Fashion companies are continually innovating and coming up with fresh, interesting designs that are eye-catching and astounding in their creativity. Loewe, rich in their history and famous for their specialized leather goods, clothing, perfume and other products, stands at the forefront of the fashion game.
First established in 1846 by a group of Spanish leather craftsmen in Madrid, the brand fully came into existence in 1876 when Enrique Roessberg Loewe, a German craftsman specializing in leather working, arrived in Madrid and decided to join forces with the leather workshop owners and establish the brand. By the early 1900s, Loewe came to prominence within fashion circles and many famous celebrities and persons took great interest in their products and services. King Alfonso XIII’s wife (the king of Spain then), for example, frequently visited Loewe’s store on Príncipe de Madrid street.
Now, Loewe is approaching 175 years of fashion excellence and they are defined by their persevering and obsessive commitment to their expert craftsmanship and unmatched expertise with leather.
Reinventing the wheel
Peculiar is in how Loewe is a Spanish brand with a German name: an interesting cultural marker of the different influences the brand has been exposed to over the years, and also adding to the confusion on how one should properly pronounce the brand’s name. You would be forgiven for pronouncing it phonetically as “loe-we”, but the correct pronunciation is in fact “lo-weh-vay”. For in German (and Loewe is indeed a German name, after all), “w’s” have a “v” sound.
When the technically gifted leathermaker Enrique Loewe Roessberg bestowed the company its name, Loewe as a brand found itself intricately intertwined between the two cultures, an impressively successful cultural exchange for its time in the 19th century.
Craft, as they assert on the website, is the essence of Loewe. And Loewe has the receipts to show for it. They have consistently valued the artisanal and design techniques in their approach to modern, refined manufacturing, a blend of both the modern and the traditional.
Such devotion to craftsmanship has manifested itself in their specialist collaborations throughout the years, such as the Loewe Baskets collection for Salone del Mobile, and global platforms like the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. These ensure that the Loewe house is upholding traditional craft practices while always pushing the envelope, charting new paths in fresh creative territories.
Remaking the brand
Now, Loewe is leading the fashion industry in both design and craftsmanship. Jonathan Anderson, founder of JW Anderson and leading designer of this generation, took the creative helm of Loewe in 2013. He spent a year “reimagining Loewe’s vocabulary before designing his first ready-to-wear collection out of a sense of responsibility to the fashion house’s heritage.” And in just five years, he has managed to remould Loewe from the ground up, restructuring the very foundations of this nearly two-century old company. Such a feat is not easy, and it definitely takes a lot of talent and hard work to accomplish.
The effectiveness of Anderson’s creative direction is undeniable, palpable, a thrust in what one might say the right direction.
After the pandemic, Anderson is once again ready to bounce back into the world of fashion with renewed vigour, both in terms of the house’s creative energies as well as to make a splash on the fashion runway. “We’ve had the pandemic, and now we have to come out of it different,” Anderson said in an interview in September this year. “I think it’s a moment of experimentation. If you’re going to reset after this period, you need to allow a moment to birth a new aesthetic. Start again.”
Loewe’s latest runway show opened to a massive success. Showing off subdued colours of deep black, punctuated only by bursts of silver and gold and injecting excitement at last, like a release of creative tension, with sudden pastelly and colourful hues, Loewe’s and by extension, Anderson’s runway project has been nothing short of glorious.
With a fashion icon like Anderson heading a company brimming with culture and tradition, the creative exergies of its designers, craftsmen and models are slowly but surely being harnessed for the better. And what better way to showcase their talents and bring Loewe to new heights than through a fresh new fashion runway project right after the pandemic?
Loewe has stood the test of time for 175 years. There is no denying the brand’s capabilities, and it has already established itself at the forefront of the high fashion industry over its long and illustrious history. Anderson himself maintains that he wishes that he can bring Loewe to greater heights, to always strive to be better. “It’s about getting consistently better. You can always get better. Ultimately the whole point is to make a brand more productive so that you can employ more people.”
He has high hopes and big ambitions for the future of Loewe. “I don’t own Loewe,” he says. “It’s a brand that’s been going since 1846. I don’t want to mess it up. I want to make sure it can last for another 200 years.” From the looks of it, Loewe’s career in the fashion industry will not be stopping anytime soon.