The Amazona bag does not announce itself

The Amazona bag does not announce itself. It slouches. The leather, if left alone, develops a patina that reads more like use than care. This is not an accident. Loewe has always understood that the finest leather goods should look better after a decade than they do in the window. It is a philosophy that predates the runway, the logo, and the idea that a house needs a creative director at all.

Loewe began in 1846, not as a brand but as a cooperative of Spanish leather artisans working out of Madrid. They made saddles, bridles, and cases for men who travelled by horse. By 1872, a German entrepreneur named Enrique Loewe Roessberg had bought into the operation and lent it his name. The house moved into a workshop on Calle del Príncipe, and the work remained the same: vegetable-tanned hides, hand-stitched seams, objects built to outlast their owners.

For most of the twentieth century, Loewe was a name you knew if you spent time in Spain or if you cared about leather in the way some people care about cloth. The house opened a flagship on Gran Vía in 1939, sold handbags to European aristocracy, and stayed small. There was no ambition to be French, no attempt to court Hollywood. Loewe made things, sold them in Madrid and a handful of other cities, and left it at that.

That discretion held until the 1960s, when the house began to formalise its approach. The Amazona arrived in 1975, named after the female warriors of Greek myth but designed with the proportions of a weekend case. It had a soft trapezoidal body, double handles, and no hardware to speak of. You could carry it to the office or sling it in the boot of a car. The bag didn't look precious, which made it useful, which made it last.

The LVMH era and the search for direction

LVMH acquired Loewe in 1996. The logic was sound: the group had built its fortune on French leather goods and saw an opportunity to do the same with a Spanish house that had 150 years of craft credibility and no creative baggage. What followed was two decades of creative directors who arrived with ideas and left without making a mark.

Narciso Rodriguez came first, in 1997, and stayed three years. His work was clean, minimal, and forgettable in the way that competent design often is. José Enrique Oña Selfa took over in 2000 and lasted two years. Stuart Vevers, who would later revive Coach, ran the studio from 2008 to 2013. His tenure was the most commercially coherent, but coherence is not the same as vision. Loewe sold handbags, opened stores, and remained a house that people respected without particularly wanting.

The problem was not the leather. The problem was that Loewe had no clear argument for why it should exist beyond the fact that it already did. LVMH needed a creative director who could articulate that argument, and in 2013, they found one.

Anderson's arrival and the reassertion of craft

Jonathan Anderson was 29 when he took the role. He had built his own label, J.W. Anderson, into a critical success by treating garments as sculpture and sculpture as something you could wear to dinner. He collected ceramics, referenced twentieth-century art, and seemed uninterested in the question of what was commercial. LVMH hired him anyway.

Anderson's first collection for Loewe, shown in Paris in September 2014, did not look like a relaunch. There were no monograms, no house codes reinterpreted for a younger audience, no attempt to make the brand feel urgent. Instead, Anderson showed loose trousers in heavyweight linen, shirts with exaggerated cuffs, and bags that looked like they had been folded rather than structured. The Puzzle bag, which would become the house's signature under his direction, debuted that season. It was made from 27 individual leather panels, each one cut and stitched by hand, and it collapsed flat when empty. The bag was a technical exercise, but it was also a argument: Loewe was a house built on the idea that making things well was more interesting than making them recognisable.

Anderson doubled the size of the leather atelier in Madrid and began commissioning artists to collaborate on everything from window displays to runway sets. He hired the painter and sculptor Richard Hawkins to create prints, brought in the Japanese ceramicist Takuro Kuwata to design vases that were sold alongside the handbags, and turned the brand's advertising campaigns into something closer to art direction than commerce. A 2016 campaign featured Steven Meisel photographs of models holding bags in poses borrowed from Flemish painting. It was peculiar, specific, and nothing like what the rest of LVMH was doing.

The clothes followed a similar logic. Anderson's Loewe was not about silhouette in the traditional sense. Trousers sat low and wide, knits were oversized and cropped simultaneously, and leather—always leather—appeared in forms that had nothing to do with biker jackets or pencil skirts. He made leather trousers that moved like wool, leather shirts that wrinkled like linen, and leather dresses that required no zips because the hides were soft enough to pull over the head. The work was not about making leather look like something else. It was about remembering that leather, before it became a signifier, was a material.

By 2018, Loewe had become the kind of house that other designers referenced. The Puzzle bag was in production alongside the Amazona, which Anderson had quietly reissued. The brand opened a flagship in Madrid designed by Peter Marino, filled it with contemporary art, and made no effort to explain why a leather goods house needed a gallery. The answer, implicit in everything Anderson did, was that craft and culture had always been the same conversation.

Where the house stands

Loewe is now in its twelfth year under Anderson's direction, which makes this the longest sustained creative vision the house has ever had. The runway shows continue to confound and occasionally irritate—Spring 2025 featured garments made from dried grasses, which prompted the usual questions about wearability and purpose. But the leather atelier in Madrid is still there, still hand-stitching bags that will look better in 2035 than they do today, and that continuity matters more than any single collection.

The house sells clothes, bags, shoes, and small leather goods in 170 stores worldwide. It is profitable, though LVMH does not break out individual brand performance. It is also, unusually, a place where the work feels like it belongs to someone. You can argue with Anderson's choices, but you cannot argue that they are calculated to please a focus group.

What Loewe has now is what it lacked for most of its LVMH tenure: a reason to exist that is not dependent on its archive. The Amazona is still in the collection, still made the same way it was in 1975. But it sits alongside the Puzzle, the Flamenco, the Hammock, and a dozen other shapes that did not exist before Anderson arrived. The house is not trading on its past. It is building on it, one hide at a time.