Jonathan Anderson (Loewe): “It doesn't make sense to make fashion to be at home. I prefer to project an optimistic future "

“For a few years, I have been obsessed with the idea of ​​never judging things by what they seem.

Everything can mean something else, ”explains Jonathan Anderson, Loewe's artistic director, by videoconference after the presentation on 23 January of the house's fall / winter 2021 men's fashion collection.

Following this methodology, each new delivery of Northern Irish must be understood as part of a whole.

As new chapters in an evolving story, rather than as self-concluding universes.

And the project he has presented in the context of the digital edition of Paris fashion week abounds in various concerns of the creative director of the Spanish luxury house.

The first is the transformation of the silhouette, which since Jonathan arrived at Loewe has continued to become broader, more fluid, more difficult to pigeonhole.

Blouses or tunics?

Sweaters or dresses?

Wide pants or skorts?

If there is something left over here, it is the rigid labels, which on the other hand have been languishing for some time: many online stores categorize their garments exclusively as

(to be worn on the upper part of the body) and

(from the waist down), and that fluidity leads inevitably to a freedom of use that Anderson enthusiastically claims in each of his collections.

“For me, the key is optimism.

I am surprised that they ask me why I don't make clothes to be at home, because fashion projects the future.

I don't want to project that.

Even if it happens.

I prefer to predict better times.

Give positive messages.

Because this situation seems incredibly difficult to me.

People are suffering a lot.

There is no point in making a collection to be at home.

I need my team to be creatively happy ”.

In one of the key pieces of the collection, the sides of a pair of trousers extend into square lapels –not to say, they are as wide as they are long– that feature prints with graphic motifs inspired by the work of Joe Brainard.

And that's where this installment adds one more paragraph to another great endeavor of the Northern Irishman: the recovery of the work of forgotten, marginal or little-known artists.

This time his attention has been directed to this legend of the

New York

who died of AIDS in 1994 - ”I want to underline the amount of talent that was lost during that pandemic.

The list is endless ”- and that he worked primarily on paper, a genuinely independent medium that art historians have not paid as much attention to as installation or video.

“He interested me because he was just as important as a writer and as an artist.

And also because of the way in which he uses the familiar, the everyday, and turns it into something more ”.

Brainard published dozens of fanzines and generated a huge amount of

in which pop, humor, social criticism and a certain autobiographical existentialism are mixed that, with the distance of the years, is enormously suggestive.

"I'm interested in your optimism," says Anderson.

In the collection, his work not only occupies literal quotes –reproductions of his images on garments and accessories, for example on bags and knitwear with floral motifs–, but also his methodology.

Many of the designs are

textile

, sweaters attached to other sweaters, t-shirts that have more t-shirts sewn on and a prodigious trousers full of straps that denote that behind Anderson's exquisite conceptualism there is always a song of love to the urban subcultures of the second half 20th century.

A handful of memorable pieces and prints that, as always happens at Loewe, will make themselves stand out in a season when the competition is very close.

The knitwear with a wide variety of techniques, the bags that reproduce Brainard's works, the voluminous soles of shoes and boots, the floral prints and the infinite nuances that Anderson manages to extract from the camel tones, the great protagonists of the collection, are flawless.

But it is also unbeatable, once again, the balance between analog and digital, fashion and culture: under the title

, the collection is accompanied by the publication of a book that reproduces some of the

most interesting

by Brainard, authentic collector's jewels whose content has rarely been made available to the general public.

“After a very hard year psychologically, at least we can tell the story of a not very well known artist and we have been able to edit a wonderful book that will serve to help the fight against AIDS.

At least we can learn history.

At least we can learn from people like him. "

That may be the key.

With each new collection by Jonathan Anderson for Loewe you learn something new.

And that, at a time when firms compete to be cultural powerhouses, is a highly enviable achievement.

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