## The Fittings Room at Loewe

The Fittings Room at Loewe

Jonathan Anderson stands in the first-floor atelier at Loewe's Madrid headquarters, adjusting the fall of a sleeve on a muslin toile. The shoulder seam sits half an inch forward of where you'd expect it. He steps back, squints, then moves it again. This isn't about perfection. It's about the deliberate mistake that makes a garment feel alive rather than correct.

Anderson has been creative director of Loewe since 2013. That's long enough to have rebuilt the house twice over. When LVMH brought him in, Loewe was a leather goods concern with a couture past and a present that didn't quite know what to do with either. Anderson was 29. He had a four-year-old namesake label and a reputation for knitwear that looked like it had been assembled backwards. The appointment raised eyebrows. Twelve years later, it reads like the only decision that made sense.

Belfast to London

Anderson grew up in Magheralin, County Down. His father ran a garage. His mother taught him to sew. He has said, in various interviews, that he learned draping by making cushion covers and that his early education in clothing came from watching his grandmother alter her own dresses. This isn't romantic backstory. It's technique. By the time he enrolled at the London College of Fashion in 2000, he already understood construction in three dimensions rather than two.

He moved to Savile Row after graduating, apprenticing under Deborah Milner at Alexander McQueen's tailoring atelier. The work was exacting. Pad-stitching lapels by hand. Setting sleeves with a quarter-inch of ease that had to be eased, not gathered. Anderson has described it as the best education he never wanted. He left after a year. Tailoring taught him respect for structure, but he wasn't interested in making suits.

J.W. Anderson, the Label

He launched his own line in 2008, showing it as part of Fashion East, the London incubator that has produced more interesting designers than any school. The first collection featured oversized knits with exposed seams and trousers cut wide through the thigh, then tapered aggressively at the ankle. It looked unfinished. That was the point. Anderson was working against the polished minimalism that dominated menswear at the time, proposing something deliberately awkward instead.

The womenswear followed in 2010. Anderson approached it the same way he had menswear: start with the body, then complicate it. Dresses had asymmetric hems. Skirts wrapped and tied in ways that suggested you'd done it yourself, badly, on purpose. The press called it cerebral. Buyers called it difficult. Both were correct. By 2012, J.W. Anderson had won the LVMH Prize and established a reputation as the designer other designers watched.

Loewe, the Rebuild

When Anderson arrived at Loewe in 2013, the maison had been through three creative directors in six years. It had heritage—founded in 1846, royal warrant, all the usual credentials—but no coherent voice. The leather goods were competent. The ready-to-wear was forgettable. LVMH wanted someone who could make the house relevant without erasing what it had been.

Anderson's first collection for Loewe, shown in Paris in February 2014, opened with a shearling coat worn over a silk slip dress. The bag was the Puzzle, a geometric construction that folded flat or expanded into three dimensions depending on how you held it. The show was quiet. No grand gestures, no manifestos. Just clothing that felt considered and bags that looked like nothing else in the LVMH stable.

The Puzzle became the commercial engine. Within two years, it was the house's bestselling style, outselling even the heritage Amazona. Anderson followed it with the Hammock, the Gate, the Balloon—each one a structural exercise that happened to be a handbag. Leather remained the foundation, but Anderson treated it like fabric. He pleated it, smocked it, wove it into baskets. Loewe's atelier, which had been making the same styles for decades, had to learn new techniques.

Craft Without Nostalgia

Anderson's Loewe doesn't look backwards. It looks sideways, at ceramics, at weaving, at the Bauhaus, at Japanese basketry. He has collaborated with the estate of William De Morgan, the Victorian potter. He has commissioned Studio Ghibli to design bags. He turned a spring 2017 show into a meditation on Spanish craft, sending models down the runway in dresses embroidered by artisans from Galicia and Andalusia. The work was traditional. The silhouettes were not.

This is Anderson's signature: take a craft, respect its history, then use it in a way that has nothing to do with preservation. A hand-woven basket becomes a handbag. A ceramic technique becomes a print. The result doesn't feel like heritage. It feels like now, made with methods from before.

The clothing follows the same logic. A spring 2023 look paired a crisp white shirt with trousers that ballooned at the hip, then cinched at the ankle. The shirt was plain poplin. The trousers were cut from the same poplin, but the shape made them read as evening wear. Anderson has said he thinks about clothing as a series of proportions rather than a series of garments. Get the proportions right, and the garment can be simple. Get them wrong, and no amount of detail will save it.

Two Houses, One Designer

Anderson still runs his own label alongside Loewe. The two don't overlap. J.W. Anderson is sharper, more conceptual, occasionally more difficult. Loewe is warmer, more tactile, more concerned with how a sleeve falls than with what it means. Anderson has said he needs both. J.W. Anderson is where he works out ideas. Loewe is where he makes them wearable.

The schedule is punishing. Four collections a year for Loewe, two for J.W. Anderson, plus pre-collections, plus collaborations, plus the constant churn of special projects and capsules that come with running a house inside LVMH. Anderson has a team of 60 at Loewe, another 15 at J.W. Anderson. He splits his time between London, Madrid, and Paris. He has said, more than once, that he doesn't sleep much.

What Comes Next

Anderson turned 41 this year. He has been at Loewe longer than most creative directors stay anywhere. The house is profitable, critically respected, and commercially successful in a way it hasn't been since the 1980s. The question now is what happens when a designer has already rebuilt a house and made it his own.

The autumn 2024 collection offered a clue. It was quieter than usual. Fewer ideas, more refinement. A camel coat cut with a soft shoulder and a long skirt. A leather jacket that looked like it had been worn for years. A series of knits in grey and navy that didn't ask for attention. Anderson has spent a decade proving he can do anything. This collection suggested he might be more interested in doing less.

In a fitting room in Madrid, the sleeve still isn't right. Anderson adjusts it again, pins it, steps back. The toile will be remade. The sample will be fitted again. The process will repeat until the sleeve does exactly what he wants, which is to say: nothing obvious, nothing correct, just the right amount of wrong.