Last September, when Jonathan Anderson took his bow after a smacking Loewe show, it was obvious that something was up. Anderson, normally as understated as his jeans and trainers, had tears in his eyes. Daniel Craig led a bellowing standing ovation. I was told tissues were passed around backstage. At an afterparty later that night, Anderson held forth about change. Change, he shouted over the techno music, was coming to fashion.
Now, the Northern Irish designer’s leading role in fashion’s next era is finally coming into focus. Jonathan Anderson is leaving Loewe after 11 years, the LVMH-owned Spanish house announced on Monday. “Under his direction, Loewe experienced exceptional growth,” noted the press release. It is widely assumed that Anderson will soon take over Dior, rising to one of the industry’s most important posts.
For the past week or so, Anderson has been sharing Instagram highlight reels from his critically adored Loewe tenure, and in a follow-up he thanked the studio hands and multi-faceted collaborators. “Over the last eleven years, I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by people with the imagination, the skills, tenacity and resourcefulness to find a way to say ‘yes’ to all my wildly ambitious ideas,” he wrote.
Anderson’s departure was the worstkept secret in fashion over the past six months. He skipped the men’s runway shows in January, and presented his now-final Loewe collection on mannequins last week in a palatial Paris salon. Though everyone knew it was over, Anderson’s exit is no less bittersweet. The designer transformed Loewe from a once-obscure Spanish leathergoods label into a righteously unpredictable “cultural brand” that followed his own ever-evolving, superlative taste in art, film, and music.
If anything truly defines Anderson’s work it is his profound restlessness. Though he united his contemporary ideas with Loewe’s heritage of craftsmanship, he never felt particularly beholden to the house’s dusty archives. Well before fashion entered its season of change, Anderson was in hot pursuit of the new and the next, from the way old-school craft could be applied in new ways—see a graphic T-shirt made of breathtakingly delicate featherwork in his final show—to who sat front row at his shows, which were consistently populated by the coolest and most compelling starlets. He would probably be the first to say that 11 years is a long time for a designer to stay in one place. He has always been keenly aware that if he is bored, the customer will be too.
His colorful curiosity was most evident in his relationship with the fine art world. Fashion x art collaborations are nothing new these days, but Anderson approached working with a rangey roster of artists like Lynda Benglis, Richard Hawkins, and Julien Nguyen more like an artist himself than a collaborator or curator, using their creative gestures as source code for his entirely new statements about how to dress right now. As he told GQ in 2023, “Everything I do in both brands is a reflection of what I’m into. In real time.”
