The fitting room at Loewe's workshop in Madrid is smaller than you'd expect

The fitting room at Loewe's workshop in Madrid is smaller than you'd expect. Jonathan Anderson stands near the window, turning a sleeve inside out. The jacket is half-canvas, half-deconstructed, and he's testing where the lining should stop. He pulls the shoulder seam forward an inch, then pushes it back. The pattern cutter watches. Anderson doesn't say much. He repositions the sleeve again and nods.

This is the same designer who put a leather handbag through a kiln and called it sculpture. The same one who showed a coat with sleeves that ballooned like parade floats in Paris. But here, in the workroom, the gesture is smaller. He's solving a problem about weight distribution in a blazer that won't be photographed for another four months.

Anderson joined Loewe in 2013. He was thirty at the time, already running his own label, JW Anderson, and had spent exactly zero years apprenticing under a legacy creative director. He didn't come up through the atelier system. He studied menswear at the London College of Fashion, interned briefly at Prada, then started making his own clothes in a Hackney studio. By the time LVMH approached him, he'd done five seasons of his own line and won the LVMH Prize. The appointment raised questions. Loewe was a Spanish leather house founded in 1846. Anderson was a Northern Irish designer who'd built his reputation on gender-fluid tailoring and sculptural knitwear. The fit wasn't obvious.

What he did have was a method. Anderson works by layering references that shouldn't sit together and then watching what happens when they do. Early in his tenure at Loewe, he pulled from the house's archive of leather goods and combined them with the proportions of Bloomsbury Group interiors. He referenced Irish craft traditions alongside Bauhaus furniture. The result was bags that looked like they'd been folded from single sheets of leather, and coats with exaggerated pockets that recalled both utility wear and modernist sculpture. The Puzzle bag, introduced in 2014, became the clearest example of this approach. It was constructed from forty separate leather pieces that could collapse flat or expand into a structured form. It didn't look like anything else on the market, and it didn't look like Loewe had looked before Anderson arrived.

The pivot wasn't just aesthetic. Anderson repositioned Loewe as a house that took craft seriously without making it precious. He hired artisans who worked in ceramics, weaving, and bookbinding, then collaborated with them on pieces that appeared in the runway shows. A handbag might be shown alongside a hand-thrown pottery vessel. A leather coat might be displayed next to a woven basket. The message was clear: this is about making, not just designing. In a 2017 interview with System, Anderson said he wanted Loewe to feel like "a space where craft isn't nostalgic." He meant it. The collaborations weren't ornamental. They fed directly into the design language of the collections.

Anderson's signature at Loewe is harder to summarise than a single silhouette or colour palette. It's more about a sensibility. He treats volume as a variable, not a constant. A sleeve might be narrow at the shoulder and wide at the cuff, or the reverse. A skirt might have structure at the waist and collapse into pleats at the hem. He uses leather the way other designers use jersey—as something fluid, capable of drape and movement. The Spring 2020 collection featured leather trousers that looked like they'd been tie-dyed. They hadn't. Anderson had worked with the atelier to create a marbling effect by laying different thicknesses of leather and then treating them with oils that soaked in at different rates. The result was a pair of trousers that read as both technical and organic.

He's also uninterested in the idea that a luxury house should feel remote. Loewe's stores are designed to feel like living rooms. The clothes are displayed on shelves and tables, not behind glass. Anderson has said he wants customers to touch the garments, to understand the weight of the cloth and the construction of the seams. It's a deliberate rejection of the high-low divide that defines much of contemporary luxury. A Loewe coat might cost three thousand euros, but Anderson wants you to wear it the way you'd wear a field jacket.

The tension in Anderson's work is between control and release. He's meticulous about construction—every jacket is fitted multiple times, every leather panel is tested for weight and flexibility—but he's also willing to let a garment do something unexpected. The Flamenco bag, introduced in 2016, was designed to move. It had a drawstring closure and a soft, gathered shape that shifted depending on how much you put inside it. It wasn't engineered to hold a fixed form. Anderson wanted it to feel alive, responsive to use.

This approach has kept Loewe relevant in a market that rewards both innovation and consistency. The house's revenue has grown steadily under Anderson's direction, and it's become one of LVMH's strongest-performing brands. But the growth hasn't come at the expense of experimentation. Anderson continues to show collections that feel like propositions rather than products. The Autumn 2023 menswear show featured coats with sleeves that extended past the hands, turning the wearer into a figure from a Léger painting. It wasn't practical. It wasn't meant to be. It was a statement about proportion, about how clothing can reshape the body.

What comes next is harder to predict. Anderson has been at Loewe for over a decade now, longer than many creative directors stay anywhere. He's built a visual language for the house that's distinct and commercially successful. But he's also shown no interest in repeating himself. The Spring 2024 collection included handbags made from woven palm leaves and leather trousers with asymmetric hems. It felt like the work of someone still testing limits.

In the fitting room, Anderson adjusts the sleeve one more time. The jacket is for a collection that won't show for months, and he's still not satisfied with the fall. He pulls the shoulder seam forward again, holds it there, and waits. The pattern cutter makes a note. Anderson steps back. The jacket stays on the form, unfinished, and he moves to the next piece.