Loewe, again, I know. Well what can I say, Loewe is currently one of the most interesting brands when it comes to the intersection of art and fashion. JWA perfectly masters the meaning-creating potential of the now usual collaborations between artists and designers.
For the SS24 collection presented this past September 29th, the Spanish house collaborated with post-minimalist American artist Lynda Benglis. As some of you may already know, Loewe has gone through a form of rebirth since JWA took the creative helm ten years ago. From surrealist references to pixelated items, JWA has shown a deep relationship with the art world, collaborating with artists like Anthea Hamilton in the past.
Notably, JWA chose to collaborate with a woman again, a woman who has been vocal about the patriarchy and the male dominance of movement and artistic ideas. Benglis rose to fame when she published a picture of herself holding a dildo in Artforum in 1974.
The artist is also famous for her use of saturated colors, her focus on process and her use of alternative medium to create poured latex floor paintings, cantilevered foam urethane sculptures or totemic wax paintings. This year during Men’s Fashion Week, three water-spouting fountains by Benglis, including Crescendo, adorned the runway for Loewe’s menswear show.
For this collaboration, six bronze pieces were used as the setting of the runway show in Château de Vincennes and the artist designed some jewelry pieces. Sculptures included Black Widow (2021) and Yellow Tail (2020). They stressed the tension between the stillness of the sculptures and the movement of the bodies wearing the miniature/jewels. “Knotted, pleated, poured and extruded wearable sculptures” according to a statement.
The SS24 collection was an ode to retro masculinity, with boyish hair and oversized garments featuring exaggerated shoulders and trousers coming up almost to the chest in toned, muted colors. The fluidity of the silhouettes contrasted with the brutality of the in-the-round bronze sculptures while the visual continuity was ensured through the sense of movement permeating both.
The weighting monumentality of the sculptures was muted into pop colors for the jewelry; pink, light blue or neon green de facto standing out among the grey and browns. “She’s always interested in translation. How one material translates into another and the process of deciding what materials they would be” said curator Andrew Bonacina backstage after the show.
“The body sculptural idea has always interested me,” Benglis said in a video by Loewe. “In fact, jewelry is the first thing that I noticed when I was a kid, and that led me into making art. It was a way of making large jewellery when I did a sculpture. It was decor, and decor mocking decor. I just wanted it to roll, to swing, to move, to have a gesture.”
The relationship between stillness and movement and the intrinsically fleeting nature of a fashion show relates them to happenings, after which only the filmed record or the accessories are left as a testimony. Paradoxically, the materiality of the props become the most powerful witnesses of the immaterial event that is gone. Here, Lynda Benglis’ jewelry becomes the most potent reminder of the presence of her bigger sculptures and how JWA’s designs can only be fully understood in their absent presence.
This expands Loewe’s world beyond not only the runway but the clothes that become essential to understand the artistic component of Benglis’ and Anderson’s collaboration. The sculptures are not only a nice, inspiring setting, they are meaningfully part of the collection, of the aesthetic vocabulary of Loewe and of the reference system of Loewe’s customers beyond the store.
mabou 