How much weirder can Jonathan Anderson make Loewe? He isn’t stopping. Kudos to him

Under Jonathan Anderson’s watch, Loewe has done an amazing array of things. The aesthetic leaning is never static. And the stranger he gets in the latter half of his tenure at the Spanish house, the more delectation he brings. The spring/summer 2024 was no exception. Seemingly straightforward clothes had more worked into them than nature to cells, which means it is also harder to describe accurately without first seeing the clothes or touching them. All the clean lines belie the structural complexities of each garment. Loewe is one of the few shows that frequently elicit in us “wow” when watching the livestream. By that we don’t necessarily mean how astounded we were, but also how unbelievable the garments seemed, wearability aside. Being perplexed by clothes conceived against standard dress-making constraints can be a good thing, or think.

The opening look (which would be repeated) was a knit cape that could be button up in the front. For some reason, an umbrella case came to mind, so did sausage casing. Worn the way it was on the stark runway—bundled, the model’s arms were restricted within. In all likelihood, when the outer is bought and adopted, the wearer would button only the first fastening, freeing the arms, the body, allowing the garment to hang behind the shoulders like a cape normally does. This button-up hull of yarn cannot be judged as one tends to the cover of a book. Mr Anderson was perhaps saying that this apparent nothingness is not the foretaste of the test to come. But the strangeness of proportion, the off-beat styling is precisely what he wanted you to expect. Nothing less.

But, perhaps, not quite. Mr Anderson has put out what is also prevalent in other collections this Paris Fashion Week: semblance of normal clothes, but not quite. One of his striking pieces this season is the trousers with ultra-high waist, so high, in fact, that sometimes they looked to rise to just below the bust. These could be seen as drop-crotch pants (once associated with the late Vivienne Westwood) pulled up to go beyond the erogenous zone of the belly button to an area that could potentially be even more suggestive, except that the near-geekiness of the styling dramatic tempered any sensitivity to sexual suggestion. The pants, in assorted fabrics, including washed denim, were paired with executive-looking shirts; proper, boyish blazers; or chunky, roomy sweaters (tucked!); taking the last vestige of sexiness out of the composition.

There were more unusual pieces, such as the knee-length, A-line skirts (leather?) that appeared so loose at the waist that they needed to be secured by what could pass off as knitting needles, creating fetching gathers as a result. We wowed at one strapless dress with extreme Grecian drapes, asymmetrically arranged, as well as a sort of column, in butter yellow, without a back but with a rigid and squarish bodice, and that knitting needle diagonally pierced through the upper half, as if it was a repurposed 发簪 (fazan) or hair pin. Although we sometimes sense that Mr Anderson does play down the unconventional—even bizarre—that he stays with in his own eponymous collection rather staunchly, his Loewe is no less engaging or gripping, however high he pulls up his pants.

Screen shot (top): Loewe/YouTube. Photos: Loewe