When Jonathan Anderson was growing up in a small town in Northern Ireland, there was one nearby newsagent that stocked international magazines – and, in 1997, aged just 13 years old, he happened to pick up a copy of Italian Vogue. It contained a photo shoot by Steven Meisel, and “it was a piece of storytelling,” he remembers now. “I’ll always remember it because of the lighting – the lighting was incredible – and so you didn’t know what country you were in, whether it was America or Britain. There was this incredible sense that the character was more important here than the fashion.”
Sixteen years later, and when Anderson decided to pitch LVMH to become the creative director of Lowee, it was that same photo shoot that opened the presentation he gave to Delphine Arnault. He had never worked with Meisel, nor even spoken to him, but “he was the person I wanted to help me with the re-brand,” he explains. “There’s not many people like him, who understand fashion like he does, who can do the full package: he could style it, do the make-up, do the hair… I don’t think I could have done this job without him; I think he was able to articulate the dream.”
It was lucky, then, that when Anderson won the pitch, Meisel got on board. Their first campaign together was actually a re-print of that archival photo shoot Anderson had seen in his childhood – and their collaboration since has been intent on pushing the boundaries of fashion advertising. It is a relationship which extends beyond the typical photographer/client dynamic, and sits at the core what Anderson is intent on achieving with Loewe. “Every single time I talk about this brand – and my own brand – I am talking about culture,” he asserts. “It’s about how do we, in the next 10 years, start to evolve culturally; how do we use fashion as a creative tool? The days of seeing fashion in isolation are over – it’s more about the idea of how you give a product value – and for me, a product’s value comes from the culture of it.”
For their new campaign, Anderson and Meisel are presenting Vittoria Ceretti, remarkably made-up by Pat McGrath, in an Edenic exploration of contemporary consumption. This afternoon, one of these pictures will be distributed as the invitations to Loewe’s spring/summer 2018 fashion show, while simultaneously being plastered onto 500 Parisian news kiosks. “Each time we do a campaign, it has to challenge the entire team, and it has to be something we can put in windows, put on the street. It’s propaganda,” says Anderson. Then, on Friday, they will decorate the brand’s newly minimalist show space in the form of giant hanging tapestries.
“The collections over the past three seasons have been based upon the idea of a woman living in her own domestic space,” Anderson says. “That chapter has ended. It’s now a completely different thing, in a white, oval space. It’s about the idea of reduction.” So, amidst a stage of minimalism will stand these giant works of art, 8x4 metres apiece, each woven by specialists in the south of France using up to 40 different colours so as to resemble photographs. While these sorts of tapestries were once used to celebrate historic events or monumental achievements, now they will stand in proud celebration of this new, consumptive ideal. “Everything at the moment is propaganda,” Anderson says. “We consume what we are told to consume. Sometimes you have to reflect what is happening… and Vittoria, well, I think she really kind of consumes you. You feel like you could eat her.”
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