For a young man, Jonathan Anderson’s ability to project himself into the mind-set of a sophisticated, older woman at Loewe is becoming ever more impressive. He’s transformed a brand that was once a minor player without much of an identity into a major attraction on the Paris schedule. His show now places an ever-expanding number of accessories in the context of a holistically believable, put-together look.
He knows where his target customer lives, and it’s somewhere expensive. “I like the idea of thinking about this woman in her apartment,” he said. “And I like the idea of continuity, slowing it down.” The set—installed in the UNESCO House, an avant-garde landmark from 1958—had cream carpet, ceramics, lamps, and massive video screens playing an art film on a loop. This woman, then, lives surrounded by her collection of contemporary objects and art. Her latest acquisition, apparently, is a conceptual video piece, Offshore, by Magali Reus, showing two men swimming out into an ocean, endlessly struggling to bring floating oil barrels back to the beach. Whatever else it meant (man’s ceaseless fight against pollution? a chance to contemplate the sight of two hunky men in wet clothes?), it also brought in a sense of the outdoors—fresh air, summer—all suggestions of the environments these clothes will be worn in.
Comments