Loewe’s Love Affair with Contemporary Art

Art likes fashion, and – it transpires – fashion likes art, too. In fact, the two are becoming increasingly cosy bedfellows, with Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe, headed by creative director Jonathan Anderson, perhaps the most flirtatious with the art world. 

Anderson’s Spring/Summer 2024 menswear collection for Loewe launched during Paris Fashion Week in an indoor training paddock for police horses. In a moment of serendipitous choreography, resident birds flitted around the vaulted metal ceiling, supplying ambient chirps. Below, three shallow pools perforated the grey floor, with a work by sculptor Lynda Benglis in each: Knight Mer (2007–22), the smallest piece, emerged from the water like a craggy constellation of bronze nuggets. In contrast, the towering Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane (2021) reached towards the rafters like abstracted, neoclassical columns, with water spurting from their respective tips.

Benglis produced her first fountain, The Wave of World, in 1984 for the Louisiana World Exposition, a remodelled version of which completes the group in Paris (Crescendo, 1983–84/2014–15). These megaliths of metal are amongst her most hefty works: indeed, no easy feat to transport, install and animate here. In this event-based context – a show lasting just ten minutes – the sculptures become performative objects, seen first through the eyes of the guests (editors, celebrities, influencers, etc.), then forever after via photography and video posted online.

When Anderson’s garments appear, it is to a soundtrack of Benglis describing her experiences of SCUBA diving in the video Water Sources (2015). We see gorgeous trousers and shirts in blue mirror-ball fabric redolent of the surface of water; a voluminous checked overcoat like the one worn by Richard E. Grant in Withnail & I (1987); tight blazers with little pockets; Argyle jumpers with asymmetric patterns; oversized leather bags; and an exaggerated pink tabard pierced at the top by a giant needle like a pin-cushion.

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