Jonathan Anderson: The craftsmanship devotee who shook up and revived Loewe

In Depth

Madrid – In a major announcement, Jonathan Anderson’s departure from the creative direction of Loewe has been confirmed. He took on the role in 2013, and now, 11 years later, he will pass the baton to a new design lead, who is yet to be confirmed. Anderson successfully renovated and revitalised the legacy of the historic Madrid-based fashion house. This journey is now celebrated and recognised. However, it was not without its controversies and debates, especially in its early years.

To provide some context, while still under the creative direction of British designer Stuart Vevers, who held the position from July 2007 to June 2013, Loewe launched one of its most controversial initiatives. In spring 2012, it released an advertising campaign for the new “Loewe Oro Collection” by creative Luis Venegas, featuring a group of new Spanish “young talents”, whose involvement in the advert was widely criticised and censored. The attacks were launched against them for two main reasons. Firstly, they were presented as a new generation representing young Spanish creatives. Many of them were children or relatives of renowned artists well-established in the Spanish cultural scene. This condition was seen as undermining their own talent. Combined with the tone of their words, and the fact that the advert was released during a deep economic crisis with particularly high youth unemployment, it gave the impression of a Loewe completely disconnected from Spanish society. Secondly, the selection of emerging faces, with messages such as “it’s a drag to get older” and “every kiss I give is the first”, grated on the ears of the house’s main customers at the time. This “senior” audience was interested in, and could afford to buy, the brand’s pieces and creations. They reacted very negatively to the advertising campaign, branding it as frivolous and vulgar.

Why highlight everything that happened around that controversial advert? It is simply because it was the moment when Loewe, and its parent company, the French multinational holding company LVMH, which has owned the Spanish house since 1996, made their objective clear. They aimed to revitalise and renew its essence, with the firm intention of reaching a new audience and rejuvenating its existing one. This strategy was seen as vital for the brand’s survival and future as a luxury reference, based on an undeniable biological principle. If a company, whatever its type, is unable to secure the levers and resources needed to constantly renew its audience, it is simply moving, slowly but surely, towards its demise. This will become a reality as its audience gradually passes away.

This issue affects and underlies the irrelevance, or even disappearance, of countless fashion houses, as well as that local restaurant or beauty salon that was once fashionable. They end up closing as they are unable to refresh their offerings, while remaining anchored to an audience that dwindles with each passing year. Loewe in 2012 was trying to correct this process with the launch of that advert. Looking back now, it seems that Vevers’ particularly strong taste for the traditional flavours of Loewe’s origins ultimately failed in that objective. However, these aesthetics must have appealed to US-based Coach, who did not hesitate to sign the British designer as their new creative director while he was still in charge of Loewe’s design department. He left this role in June 2013, and has since held the position of creative director at Coach. With his departure, Jonathan Anderson joined Loewe. He has undoubtedly contributed the most to the internationalisation and enhancement of Loewe as a leading luxury brand in the 179 years since its founding in Madrid in 1846.

Loewe stopped being 'Loewe', to continue being 'Loewe'

“Loewe is no longer Loewe” was a common sentiment, and not in a good way, after Anderson’s arrival as the Spanish house’s new creative director in September 2013. The appointment of the Northern Irish designer, a fashion design graduate from the London College of Fashion, who was only 29 years old at the time, as the new head of design at the Madrid-based firm, was part of a broader operation led by LVMH. At that time, LVMH became a major shareholder in the British designer’s fashion house, JW Anderson. The creative decided to launch this label around 2008, initially as a menswear-only brand. He managed to secure the backing of the French luxury giant for its future development, while LVMH invested in his very personal fashion house project. The company also offered him the opportunity to take over as creative director of Loewe, recognising that his sensibility and creative vision were precisely what was needed to advance the strategy of renewal and audience expansion that the firm had been trying to implement during Vevers’ final period at the Spanish house.

Anderson has proven to be a prodigy in this process, as has become clear over the past 11 and a half years as creative director of Loewe. He implemented a strategy that relativised the brand’s traditional origins, which Vevers had placed so much emphasis on. Instead, he focused on the craftsmanship that has always been a constant within the walls of the century-old Spanish house. In this way, the firm stopped being the Loewe that its customers at the time, but only them, appreciated so much. Without abandoning its firm commitment to craftsmanship and quality, or leather as the house’s iconic and most representative material, it was reborn as a renewed Loewe, capable of attracting and inspiring a much wider, more global, diverse and intergenerational audience.

The Spanish house has always relied on these levers, the defence of craftsmanship, quality and leather work, as inherent to its foundations as a fashion brand. Combined with Anderson’s creative vision, they have come to characterise this latest and remarkable chapter in the house’s history. This chapter began with LVMH’s decision to trust in the talent of an emerging designer. Although he was largely unknown to the general public at the time, he had been attracting the attention of both the specialist press and an increasing number of consumers since launching JW Anderson in 2008. These aspects suggested that LVMH’s confidence in the Northern Irish designer would be a winning bet, as it has proven to be for all three parties involved who have benefited from his appointment and tenure at the Spanish house. On the one hand, the designer has not only managed to receive the resources needed to finance the growth of his own fashion house, but also has a platform like Loewe from which to promote himself and his creative vision. On the other hand, Loewe has seen its name and collections become the main objects of desire for fashion lovers. Finally, LVMH has managed to revitalise and enhance the potential of one of its “smaller” fashion houses, which, over the past few years, has managed to eclipse even its major brands, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, in terms of public and press appeal and attention.

“When Delphine Arnault and I met Jonathan, we immediately felt that we could help him express the full potential of his brand; an innovative, emerging brand that was already influential,” said Pierre-Yves Roussel, then chairman and chief executive officer of LVMH’s Fashion Division, when announcing LVMH’s investment in JW Anderson in 2013, as well as Anderson’s appointment as creative director of Loewe. “In discussing our agreement, and as we got to know him better, we realised that, because of his knowledge of all facets of a brand’s creative process, and his ability to transform tradition into an exciting vision for the present, Jonathan Anderson was also perfect as creative director of Loewe.”

“The LVMH group has the resources and experience necessary in the field of contemporary luxury, and I believe that we can work together with the aim of creating something new,” added Anderson, paying particular attention to the boost that the French international luxury goods group was committed to giving his fashion house project at the time. It was an agreement that was widely celebrated by both parties, and to which he added that “I am equally excited to be joining Loewe, one of the oldest luxury houses in the world, specialising in leather goods, where I have found exceptional craftsmanship combined with purity and lightness”. These considerations regarding Loewe’s heritage are precisely what he has exploited and especially enhanced during his time at the helm of the Spanish fashion house.

From the “Loewe Craft Prize”, to the “Puzzle” and the “Casa Loewe”

It was in fact the Northern Irish designer himself, from his farewell letter, and then from Loewe’s management, who highlighted the main initiatives and actions that the creative has launched to reposition Loewe internationally as a luxury house. The firm, designated as Supplier to the Spanish Royal House in 1905 by King Alfonso XIII, has entered a new and consolidated space, through the construction, led by Anderson, of a perfect symbiosis between heritage, tradition, craftsmanship and innovation. This sum of values and characteristics is now inherent to the identity of the new Loewe, and has crystallised and become especially evident over the years through the launch of the “Loewe Craft Prize”, iconic pieces such as the “Puzzle” bag, and the opening of a whole series of “Casa Loewe” stores around the world.

First launched in 2016, three years after Anderson’s appointment as creative director of Loewe, but at a time when the Northern Irish designer was still settling into the direction of the Spanish house, the “Loewe Foundation Craft Prize” was presented as a prize for craftsmanship that would pay tribute to the very origins of the house, and its founding in 1846 as a firm with a marked artisanal character.

Far from being a superfluous or anecdotal move, it ended up launching what is considered to be the biggest initiative driven by Anderson at the head of Loewe. Since 2016, it has been celebrating new ways of conceiving craftsmanship, with an annual prize that seeks not only to give visibility, but also to ensure new avenues of exploration to illuminate the new craftsmanship of tomorrow. All of this comes under the umbrella of awards conceived by Anderson himself, which are presented by the Loewe Foundation, founded in 1988 by Enrique Loewe Lynch, a member of the fourth founding generation of the house, and currently under the direction of his daughter, Sheila Loewe. This is the best example of the remarkable taste for craftsmanship, not only of the firm but also of the Northern Irish designer, a self-confessed lover of the “Arts & Crafts” movement that originated in Britain in the late 19th century.

If the “Loewe Foundation Craft Prize” best represents the change in paradigms on the side of Loewe’s “soul”, with the determined commitment to enhancing the value of craftsmanship and maintaining a global, international and inclusive perspective, the change in languages between the more “classic” Loewe of previous decades and the new and revitalised Loewe of Anderson, was best reflected with the launch of the “Puzzle”. The bag caused a stir when it was launched in 2015, as the first bag designed by Anderson for Loewe, based on a reinterpretation of traditional Japanese paper-folding techniques. As we can see, the design was conceived from the same global, international and inclusive vision that Anderson professes, and under which he would end up devising the “Loewe Foundation Craft Prize”. But on this occasion, it was a vision put at the service of designing a bag model for both men and women, which, once the controversy had passed, has already become one of the greatest new symbols of today’s Loewe.

So much so that a new version, in which the gaps between the different parts that make up the original design were removed to present a new, more compact version, ended up generating the same or more controversy than the launch of the original design. Loewe has in fact recovered this design again with the launch of a new version, more faithful to the original, and precisely to mark the 10th anniversary of its launch, presenting a new “Featherlight Puzzle” model from the “Puzzle” family as part of its catwalk collection for this spring/summer 2025 season.

This is now a category in its own right within the Spanish house’s offering, and was discovered with the launch of the first Puzzle as the antecedent to the various innovations with which Loewe, combining tradition and inventiveness, and always with Anderson at the helm, has managed to renew its until recently ossified creative codes to the extreme over the past few years. A process for which, show after show, season after season, collection after collection, Anderson has never ceased to surprise and innovate, with creations as unique and straddling art, craftsmanship and the most cutting-edge innovations, with designs such as his balloon dresses and shoes, his glass breastplates, his bejewelled bodies for both men and women, his coats and disproportionate garments from which he challenged the canons of traditional clothing, or those “living” trainers and garments with grass, developed together with the Spanish designer Paula Ulargui Escalona and presented as part of Loewe’s collection for the spring/summer 2023 season.

Having covered the vibrant renewal that Anderson carried out of Loewe’s soul, and its creative codes and languages, the upheaval that he subjected the century-old Spanish house to with his arrival also went beyond “soul” and “form”, to also be reflected in the firm’s “body”. In this case, the body takes shape through Loewe’s commercial network, made up of a number of boutiques that gradually adopted a new store concept, following the opening of the first “Casa Loewe” in Madrid in November 2016. Under this title, the firm’s boutique on the corner of Serrano and Goya in Madrid reopened its doors, equipped with each of the different elements and characteristics that have since become a constant in each of the new or refurbished establishments of the Madrid-based house. In these elements, craftsmanship plays a leading role, based both on the display of unique artisanal and art pieces, and on the use of these same techniques and processes, to shape the very construction and aesthetics of the various “Casa Loewe” stores.

One of the best, and most recent, examples of this store concept is the “Casa Loewe” store that opened its doors on February 18, 2025 in Shanghai. The 695-square-metre boutique became Loewe’s largest store in Asia, housing a complete range of its ready-to-wear and accessories collections for men and women, all behind a dazzling façade covered in golden ceramic, made up of handmade enamelled tiles manufactured in Spain. It is undoubtedly the perfect example to illustrate how Anderson, faithful to the house’s artisanal tradition, and with his sights set on the craftsmanship and artisanal processes that take place and are treasured in Spain, has managed to restore Loewe’s shine during the past 11 and a half years. This period is now coming to an end, with a more consolidated and international Loewe, although now under the doubts of whether Anderson’s new replacement at the head of the firm will be able to continue building on the magnificent legacy left behind by the British designer.