When you saw Jonathan Anderson taking questions from the reviewers after his show on Saturday morning in the 16^th arrondissement of Paris with his eyes firmly closed in full concentration while he was stammering out his thoughts, you knew that for this designer doing fashion shows is a little more than just making clothes. He wants to capture the Zeitgeist and more so, he wants his Loewe to be a precursor of tomorrow. Ever since he took the Spanish leather good house into his hands and reshaped it as a modern arts and crafts brand with a serious intellectual bent, Anderson is slowly but surely getting to the very top of designers by letting his clothes speak. Challenging the concept of perfection in fashion shows, he found a starting point for this collection with the assumption that we live in a backlit world. Yes, it’s true, nothing happens without the small mobile device in our hands, which backlights every word and image we see. Translated into fashion, it means super simple outfits of narrow cut jeans with a beautiful heart-padded sweater front to mimic a backlit appearance. But there was lots more to discover in the beautiful show space which was a site-specific installation conceived by artists Joe McShea and Edgar Mosa entitled “Flags, Paris 2022”  – eighty-seven flags made up of almost 4,000 individually cut ribbons and mounted on 6.5m long aluminum flagpoles. The space looked like the site of a happy Ibiza rave in the near future. 

The big idea?

To underline individuality, Anderson brought in LED technology to light up his garments. “I wanted them to shine from inside and take that idea into the clothes” explained the designer backstage. So LED lights illuminate everything from sleeve openings to entire bodies on coats, the furry collars or the hip region.

Slow fashion?

Anderson excels at taking classic garments such as shearling coats and giving them a serious spin by slicing them open to create a double front or adding a LED collar. His narrow, elongated jeans looked terrific and worn with the heart-padded sweaters; the simplicity of these pieces will make the cash register ring.

Body extending on the body?

Sounds quirky but are another one of Anderson’s wickedly good ideas where the face or torso of the model was printed upside down for a trompe l’oeil effect and a definitely cool looking T-Shirt.