Lead PictureLoewe Spring/Summer time 2023Pictures by Cris Fragkou
On the centre of Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe present, an anthurium flower – a kind of plasticky, heart-shaped blooms – poked by means of the white-slatted ground erected within the Gendarmerie Nationale-Garde Républicaine. Anthuriums appear fairly faux, even once they’re actual, however this one was blown to Brobdingnagian proportions, its scarlet spathe blown as much as the scale of a Fiat Punto, and the fashions rising from beneath its stem. “It’s about one thing in nature that appears faux however is actual,” Anderson mentioned, post-show. “And the thought of iconography – one thing that reminds us of one thing else.”
That flower is a loaded image, particularly in artwork and vogue. It recollects the sexually-loaded imagery of Man Bourdin and Robert Mapplethorpe, the previous inserting it provocatively between the legs of fashions, the latter photographing the flower so its spadix – the outstanding protuberance – wound up resembling a phallus. There was an erotic frisson to Anderson’s Loewe garments too, flesh bared by strapless bodices or abbreviated skirts, attire of apparently spontaneous material seemingly frozen across the physique. A single breast was uncovered by various uneven attire, the pores and skin lined by one other anthurium, this time life-sized. Another variations of that flower had been rendered outsized to span whole torsos, as if fusing with the physique of the wearer.
These flowers had been faux, however hyperreal – and actuality was what Anderson was after this time, after a few seasons toying with the surreality of girls dressed as a pair of lips, or with physique components apparently chased in hammered steel. In contrast, even super-sized, these flowers seemed actual, and so did the garments, baby-doll silhouette attire and coats, giant-scale sweaters and shirts worn as attire, a trio of soppy robes tied sweetly with velvet bows in entrance. These provided a touch of a historicism underscored by attire with panniers, evocative of Las Meninas, the 1656 Velázquez portray depicting the hoop-skirted infanta and her ladies-in-waiting on the Spanish royal court docket. After which, wasn’t there a touch of a contemporary historicism to the outfits that appeared pixellated, like a Nineteen Nineties online game with squared-off outlines and blocky degradations of color that Anderson described as ‘glitched’, one other instance of reality and fakery, actual clothes – and deliberately boring ones, at that – which wound up trying like two-dimensional representations. Similar to these faux flowers, that look identical to actual flowers, however that look faux in themselves. It felt like a meta touch upon our tradition at this time, on our incapacity to outline what’s actual and counterfeit.
Though actuality was the intention, there was one thing discombobulating – in a method André Breton and the Surrealists would likely recognize – about Anderson’s play with the proportion of equipment and adornment, just like the trailing shirts and sweatshirts arresting the attention, disturbing the peace. “There at all times needs to be one thing for me that’s barely knife-edge,” mentioned Anderson. “An uncomfortable-ness.” The footwear made me really feel uncomfortable, tufted as a number of had been with deflated balloons to look like some type of sea creature, or maybe a porous development. They concurrently begged to be stroked and tugged and performed with, but repelled the contact. And that looks like Anderson’s remit, even at Loewe – daring new concepts, introduced with a bluntness, to shock us into one thing new.
