The Anagram bag — a twisted, origami-folded envelope of calfskin — requires sixteen hours of hand assembly

The Anagram bag — a twisted, origami-folded envelope of calfskin — requires sixteen hours of hand assembly. The leather is cut, skived to different thicknesses across a single panel, wetted, shaped over wooden forms, and left to dry under tension. Then it is stitched. The seams sit inside out, raw edges exposed, because Jonathan Anderson decided in 2016 that hiding construction was less interesting than showing it.

The person who makes that possible is not Anderson.

Her name is Maribel García. She has worked in Loewe's Madrid atelier for twenty-two years. She is one of eleven marquetry specialists who translate Anderson's drawings — often annotated with the word "softer" or "like a shell" — into three-dimensional leather. García trained under the house's former head of prototyping, a man named Vicente Llorente, who joined Loewe in 1972 and retired in 2018. Llorente's teacher was a craftsman named Julián Sánchez, who learned the trade in the 1950s. This is how knowledge moves in an atelier: vertically, slowly, through correction.

Anderson arrived at Loewe in 2013. He had no background in leather. His degree was in menswear. His early collections for his own label leaned on knitwear and draping, not structure. When he took over creative direction, the atelier in Madrid — located in a low-ceilinged workshop on Calle Serrano — was staffed by craftsmen who had spent decades making briefcases and luggage. They did not, initially, understand what Anderson wanted.

The Puzzle bag, which debuted in Spring 2015, was the first test. Anderson's sketch showed a geometric patchwork that could collapse flat or expand into a slouchy tote. The prototype took three months. The craftsmen — led at the time by Antonio Pérez, Loewe's technical director — had to engineer a frame that held shape without internal structure. They used thirty separate leather panels, each cut on the bias to allow movement. The seams were stitched by hand, then burnished so the edges sat flush. Pérez later said, in an interview with System magazine, that the difficulty was not in the cutting but in the balancing. A bag that folds must distribute weight evenly, or it tips.

García worked on the second round of prototypes. She is the one who suggested wetting the leather before assembly, a technique borrowed from bookbinding. It allowed the panels to mould into curves without puckering. Anderson kept that process. The Puzzle is now made the same way in Loewe's atelier and, in larger quantities, at a contracted workshop outside Madrid. García trains the new hires. She checks every sample that leaves for the runway.

This is not romantic. It is work. The atelier is a bright, fluorescent-lit room with cutting tables, industrial sewing machines, and a wall of wooden lasts. There are no exposed brick walls. There is no artisan in a linen apron hand-stitching by a window. The craftsmen wear lab coats. They clock in. They have quotas.

But the skill is real.

Take the Flamenco bag, introduced in 2016. It is a drawstring pouch with knotted leather ties, based on a 1970s Loewe archive piece. The knots are not decorative. They are structural. Each one is tied by hand, tightened to a specific tension, then secured with a hidden stitch. If the tension is wrong, the bag does not close properly. The knot either slips or jams.

The woman who perfected that knot is named Sofía Ruiz. She joined Loewe in 2008 as a stitcher. She learned the Flamenco knot by making it incorrectly forty-seven times. Ruiz mentioned this in a short film Loewe produced in 2019 for its craft prize. She was not complaining. She was explaining that repetition is the only route to consistency. A good knot takes eleven seconds. A great knot takes nine.

Ruiz now oversees small leather goods. She trains new artisans in the atelier and travels twice a year to the contracted workshops in Spain and Italy to audit production. She checks stitch count, edge finish, and knot tension. If a bag does not meet her standard, it is remade. Anderson does not see it until Ruiz approves it.

This division of labour is deliberate. Anderson designs. The atelier engineers. The craftsmen execute. Loewe's structure has not changed significantly since the 1970s, when the house was still family-owned and focused on leather goods. What has changed is the complexity of the product. Anderson's designs require techniques that were not part of the atelier's traditional repertoire: intarsia (inlaid leather), marquetry (pieced geometric patterns), and three-dimensional moulding. The craftsmen had to learn them.

Loewe funded that education. In 2014, the house established a programme with the Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño in Madrid, offering six-month apprenticeships to graduates. The apprentices work in the atelier under Ruiz and García, learning cutting, skiving, stitching, and finishing. Most do not stay. The ones who do become part of the permanent staff. García estimates that one in five apprentices has the temperament for production work. The rest move into design or product development.

The atelier currently employs thirty-two craftsmen. Fourteen specialise in handbags. Eight work on small leather goods. The remaining ten split between prototyping and archive restoration. Loewe's archive, housed in a climate-controlled room adjacent to the atelier, contains over four thousand pieces dating back to 1846. Some are fragile. Some are incomplete. The restoration team — led by a conservator named Elena Vázquez — repairs them using period-appropriate techniques. Vázquez re-stitched a 1920s doctor's bag last year using linen thread and a saddle stitch, both of which had to be sourced from a supplier in France. The bag is not for sale. It sits in the archive. Anderson references it occasionally.

This is the other function of the atelier: institutional memory. When Anderson wants to revive a silhouette from the 1960s or adapt a construction technique from the 1980s, he does not start from scratch. He pulls the original from the archive. Vázquez and her team disassemble it, photograph every seam and panel, and create a technical drawing. The drawing goes to Ruiz or García, who build a prototype. Anderson adjusts. The cycle repeats.

The Gate bag, one of Loewe's best-sellers, came from this process. The original was a 1970s shoulder bag with a metal clasp shaped like a knot. Anderson saw it in 2016, liked the clasp, and asked the atelier to rebuild it in a smaller, crossbody format. The first prototype used the original clasp mechanism. It jammed. Pérez's team re-engineered it, widening the clasp by two millimetres and changing the hinge angle. The adjustment took six weeks. The bag launched in Spring 2017.

García made the first one. She still makes the samples for every new Gate colourway. She estimates she has assembled over three hundred Gates in the past seven years. She can do it in four hours now. The first one took two days.

Anderson has said, in various interviews, that Loewe's craft is not about nostalgia. He is correct, but not for the reasons he suggests. The craft is not nostalgic because it is not static. The atelier's techniques evolve with each collection. The Puzzle required new moulding methods. The Flamenco required new knotting standards. The Anagram required new approaches to edge finishing. The craftsmen adapt, or the house stagnates.

Loewe does not publicise this. The brand's campaigns focus on Anderson, on the clothing, on the runway. The atelier appears occasionally in behind-the-scenes content, usually as B-roll: hands stitching, leather being cut, a workbench. García and Ruiz are not named in press releases. Their work is visible only in the product.

Which is, perhaps, the point. A well-made bag does not announce its construction. It simply functions. The seams sit flat. The leather ages evenly. The hardware does not loosen. You use it for a decade and it looks better, not worse.

That durability is not accidental. It is García tightening a stitch. It is Ruiz checking a knot. It is Pérez re-engineering a clasp. It is work.

Anderson designs the bag. They make it possible.