

At Loewe’s spring/summer 2024 show, Jonathan Anderson returned to the themes he explored in his menswear collection back in June; here, Anders Christian Madsen reports from Paris Fashion Week.

It was a meeting of quiet luxury and normcore

Fashion’s current appetite for quiet luxury has an older, less polite cousin in the normcore movement that stirred the industry some 10 years ago. Back then, we fetishized the plain and turned it into something extreme. Now, we lionise and refine the conservative wardrobe staple – “extremify” it in quality but not in expression. In the Loewe show, those two mentalities merged in a collection that put classic dress codes on a pedestal but magnified and twisted them into something extreme.

It was twisted classics

“It’s quite nice when you’re approached by something where you feel like it’s normal, and it’s slightly unhinged, too,” Jonathan Anderson reflected after the show. “I quite like that when you look at it, you’re instantly like, ‘I know that!’ Is it English or American? Is it Ralph?” Then, he said, the idea was to unsettle the eye with something unexpected: an extreme high waist on trousers, a sweatshirt that shape-shifted on the body, a coat panel stuck in a bag, an oddly tiny little Oxford shirt, or a cardigan that exploded in dimension.

It was a shared wardrobe

Anderson referred to June’s men’s show – where he covered regular wardrobe staples in tonal crystal – as the starting point for his idea. “I wanted something fresh that felt like no kind of milestone, somehow, for myself. With the men’s, I think I found a new rhythm and I think it’s about tightening it. I’m enjoying that silhouette,” he said. “On a man, it was a kind of newer proposition. For the woman, it was like, how do we make it work for the idea of the shared wardrobe?” He injected it with bursts of decoration, from latticed floral tops to ruffles cascading from skirts.

It featured sculptures by Lynda Benglis

Placed around the large-scale runway in the optical white tent erected within the courtyard of Château de Vincennes were six bronze sculptures by the American artist Lynda Benglis, who became something of a muse for Anderson. “When I stand back from the collection, it’s very Lynda through her life. You see her as this sexual being going after Artforum, and then you have this moment where she becomes established and breaks the rules. Then you have this period where she disappears. Now, people are realising what she’s achieved.”

It was life clothes

The nature of the normality that fashion – and the Loewe collection – is dealing with at the moment is that it reflects a universal experience: the clothes life calls for. You could mirror that in the life of Benglis, but in theory, in anyone else, too. It’s an authentic approach to fashion that Anderson echoed in his trajectory at Loewe. “When you look at the brand from when I started to now, I feel like there’s an authenticity to that journey. Some years you do feel deranged and some years you do feel surreal and some years you want a high waist, and sometimes you get it wrong and sometimes you get it right.”