Jonathan Anderson Leaves Loewe and Fashion More Tightly Intertwined with the Art World Than Ever Before

Designer Jonathan Anderson announced his departure from Loewe last week after months of speculation that he’s headed for the top job at Dior. As the brand’s creative director for a little over a decade, Anderson grew the Spanish luxury house from a small leather goods purveyor to one of the most popular and innovative luxury brands on the planet. His tenure at Loewe is already being heralded as one of the all-time career runs in fashion history, placing him alongside the likes of John Galliano at Dior, Tom Ford at Gucci, and Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga. There’s no question Anderson has left an enduring impression on the aesthetic codes not only of the label but the fashion industry at large with collections that repeatedly set the standard for what the modern woman wants to wear. (Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez were announced this week as the new creative directors of Loewe.)

That highly covetable, contemporary feeling inherent in Anderson’s work is in large part due to his holistic approach to design, seamlessly fusing together art, fashion, poetry, architecture, and interior design to create a fully realized, multi-dimensional vision of the Loewe customer. For each of his collections, Anderson, who is also a trustee on the board of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, worked with a different creative collaborator across mediums and genres, going far beyond just reprinting their art on T-shirts or hoodies. He found organic ways to fully integrate their work into the broader world of the brand.

This can be seen in his most recent Fall 2025 collection where Anni Albers’s colorful weavings and Josef Albers’s color-study paintings are transformed into textiles and leather goods for coats and handbags. The Spring 2024 runway was decorated with sculptures by Lynda Benglis and presented alongside a line of jewelry made in collaboration with the artist that turned her hefty brushstrokes into wearable metal cuffs and earrings. For Fall 2020, Anderson worked with ceramicist Takuro Kuwata on multiple porcelain embellishments for necklaces and handbags, as well as an armor-like chest piece that served as the focal point of one dress. And in 2019, Anderson had exclusive access to the archives of the William Morris Foundation to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Arts & Crafts movement, applying those ornate illustrations to bags, jackets, and even limited-edition packaging.

While his collaborative focus was largely on high-brow artists and craftspeople, Anderson has also proven he has a keen eye for pop culture, effortlessly introducing niche fandoms and massive celebrities into the Loewe aesthetic vernacular. He designed an incredibly successful and collectable line of leather goods in conjunction with Studio Ghibli that feature a number of the renowned animation studio’s most beloved characters on handbags, wallets, and keychains. Plus, who could forget the custom trompe l’oeil hand-covered crystalized catsuit he designed for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour that instantly became a fan-favorite look?

Beyond these fashion partnerships, Anderson also regularly incorporated original works of art into his own runway shows, turning the catwalk into an impromptu gallery space for some of the biggest contemporary artists in the world. His shows have featured pieces by David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Franz Erhard Walther, Lara Favaretto, and Richard Hawkins, among many others. This same attention to detail and curation also went into Loewe’s stores that featured highly intentional and thematic choices in art and decor that the brand would in turn feature on their website alongside the rest of their standard consumer goods.

Most importantly, it wasn’t just the way Anderson integrated these creatives into Loewe that was so impactful, but also the way he used the financial and institutional power of the brand to support and shine a light on these artists and their endeavors, as he did in 2018, working with London-based Anthea Hamilton to create seven costumes and headpieces for her performance, The Squash, at Tate Britain.

“Craft, art, design—our creative output has never been more important,” Anderson said in a 2022 video for Loewe. “It’s something that reminds us that we are human somehow. Because, ultimately, it is about how you interact with an object. Art opens questions, and I think the more we question the better.”

Loewe also sponsors a number of events and art exhibitions every year to highlight the artists they work with, hosting displays at Milan Design Week, as well as the Loewe En Casa series of online talks and workshops streamed on the brand’s social media accounts featuring the processes of some of the artisans they work with. In addition to these exhibits and partnerships, the brand also makes very tangible monetary investments in local artisans, writers, and craft, largely via the Loewe Foundation and its annual prizes. The Poetry Prize, established in 1988, has become one of the most prominent non-institutional prizes celebrating outstanding voices in the Spanish-speaking world. And in 2016, Anderson introduced the Loewe Craft Prize to draw attention to the work of master craftspeople around the world and showcase how these traditional artforms can inform the designs of today, regularly incorporating their work into his own collections. Over the years thanks to this initiative, Anderson has worked with ceramicists, wood workers, glassblowers, and more to create one-of-a-kind pieces for both Loewe’s collections and stores.

Of course, Anderson is also a fine artist in his own right, often using his collections to blur the line between the runway, the museum, and performance art. His Fall 2023 collection, in which cubes of colorful confetti by Favaretto dotted the runway, would look at home in a biennial or sculpture garden. The Spring 2023 menswear line, on the other hand, featured living plants growing on coats, creating an ever-evolving piece of clothing, that is not all that dissimilar to one of Andy Goldsworthy’s time-based installation piece in nature.

Anderson has also become known for his cheeky, irreverent approach to luxury fashion where sight gags often brush up against highly technical, avant-garde design. This can be seen in many of the most iconic pieces from his time at the fashion house, like the Loewe pumps featuring a broken egg or a partially-deflated balloon in place of a heel, his animal-inspired bags modeled off of elephants and hamsters, or his Spring 2023 pixel capsule collection that looked like early internet 8-bit computer animations rendered in real life. This interface in this work between the digital and the physical realm also became a core tenet of his aesthetic, coming to a head when Anderson appeared to bring an internet meme to life overnight. Shortly after a tweet went viral proclaiming that a particularly heavily-ridged heirloom tomato was “so Loewe,” the designer posted a very similarly shaped tomato evening bag to his Instagram account proving that the original fruit in the meme was, in fact, extremely Loewe.

This same love of interdisciplinary creativity can also be seen in Anderson’s friendship and collaboration with Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Anderson has now designed the costumes for three of his films, Bones and All, Queer, and Challengers. With the latter, Loewe also produced and sold the “I Told Ya” T-shirt Zendaya wears in the film. When asked in an interview with Wallpaper what he likes so much about Anderson’s clothing, Gudagnino replied, “I like his mind. I think he’s a great artist. He’s a great intellectual.”

Both Gudagnino and Anderson’s careers have proven that good taste is good taste no matter the medium it’s applied to, and that inspiration can strike from any number of sources. Both also speak to the importance of surrounding yourself with artists who inspire you as creativity invariably begets creativity. While the clothing Anderson designed at Loewe will unquestionably become some of the most important and enduring work of the past 15 years, perhaps the greatest legacy he leaves behind is demonstrating how inextricably linked the worlds of art and fashion actually are.