The Amazona bag has no hardware to speak of

The Amazona bag has no hardware to speak of. No logo plate, no turn-lock, no chain. Just leather, folded and stitched in a way that makes the seams disappear into the form. It debuted in 1975, named after a parrot because someone at Loewe thought the silhouette looked like folded wings. That someone was likely a craftsman, not a marketing director. The bag is still in production. It has never been relaunched.

This is how Loewe has survived 180 years: by making things well enough that they don't need explaining.

Madrid, 1846

The house began as a cooperative. A group of leather artisans pooled their tools and workspace in central Madrid, near the Puerta del Sol. They made saddles, tobacco pouches, desk sets—functional objects for a city that still moved on horseback. In 1872, a German entrepreneur named Enrique Loewe Roessberg took over the operation, formalised the structure, and put his name on the door.

Loewe understood two things early. First, that Spanish leather—particularly from Ubrique and the Balearics—was as good as anything coming out of Florence or Paris, provided you knew how to cut it. Second, that the Spanish court, and the broader European aristocracy wintering in Madrid, would pay for objects that didn't announce themselves. No gilt, no monogram. Just material and make.

By 1905, Loewe held a royal warrant. The workshop supplied King Alfonso XIII with luggage, gun cases, and a standing order of desk blotters in vegetable-tanned calfskin. The work was clean, geometric, built to last decades without looking like it was trying. This was not yet fashion. It was craft in service of function, which happened to look elegant because the people doing it cared about edges.

The Long Middle, 1960–1996

Loewe entered ready-to-wear in the 1960s, later than Hermès, earlier than Bottega Veneta. The move made sense—leather goods were becoming accessories to clothing, not standalone purchases. But for three decades, the house drifted. It produced competent handbags, stiff ready-to-wear, and the occasional collaboration with Spanish painters that felt more like corporate sponsorship than creative direction.

In 1985, the Rumasa scandal forced a sale. LVMH acquired a stake in 1996, full control by 2001. For a while, this changed very little. Loewe had boutiques in the right cities, a recognisable logo, and a back catalogue of bags that sold steadily to women who didn't want to carry the same Birkin as everyone else at the club. It was a good business. It was not, by any measure, a creative force.

The house tried. There were campaigns shot by Steven Meisel, attempts at It-bags with names like Calle and Flamenco. But the work felt reactive, chasing trends Loewe had no hand in setting. The tailoring was correct but lifeless. The leather, still impeccable, was being cut into shapes that could have come from anywhere. By 2010, Loewe had become the brand you remembered existed only when walking past the store.

Anderson, 2013–Present

Jonathan Anderson's first collection for Loewe opened with a coat made from 42 puzzle-cut panels of shearling. It sat on the shoulder like a sculpture. It also, somehow, worked as a coat. This was the tension he brought to the house: an art-school conceptualism that never lost sight of the fact that people still need pockets.

Anderson is Northern Irish, trained under Prada, founded his own label (JW Anderson) at 24. When LVMH appointed him creative director at 29, the decision looked like a gamble. Loewe had heritage but no heat. Anderson had heat but no atelier. What he did have was an obsessive respect for materials and a willingness to let leather do things it hadn't been asked to do in 80 years.

He put the craftsmen back at the centre. The intarsia technique—inlaying pieces of leather like marquetry—became a house signature. So did the Puzzle bag, a geometric construction that folded flat or ballooned into shape depending on how you held it. The bag looked impossible until you understood the pattern. Then it looked obvious, which is a harder trick.

Anderson also made Loewe strange again. There were handbags shaped like roses, like bunches of asparagus, like amplifiers. There were coats with sleeves that started at the elbow. There were trousers that billowed at the thigh and tapered at the ankle in a way that shouldn't have worked but did, because the cloth had enough weight to hold the line. Not every piece was wearable. Many were. All of them felt like they came from a specific point of view, which Loewe hadn't had in decades.

The house also leaned into its Spanishness without turning it into costume. Anderson referenced the Prado, commissioned collaborations with the ceramicist Anthea Hamilton and the Galician sculptor Pablo Bronstein, and set shows in brutalist buildings that felt European in a way the Marais never would. Loewe stopped trying to be Parisian. It became something else: intellectual, tactile, occasionally baffling, always coherent.

Sales followed. By 2019, Loewe was LVMH's fastest-growing leather goods brand. The Puzzle, the Gate, the Hammock—bags that required a paragraph to explain—were outselling simpler shapes at higher margins. The ready-to-wear, once an afterthought, was being bought by stylists and worn by people who didn't need convincing. Anderson had made Loewe relevant without making it loud.

Now

Loewe's Madrid flagship sits in a 19th-century palacio on Calle Serrano. The ground floor is given over to leather goods. Upstairs, past a stone staircase, there is a small room dedicated to the house archive: saddles from 1880, a trunk made for Alfonso XIII, a run of Amazona bags in every colour Loewe has ever dyed.

The current season's Puzzle sits on a plinth nearby. It is made from anagram-embossed calfskin, a technique that involves debossing the leather, filling the recess with contrasting colour, then sanding it flush. The process takes eleven hours per bag. You can't tell by looking at it, which is the point.

Anderson has been at Loewe for a decade now, longer than most creative directors last anywhere. The work hasn't softened. If anything, it has become more confident in its strangeness—recent collections have included trompe-l'œil knits that looked like crumpled shirts, leather trousers with a 14-inch rise, and a bag shaped like a football that, against all reason, sold out.

The house is still making the Amazona. Still using the same tanneries in Ubrique. Still teaching the intarsia technique to new apprentices in the Madrid atelier. Loewe has lasted this long not by chasing relevance but by outlasting the people who thought it was irrelevant. The work continues. The parrot bag still folds like wings.