Loewe's muses

The fitting room at Loewe's Madrid workshop smells of leather and something older — beeswax, maybe, or the particular must of archive fabric stored in tissue. Jonathan Anderson stands at a table scattered with references: a photograph of a woman in a draped coat, sleeves pushed to the elbow. Another of the same woman, twenty years later, wearing trousers so wide they could be a skirt. A third in which she holds a basket, not like an accessory but like something she actually uses.

These are not mood boards. They are three women who built Loewe before Anderson arrived, and whose work he mines with the focus of someone looking for structural principles rather than aesthetic inspiration. The house, founded in 1846 as a leather collective, spent most of the twentieth century as a reliable producer of bags and small goods. What it did not have, until these three, was a vocabulary for how a woman might actually dress.

Rosser: the technician

Rosser Ferrer arrived at Loewe in the early 1960s, trained in Barcelona's atelier system and uninterested in the New Look silhouette that still dominated Spanish fashion. She worked as a pattern cutter first, then as head of the women's ready-to-wear atelier when the house expanded beyond leather in 1963. Her contribution was not conceptual. It was structural.

Ferrer understood how cloth moved over the body when the body moved. She cut sleeves with a forward pitch so that a jacket sat correctly on a woman reaching for something. She tapered trousers from the knee, not the hip. She used darts sparingly, preferring to shape a garment through the bias or by easing fullness into a seam. Her patterns, still held in the Loewe archive, are annotated in pencil with grain lines and tension notes. They read like engineering drawings.

Her coats, in particular, were exercises in controlled volume. A 1967 example in grey wool twill has sleeves that bell slightly at the cuff, a back vent that opens into an inverted pleat, and shoulders that extend just past the natural line without becoming architectural. The effect is of a coat that moves like outerwear but feels, when worn, like something between a jacket and a dressing gown. Anderson has referenced this piece at least three times since 2015, most recently in a burnt-orange leather version that showed in Paris last year.

Ferrer left Loewe in 1975 to open her own atelier in Madrid. She never gave interviews. What remains is the work, and the fact that every coat Anderson makes begins with her proportions.

Means: the pragmatist

Laura Means arrived in 1976 from London, hired to modernise a house that still thought of itself as a leather-goods workshop. She had worked at Biba, then at a Savile Row tailor whose name she never disclosed, and she brought with her a conviction that women's tailoring should be built like men's — on a canvas, with a floating chest piece and sleeves set by hand.

Loewe's tailoring, until Means, had been constructed like couture: soft, unstructured, designed to skim rather than shape. Means introduced the two-piece suit with a nipped waist and a jacket that closed edge-to-edge, no overlap. She used hopsack and fresco, fabrics that held a crease and breathed. She lined sparingly. Her trousers had flat fronts and side adjusters, no belt loops.

The Means suit, as it became known internally, was not revolutionary. It was simply well made, and it assumed the wearer had places to be. A 1981 campaign showed the suit worn with a leather tote, low heels, and no jewellery. The model was not smiling. She looked like she was late for something.

Means also designed the first Loewe bag that was not a handbag. The Shopper, introduced in 1979, was a large, unstructured tote in soft calf with a single interior pocket and rolled handles. It cost less than half the price of the house's structured bags and sold better than anything Loewe had made in a decade. Anderson still makes a version of it, now called the Basket, though the handles are longer and the leather is thicker.

Means left in 1985 to work for an American brand that no longer exists. She gave one interview, to Women's Wear Daily in 1983, in which she said that good design was about "removing everything that isn't necessary, then removing a bit more." Anderson has cited this line in at least two interviews, though he credits it to Means only when pressed.

Villar: the conceptualist

If Ferrer was the technician and Means the pragmatist, then Elena Villar was the one who made Loewe strange. She joined in 1988 as creative director, the first woman to hold the title, and immediately began doing things the house had never done: draping leather like jersey, cutting coats from a single piece of cloth, showing bags that were not bags but sculptures you could carry.

Villar had trained as an architect in Madrid and worked briefly in set design. She approached fashion as a spatial problem. Her 1992 collection featured a coat with sleeves that extended past the hands and folded back on themselves, creating a cuff that was also a pocket. A dress in the same collection had no fastenings; it wrapped and tied, and the way you tied it determined the silhouette.

She was also the first to treat Loewe's leather craft as conceptual material rather than product. A 1995 bag, now in the collection of the Museo del Traje in Madrid, was made from a single piece of leather folded and stitched along one seam. It had no lining, no hardware, and no structure beyond the stiffness of the hide. It was, in Villar's words to El País in 1996, "a bag that remembers it was an animal."

Villar left Loewe in 2000, a year before LVMH acquired the house. She has since worked as a consultant for several European brands and teaches at the Istituto Marangoni in Milan. Anderson has never mentioned her by name in interviews, but her influence is everywhere in his work: the draped leather dresses, the bags that collapse and reform, the coats that are also blankets.

What remains

Anderson's Loewe is not a restoration project. He does not reproduce these women's work; he builds on the assumptions they established. That a coat should move with the body. That tailoring should be functional before it is decorative. That leather is a material, not a luxury signifier.

The current collection includes a trousers-and-jacket set cut from 11oz linen, proportions lifted directly from a 1983 Means suit. A tote bag with rolled handles and no structure, Means again. A leather dress that drapes like jersey, pure Villar. And coats — always coats — with Ferrer's forward-pitched sleeves and controlled volume.

These references are not marketed as heritage. Loewe does not make a noise about its archive. But the women are there, in every fitting, every pattern, every decision about where a seam should fall. They are the structure beneath the surface, the reason the work holds.