The collection was about natural things that look fake
The invitation for the Loewe show came in a long white box with an anthurium flower inside of it. Red and plasticky, with a pert yellow spadix situated at the centre of its curved leaf, it looked entirely fake. This wonder – or freak – of nature set the tone for a Loewe show dedicated to the investigation of nature’s own trickery. “I like this idea of something in nature that looks fake but is real, and this idea of iconography: that when you see something it reminds us of something as a repeated motif,” Jonathan Anderson said after the show, addressing the associations that had crossed everyone’s mind. “I think it can represent two things. Or three things… if it vibrated.”
The show centred around the anthurium flower
Inside his vast space in the Gendarmerie Nationale-Garde Républicaine – one of the most beautiful venues in Paris – where nature’s own lighting illuminated the show through panoramic windows, Anderson had erected (pun intended) a giant anthurium in fibreglass to prove his point: “I kind of like this idea that you could make it out of fibreglass and it could be real or it could be fake. It’s playing with proportion and illusion.” He iterated on that idea in garments that employed imitations of the flower as bras, wrapped around the body, or as upscaled sculptures on patent bustiers. Because it’s a somewhat confrontational flower, the idea made for appropriately odd impressions that conjured carnivorous plants.
Taylor Russell opened the show
The actor Taylor Russell – who’s about to become very famous starring opposite Timothée Chalamet in the cannibal romance Bones and All – opened the show. “I always had this vision of her opening the show – she’s a really good friend of mine – and I just thought there was something about this decision that was about the future of acting and performance,” Anderson said, himself a former acting student. Russell wore a black velvet dress with a rigidly structured skirt that evoked the hooped lampshade dresses of the Renaissance. It appeared three more times in different colours, a motif that would continue with garments throughout the collection, from sculpted tennis dresses to trapezed field jackets and mega-magnified shirts turned into dresses with sleeves that almost swept the floor.
It was a study of repetition
“I kind of like this idea of something meditative,” Anderson said of his repetitive show. “There’s something about seeing the proportion going up and down, it’s a kind of trickery. You don’t know if it’s the look that you just saw. You can tweak the colour in a way that the burgundy becomes matching to the hydrangea pink, and suddenly, it kind of tricks your eye into ‘is that the same person or not?’ It’s more focused. I’m starting to enjoy the making of a silhouette. It’s about clothing. I love working in this way because you see the head first,” he explained. “For me, repetition is something that hones the idea and ultimately means you can get it right.”
It featured shoes made out of deflated balloons
It was Anderson’s most reduced collection in a while, but within its austerity, he couldn’t resist adding some of the surrealism that has shaped seasons past. Case in point: shoes made out of shingled deflated skin-coloured balloons. “I kind of like that they could be petals or shells. There’s an interesting movement to them. All the shoes were engineered in a way that they are not as they seem, or they have incredible function,” Anderson explained. Next to the freaky anthurium, the plastic properties of the balloons captured the conversation between nature and culture at the heart of the Loewe collection.
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