A Stop Smoking soundtrack and giant cat necklaces rule Loewe

The Loewe woman lives in a house that might look something like the precisely furnished room we were ensconced in inside the Paris UNESCO building, where cream carpet harmonises with mid-century inspired wood, and Giacometti sculptures and ceramic walls by Miró just happen to be there. She might also acquire more contemporary works such as an impressive piece called “Repressed Apple” by Irish artist Siobhan Hapask. This was the exacting environment architected by Jonathan Anderson to show his most sophisticated and elevated collection yet for the Spanish leather goods house.

“I wanted something which was like a curated space, so it was this idea of a progressed look,” said Anderson. “Loewe is, historically, a bag brand. The idea is articulating the look around the bag, so that everything became compressed or blended within the look. Everything is either blown-up or reduced or made smaller. The whole idea was how can you paint on one kind of canvas, so they become individuals in the end.”

To add a touch of humour to proceedings, the soundtrack kicked off with a voice hypnotically telling us to stop smoking, taken from the Harley Street Stop Smoking Clinic. It was a surreal soundscape to go with this ultra-curated space and these ultra-curated women in their handkerchief hemmed skirts that moved gracefully with their cinched in waists, created by paper thin gold leather corsets. In a restrained earthy palette, Anderson’s experimentation was somehow more pronounced. The natural and unnatural once again pervaded as he contrasted the likes of knitted rubber bands and metal hoop chainmail with organic bamboo fibre and distressed tweeds. That was reflected in the seating where perspex cubes filled with scourers and disposable razors were pitted against solid concrete blocks.

“Together with the neutral tones and refined textures of the collection, a pendant hanging with an enlarged lucite cat’s face filled with sequins somehow managed to look cool”

All the while Loewe’s bags were a central focal point as most models carried unzipped totes, new deconstructed riffs on the Amazona bag and the new Joyce bag adorned with a gold circular logo plate.

They were also loaded up with oversized pendant necklaces of a cat or an African mask, which for Anderson had no significance other than he liked them. “I feel like those things are kind of just objects, as much as there were objects within the space,” he said. These were the elements of randomness that Anderson cleverly injects into both his own line and here at Loewe. Together with the neutral tones and refined textures of the collection, a pendant hanging with an enlarged lucite cat’s face filled with sequins somehow managed to look cool. And cool is something that Anderson cited backstage as a way of neatly summing up the collection. As always, culture around the Loewe woman doesn’t begin and end with bags and frippery. In this space where a specific notion of good taste prevailed, Anderson created a world that many would want to inhabit.