Inside Loewe’s Reset: Fresh ‘Ferocity’ and a New Lens on Craft

PARIS — On the eve of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s debut show for Loewe, the American designer duo were buoyant. Six months after moving to Paris — a period largely spent shut-up in a work bubble as they sketched out the 179 year-old Spanish luxury brand’s next steps — “we still wake up every morning excited, and it’s because we feel so free to do exactly what we want to do,” McCollough told BoF Thursday.

After 22 years leading Proenza Schouler, the New York-based brand they founded while still Parsons students, the pair have found new energy by leaving start-up life behind to focus more squarely on what McCollough calls “the creative side of our souls.”

That’s not to say their two decades of experience as entrepreneurs won’t come in handy at Loewe, which faces a tricky commercial and creative challenge: how to keep up momentum at one of the industry’s most dynamic brands, while sustaining its reputation for cutting-edge design by offering a fresh point of view.

Rocking the boat would seem ill-advised — until you consider that predecessor Jonathan Anderson looms large, not only in the industry, but within the same company, where he is creative director of LVMH stablemate Dior.

So far, McCollough and Hernandez appear to be threading the needle: with their debut collection shown Friday, they embraced key pillars of the brand — Spanishness and high craft — while steering the label to less conceptual, more sportswear-inflected territory.

The duo celebrated the Madrid-born brand’s national identity not just through the colour palette — which foregrounded the bold yellows and reds of the Spanish flag — but also through a fresh sense of heat including a more frontal — even carnal — take on sensuality.

Even before the show, some industry insiders were swayed in Jack and Laz’s favour by a teaser campaign shot in Barcelona by Talia Chetrit and art directed by Stephanie Barth and Carina Fey: a subtly streamlined Loewe logo was set against images of wet, soapy flowers, melting ice, a beach-toweled bulge and humid portraits of “Sorry Baby” actress-director Eva Victor and Isla Johnston, who plays the lead role in Baz Luhrmann’s “Jehanne d’Arc.”

Spain has “this heat, this sunniness, a ferocity,” McCollough said.

The collection nodded back to that campaign with striped looks rendered in a spongy, luxe-terry-cloth material. The duo’s American sensibility shone through with a blouse ruffled by stacked dress-shirt collars — fit for biking on Cape Cod as much as a pair Paris runway. Straight-leg jeans were reinterpreted in shredded leather that looked like dragon scales but was feather-soft.

The sculpted coats that had been a motif at Loewe in recent seasons returned in a more supple, wearable, glossy leather — their seams masked by the overlay of ultra-thin skivved and thermal bonded leather.

Such polished, yet more wearable expressions of craft were an example of how Hernandez and McCollough aim to reinterpret Loewe’s codes through their own lens: the pair said they had been inspired by artists including John McCracken, Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly, whose works are polished to a degree that labour-intensive handiwork becomes invisible, allowing for a focus on formal and conceptual purity. (An Ellsworth Kelly, borrowed from a collector friend, greeted guests at the show).

“We’re not yarn-y, we’re not ceramic-y. That’s Jonathan’s handwriting — and he’s amazing, but it’s not us. We need to take the codes of Loewe and interpret them in our own vernacular,” Hernandez explained. “We want people to walk away being like, ‘Oh my God, that felt so Jack and Lazaro. But it also felt so Loewe.’”

Alongside the focus on Spanishness and craft was an awareness that Loewe is principally a bag business. Accessories included twisted clutches that swiveled open like the doors on a Lamborghini, and drawstring pouches models were inexplicably gripping by one end.

If these were less successful, the slouchy, rectangular suede bags — just big enough for a laptop, it seemed — were more convincing (perhaps a nod to the PS1, a bag that fuelled Proenza Schouler’s early rise). A bucket style embroidered with jangling leather mussel shells brought a note of Balearic flair.

Hernandez and McCollough also aimed to underscore Loewe’s bag-brand identity through ready-to-wear: thus the use of leather as the collection’s primary material. Some garments were also infused with the notion of carrying things — like a buttery leather jacket with a deep drawstring pouch sewn into the back. I wanted that jacket — and a podenco to put in it.

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