Les muses de Loewe

The studio at Loewe's Madrid headquarters smells faintly of leather and something sharper — the acetone from pattern adjustments, perhaps, or just the particular chemistry of a room where cloth meets skin under halogen. Jonathan Anderson stands near a dress form draped in what will become a sleeve. Beside him, pinned to the wall, are three photographs: a woman in a Balenciaga coat, another in a Schiaparelli hat, a third whose face is mostly obscured by her own hand. They have been there for years. They are not mood. They are method.

Loewe's vocabulary under Anderson has always been about women who refuse easy categorisation. Not muses in the decorative sense — not girls on a runway holding a pose — but figures whose lives and choices shaped how the house thinks about proportion, about restraint, about the difference between wearing something and being consumed by it. Three names recur in his references, in his interviews, in the way certain pieces fall. They are not clients. They were never on payroll. But their influence is structural.

Elsa Schiaparelli

Schiaparelli was a couturière, not a client, but Anderson has cited her repeatedly as the clearest precedent for what Loewe does now: treating fashion as a conceptual discipline without losing sight of the body underneath. She worked in the thirties, which means she worked in a decade that demanded both fantasy and function. Her collaborations with Dalí are well-documented — the lobster dress, the shoe hat — but the pieces that matter more to Anderson are the ones that look almost plain until you notice the seam has been moved, or the pocket sits three inches higher than it should.

Schiaparelli understood that a woman in a jacket is not the same thing as a jacket on a woman. The distinction sounds semantic. It is not. Her tailoring acknowledged the shoulder, the waist, the way fabric has to give when you lift your arm to hail a taxi or reach for a book. Anderson's own tailoring — those coats with sleeves that balloon at the bicep, then taper sharply — borrows that logic. The silhouette is strange until you move in it. Then it is the only thing that makes sense.

She also had no interest in being liked. Her autobiography, Shocking Life, published in 1954, is blunt about the commercial pressures of couture and her refusal to soften her work to meet them. Loewe under Anderson has taken a similar line. The Puzzle bag was not an immediate bestseller. It was too architectural, too demanding of the hand that carried it. But it stayed in the line, and eventually the market caught up. Schiaparelli would have recognised the gamble.

Nan Kempner

Kempner was a client, a socialite, and a collector in the most serious sense of the word. She bought Balenciaga, Givenchy, Saint Laurent — often straight from the runway — and she wore them until they fell apart. When she died in 2005, her wardrobe went to the Met. It is still one of the most complete archives of postwar couture held by an American institution.

What Anderson has taken from Kempner is not her taste, exactly, but her refusal to treat clothes as precious. She famously had a Balenciaga coat altered so she could wear it to the grocery store. She cut the hems off evening gowns when the length felt wrong. She understood that a garment is only as good as the life it can withstand.

Loewe's leather goods operate on the same principle. The Flamenco bag, reissued in 2016, is soft enough to fold flat in a drawer. The Hammock, introduced in 2015, has no fixed shape — it adapts to what you put inside it. These are not bags designed to sit on a shelf. They are designed to be used, to age, to develop the particular patina that comes from being handled daily. Kempner would have approved.

She also wore trousers when trousers were still a minor scandal in certain rooms. Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking tuxedo, introduced in 1966, found one of its earliest and most committed advocates in Kempner. She wore it to dinners, to galas, to the opera. She wore it enough that it stopped being a statement and became simply what she wore. Anderson's womenswear has leaned heavily into suiting since 2014 — not as a trend, but as a foundational category. The trousers are wide, the jackets often cropped or asymmetric, but the principle is Kempner's: a woman in a suit is not trying to look like a man. She is trying to look like herself.

Marchesa Luisa Casati

Casati is the outlier here, and perhaps the most important. She was not a designer, not a client in any conventional sense, not even particularly interested in fashion as an industry. She was a patron, a performance artist before the term existed, and a woman who treated her own appearance as a medium. She kept a menagerie, wore live snakes as jewellery, and commissioned a portrait from nearly every significant painter working in Europe between 1910 and 1930. She died broke in London in 1957, having spent her entire fortune on costumes, parties, and the maintenance of an image that required constant, expensive upkeep.

Anderson has referenced Casati more obliquely than the others, but her influence is clearest in Loewe's accessories. The Balloon bag, introduced in 2022, is absurd in the best sense — a sphere of leather that serves no practical purpose and makes no apology for it. The runway shows often include pieces that are unwearable in any literal sense: a coat made entirely of fringe, a bag shaped like a rose, a dress that requires two people to put on. These are not commercial products. They are provocations, and they are there because Casati understood that fashion is not always about utility. Sometimes it is about the sheer fact of being seen.

She also understood scale. Her Venice palazzo was decorated floor to ceiling in black and gold. She walked her cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes. The excess was not incidental — it was the point. Anderson's runway presentations have grown increasingly theatrical: the spring 2023 show featured a set by the artist Anthea Hamilton, a giant sculpture that dwarfed the models walking past it. The clothes themselves were often quiet, but the context was not. That tension — between the garment and the world it moves through — is pure Casati.

What they share

These three women never met. They worked in different decades, different cities, different economic strata. But they share a refusal to let fashion dictate the terms of their lives. They wore what they wanted, altered what did not fit, and discarded what no longer served them. They understood that a wardrobe is not a static collection but a living archive, subject to revision.

Loewe under Anderson has built its identity around that same flexibility. The house does not have a signature silhouette in the way that Dior has the Bar jacket or Chanel has the tweed suit. It has, instead, a method: take a familiar form, shift it slightly, and see what happens when a woman moves through the world in it. The result is not always comfortable. It is not always easy. But it is always specific, always considered, and always aware that the woman wearing the coat is more important than the coat itself.