This spring 2025 season marks a particular milestone for Jonathan Anderson. While the designer was officially hired at Loewe back in 2013, it wasn’t until June of 2014 that he presented his first collection for the house, a tightly edited spring 2015 men’s lookbook. This men’s Paris Fashion Week marks 10 years of his collections. Much has happened over the decade: viral pixelated hoodies, a congregation of Internet boyfriends in his front rows, copper jackets, and foliage-clad coats.
There’s been Rihanna at the Super Bowl and Josh O’Connor at the Met Gala. Zendaya on our movie screens and Taylor Russell on the runway. It’s not a common thing these days for a designer to remain at the same post for over a decade, let alone for one to refresh his own outlook and output as often as Anderson has over the years. First came the craft-driven days of his early collections; then the cerebral, art gallery sensibility of his pre-pandemic work. A somewhat minimalist conceptual era followed, which set the tone for today’s seasonal dissertations on Internet culture, digital versus physical, AI, and so much more—all of which is grounded by Anderson’s particular curiosity and affinity for normal clothes and their ripeness for perversion.
In honor of a decade of Loewe men’s collections by Anderson, it felt right to look back at this body of work and revisit both the hits and the deep cuts. For some extra fun, I’ve ranked the 19 collections. Not from best to worse, or from most impactful to least, but based on the most important methodology of all, at least to me, my personal taste.
Fall 2020
The most daunting task of this little endeavor was to decide which collection would take the top spot. Fall 2020 is my current favorite men’s Loewe collection because it puts one of Anderson’s most endearing qualities front and center: his boyish wonder. Anderson strikes me as a designer who loves fashion and the sense of play it has the ability to unleash in all of us. “I was thinking of ’50s couture—and a child trying something on. What do you look like in the mirror?” he told Sarah Mower about the collection. Then came three dresses worn against the body rather than on it. A gay boy’s sense of wonder in discovering the fantastical world of fashion and womenswear. The rest of the collection is pretty great, too, particularly the coats. Anderson has always cut a mean coat at Loewe.
Fall 2023
This fall collection was hauntingly beautiful. Every so often Anderson has a clean-slate show—often in womenswear—and that’s what this one felt like to me. A focus on materialization and silhouette (with a trio of incredible coats!) and that one copper jacket went viral first at the show and then when Taylor Russell wore it to the womenswear show that followed. The little angel wings got a lot of play, too. This one will only get better with time.
Spring 2024
This one is quite recent, but I think it’s one of his best. Paris last June was a particularly directional season in menswear, and Anderson, together with Rick Owens, proposed a silhouette that felt fresh yet familiar enough to not be too challenging off the runway. These über high-waisted jeans elongated the body to new heights and played off a quirky, almost nerdy sensibility that Anderson somehow made novel and cool. That is one of his skills—to take a familiar trope and, rather than turn it on its head, heighten it to its extreme. The crystal trousers and shirting were pretty tight, too, as was that one massive pin holding together those origami tops.
Spring 2023
Grass growing out of a coat. That should be enough to explain this show’s top 5 positioning. But this wasn’t only about Anderson’s ingenious foliage. The puffy leather sneakers and bomber jackets became street style hits in the Loewe universe, and have helped define the ready-to-wear direction for Loewe beyond Anderson’s more conceptual experiments.
Spring 2021
The Loewe pandemic lookbooks and show packages are some of that era’s most clever and compelling collection releases. I loved the circular motif as a unifying detail, and though it would’ve been great to see those pleated ballooning skirts in motion, this was also the perfect collection to show in stillness.
Fall 2024
This will forever be known as the Loewe show with all the Internet boyfriends. Every online crush who gets the “fancam” treatment on X and TikTok was at this show, or at least it felt that way. But most interesting, I thought, was Anderson’s commentary on contemporary gay idolization and fetishization of our self-image. Nudes on X, thirst traps on Instagram, an ever-growing number of OnlyFans accounts, all satirized into some beauty shots of Loewe ambassadors—Manu Rios, Omar Apollo, Jamie Dornan, etc.—in white t-shirts splattered across the walls of the show. The collection was good, too, I most loved the cheeky nod at gray sweatpants and white athletic socks. If you know, you know.
Fall 2022
Post-pandemic shows saw the rise of the metaverse and the horrible, horrible term “phy-gital.” What is real, and what isn’t, and if it’s not, then why isn’t it? Why do things in the digiverse look so…not good? This fall show was Anderson at his troll finest. There were prints of little lights and actual little lights, messed up faces worn as IRL FaceTune fiascos, wired distorted tops and waistbands, and that one heart-shaped balaclava everyone became obsessed with.
Spring 2019
This was Anderson’s second mashup with the legendary American photographer Duane Michaels, and my favorite lookbook of his pre-runway and pre-pandemic collections, when he only did lookbooks. There was a certain nuttiness and naughtiness to the sexy Surrealist staging, with boys in various states of dress and undress placed in monologue or conversation with and against Anderson’s clothes and objects. As Sarah Mower put it at the time: “He’s overhauled a staid and worthy term—craft—and made it engaging and sexy for the first time in living memory.”
Fall 2019
This was Anderson’s first runway show for Loewe menswear, and it raised the stakes. Come for the chap-like fisherman boots—with that classic Anderson touch of kink—and stay for some of his best men’s knitwear. I’m still looking for that Marylin Monroe button-down online. I currently have one favorited on Grailed.
Spring 2022
This lookbook feels like a snapshot of the manic post-pandemic energy that came to define much of 2022. The images, shot by David Sims, simultaneously capture the rave-hungry angst of youth culture and the grittiness of growing up. As Anderson put it, his menswear has always been a fantasy of what he would have liked to wear growing up, and perhaps of who he would’ve liked to be. This particular lookbook is a tender and playful portrait of that fantasy self.
Fall 2018
This photo narrative was Anderson’s first lookbook with Duane Michaels, who even painted the backdrop and made the props. The magician in the story is none other than Josh O’Connor pre-Challengers mainstream reckoning. It was the beginning of what has become a fruitful and compelling fashion love affair between the actor and the designer.
Spring 2020
This show was peak craft-era Loewe. After it, Anderson shifted towards concept and art as drivers of his collections.
Spring 2018
The spring 2018 lookbook helped cement Anderson’s intentions of linking Loewe not just to its lofty craft-driven history, but to its Spanish heritage. The charming lookbook was shot at Salvador Dalí’s house in Catalonia. The clothes helped establish Anderson’s menswear bonafides, remember this is the playful, quirky category he built from scratch at Loewe.
Spring 2015
Speaking of setting intentions, that Anderson’s first collection for Loewe was menswear certainly helped set the tone for what was to come. It was the trousers colorblocked by white cuffed linings that, to me, set the path forward.
Fall 2021
I remember this lookbook fondly for two reasons: the amazing mega show-on-a-t-shirt tee that displayed all the Loewe/Eye/Nature sustainable pieces, and the collaboration with the iconic NYC queer artist Joe Brainard. Anderson has made Loewe a destination for his audience to discover key artists in the community, be that through collabs or his show sets, and this is a prime example. Those leather harness trousers are also pretty good.
Fall 2016
Anderson has made challenging proportions one of his signatures as a designer. This lookbook is a particular example of that fascination, with its gargantuan Puzzle bags and backpacks and that insane shaggy double coat. It doesn’t rate higher simply because Anderson has since produced many more compelling proportion studies, particularly in his ready-to-wear, though it’s always nice to see where the ideas started.
Spring 2016
This was Anderson showcasing the bizarre and strangely funny places his mind tends to go. I particularly enjoyed the mash up of cute Disney motifs and other playful kid stuff with more grown-up silhouettes. “They make me smile,” Anderson told Tim Blanks of these cutesy doodles. They made me smile, too.
Fall 2015
Jonathan Anderson’s second Loewe lineup, he told Tim Blanks, started with a classic musing: “why did I buy this?” Anderson produces the kind of clothes that are as fun to wear as they are sometimes hard to style. Not everyone can pull off his designs, and that’s what made him a cult favorite pre-Rihanna and pre-Challengers. This lookbook is an early example of his ability to make the strange somehow alluring.
Fall 2017
It’s interesting to look back at these early Loewe collections and see how well they’ve aged, but also remember how new and strange they felt at the time. This lookbook is all the way at the bottom simply because this ranking has to end at some point, and its counterparts pushed it down for a variety of reasons that I hope you took the time to read already.
