“When the pandemic happened in December in 2019, I was here,” Jonathan Anderson says, “and it was like the end of an old world and the beginning of a new one.” The Loewe creative director has just flown into Shanghai to oversee the opening of “Crafted World,” a whimsical exhibition of art and fashion that will open tomorrow to the public before traveling worldwide. “It was the last trip that I had done before the pandemic. When we were thinking of where to start the exhibition [...] I thought we should start it here because then [...] we’re starting from the beginning of a new chapter.”
On view through May 5, “Crafted World” is the first public exhibition by Loewe and feels like a natural step for the house since Anderson took the helm in 2013, blending his own passion for art with Loewe’s tradition of craft. Unfolding across 1,600-square-meters of the neoclassical Shanghai Exhibition Centre, it spans 178 years of the brand’s history, laid out in a series of curated rooms that cover six distinct chapters.
The exhibition opens with a visual timeline of objects. A selection of iron and wood leatherwork tools from the early 20th century sits at the entrance, a few steps away from a visitor book signed by Ernest Hemingway. The room is bookended by three noteworthy looks from recent years: a black cashmere coat with a gilded walnut wood collar from the recent fall 2024 women’s collection, a replica of the custom red flight suit and sculpted leather corset Rihanna wore for her Super Bowl halftime show, and a reproduction of the satin jersey bodysuit with trompe l’oeil hands from Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, which reads “For Mrs. Carter, Renaissance World Tour” on the label.
Upstairs, Anderson fans can pore over an additional 69 looks from his men’s and women’s collections, displayed on mannequins alongside select pieces from Loewe’s art collection. “It’s very difficult to look back at everything,” Anderson says of curating this miniature retrospective, as he approaches the 10-year mark since his Loewe debut. “The clothing is the biggest surprise to me. I think I’ve sold this to the press so many times that every collection was different, and every collection was something brand new. Now when I see everything over the last 10 years, there is something in the make or the way in which the clothing is put together or coloration, for example. This surprised me. When you see it all together, the car dress doesn’t feel very out of place with the very first collection, which is shredded bits of fabric.”
One can follow a distinct “thread of make,” as Anderson calls it, woven throughout the room. A striped jumper and fisherman’s trousers from that first spring 2015 men’s collection connects to a nappa and suede trucker jacket set from men’s spring 2024 three rows down. A twisted mass of steel wire and plastic twine hangs from the ceiling, a sculpture by the artist Haegue Yang that could easily be mistaken for an avant-garde Loewe look like the kitschy car dress from fall 2022 that sits in the center of the room, the branded car ornament just visible through the pale gray silk. The white birch arms of the mannequin with fully adjustable joints are poised delicately on the car hub and hood, even this small detail nodding to Anderson’s fastidiousness. “It’s quite emotional, actually, when you go in and look at 10 years of work,” he says. “You sort of are confronted with what you’re achieving in a room.”
There is a closeness to the garments, as well as to the art objects, that Anderson drew from the ethos of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, which he gleaned from a BBC documentary. “It goes back to this idea with Hepworth where to understand sculpture, you have to touch it to understand it,” he explained. “I think the minute you put it behind glass, it creates this other way in which you approach clothing. If we put all the clothing in glass, it would lose its tactility. Even if you can’t touch it, visually I think it destroys it. For me it’s like taxidermy.” It’s true that the absence of glass brings the construction and material into sharper focus. The nappa leather on a macintosh coat from fall 2022 is startlingly translucent lime green, revealing the barest outlines of the white undergarments beneath.
The disparate fashion and art pieces are united by a sense of wit that prevails throughout the entire space. There is a tongue-in-cheek “pronunciation tunnel,” a staircase lined with screens featuring friends of the house including the actresses Yang Mi and Jodie Comer instructively reciting the house name “LO-WEH-VAY” again and again. The tunnel leads up to a transportive tribute to Spain. Basket and bucket bags rest beside Pablo Picasso ceramics, attached to tree trunks, projected against screens that show the Mediterranean sea. Elsewhere, the artists from Anderson’s many collaborations, such as Japanese ceramicist Suna Fujita and textile artist William Morris, are celebrated in stunning pocket installations.
“It’s an edit of people that I love or people that I worship or look up to,” Anderson says. A well-dressed crowd of Anderson’s own supporters, including Yang Mi and actor Jonathan Bailey, turned up to celebrate the show, attending a celebratory dinner and party at the Exhibition Centre that went into the night. Guests wandered through the space, pausing at The Atelier, which provides an up-close and personal look at Loewe’s collection of statement bags, beginning with sheafs of the richly dyed nappa leathers hanging on a rack to the full pattern for the Puzzle Bag, unfolding across a wall. The Howl’s Moving Castle bag from Loewe’s Studio Ghibli collaboration appears as a two-meter-tall recreation. In fact, there is a full room dedicated to the crowd-pleasing Ghibli collection, including a fur rendition of Totoro’s belly. Other clever touches tucked where you least expect them include a tiny ceramic owl embedded at the bottom of a tree trunk, and an Elephant Pocket pouch tucked into a tiny space beneath the horsehair basket by the artist Dahye Jeong, who won the 2022 Loewe Craft Prize.
“I think there is something in all the artists, there is something in the craft that they do that I think becomes quite twisted,” Anderson says of the overarching view of “Crafted World.” “What I do at Loewe, everything involves craft. Everything is made from craft. I feel it was my initial idea when I started at the brand and I still believe it today.”
