Loewe now: where the house stands

The leather goods studio at Loewe's Madrid workshop still smells the way it did in 1960: beeswax, saddle soap, and the particular sweetness of vegetable-tanned hide left to rest. A craftsman named Javier, who has been with the house for thirty-four years, can tell you the provenance of a skin by running his thumb across the grain. He does not use the word heritage. He says "this is how we've always done it" and means it as fact, not marketing.

That tension — between what Loewe has always been and what it has become under Jonathan Anderson — is where the house lives now. Not uncomfortably. But visibly.

The Spanish anomaly

Loewe was founded in 1846 by a collective of leather craftsmen in Madrid. A German saddler, Enrique Loewe Roessberg, joined in 1872 and eventually gave the house his name. For most of its first century, Loewe made things for the Spanish aristocracy: gun cases, riding tack, travel trunks with brass corners. It was not a fashion house. It was a leather workshop that happened to operate at the luxury end of the market.

That distinction matters. While French houses built their reputations on couture and ready-to-wear, Loewe remained rooted in craft. The atelier model — where individual artisans sign their work — persists. Walk through the Casa Loewe flagship on Gran Vía and you'll find a dedicated space where customers can watch bags being assembled by hand. Not as theatre. As process.

LVMH acquired the house in 1996, and for a decade Loewe drifted. Creative directors came and went. The leather remained impeccable, but the vision was unclear. By 2010, the brand was profitable but unremarkable — a dependable accessories line without a voice.

Anderson arrives

Jonathan Anderson took over as creative director in 2013. He was thirty years old, had been running his own label for four years, and had never worked inside a heritage house. LVMH gave him the keys anyway.

What Anderson understood, and what previous directors had missed, is that Loewe's strength was never in looking backward. It was in the material itself. Leather is sculptural. It holds a fold, takes a pleat, can be steamed into shapes that fabric cannot. Anderson's first collection for Loewe featured the Puzzle bag — a geometric construction of twenty-seven panels that collapses flat and expands into structure depending on how you hold it. It was not a reimagining of an archive piece. It was a new thought, built on old skills.

The Puzzle became the house's bestseller within two years. It still is. But Anderson did not stop there. He introduced the Hammock, the Flamenco, the Balloon — each one a study in what leather can do when you stop thinking of it as a surface and start treating it as architecture. The bags look strange in photographs and inevitable in person. That gap is deliberate.

Anderson also did something unusual: he made Loewe a platform for craft beyond leather. The ready-to-wear collections reference everything from Richard Scarry illustrations to Fortuny pleating to the ceramics of Magdalene Odundo. A men's look from spring 2023 featured a shirt with trompe-l'oeil ceramic vessels printed across the chest, paired with trousers cut to pool at the ankle like a sculptor's smock. It should not have worked. It did.

The shows themselves are quiet. No streetwear collabs, no celebrity front rows engineered for Instagram. Anderson casts older models, sometimes in their sixties. The soundtracks are ambient, occasionally silent. A Loewe show does not give you a hashtag. It gives you an hour to think.

The numbers and the noise

Loewe does not break out its financials separately, but LVMH's fashion and leather goods division reported €42.3 billion in revenue for 2023, and analysts estimate Loewe contributes approximately €2 billion of that. It is not Dior. It is not Louis Vuitton. But it is growing faster than both, with double-digit increases year-on-year since 2018.

The growth is not coming from logo bags. Loewe's Anagram — a stylised interlocking L, designed in the seventies and revived by Anderson — appears on some products, but the house does not lean into it. The bestselling items are the ones that look like nothing else: the Puzzle, the Hammock, the woven leather baskets that cost €3,900 and sell out anyway.

There is also, quietly, a significant ready-to-wear business. Anderson's clothes are not easy. The silhouettes are often exaggerated — balloon sleeves, dropped shoulders, hems that drag. But they move well, and they photograph strangely, which is its own kind of currency now. Loewe has become the brand stylists reach for when they want to signal that a client has taste beyond the obvious.

The brand's cultural position is harder to quantify but impossible to miss. Loewe is not cool in the way Bottega Veneta was cool in 2020, when every editor carried a Pouch and the whole thing felt like a secret. Loewe is respected. It shows up in museum exhibitions — the V&A, the Met, the Noguchi Museum. Anderson collaborates with artists and estates: Spirited Away, William De Morgan, Anthora cups. The work feels considered, not opportunistic.

Where it stands

Loewe now occupies a strange position in the LVMH stable. It is too intellectual to be a blockbuster, too commercially successful to be a vanity project. It does not have the scale of Louis Vuitton or the Instagram omnipresence of Dior, but it has something those houses cannot easily replicate: a clear point of view that does not require a celebrity to explain it.

The risk, if there is one, is that Anderson's vision is so specific that it cannot outlast him. Loewe before Anderson was a leather house without a creative identity. Loewe after Anderson — assuming there is an after — will have to reconcile fifteen years of his aesthetic with whatever comes next. That is not a problem yet. But it is a question.

For now, the house is in a rare position: critically lauded, commercially strong, and still making things that feel like discoveries rather than inevitabilities. The Puzzle bag turns eleven this year. It still looks like it arrived from the future. That is not an accident. That is what happens when you give a craftsman's house to someone who understands that craft is not about preservation. It is about what you can make that did not exist before.

Javier, in the Madrid atelier, does not follow the runway shows. He sees the prototypes when they come through for sampling, and sometimes he shakes his head. Then he figures out how to build them. That is the work. That is still the work.