“I feel a real responsibility to bring people here to enjoy Madrid, because it’s an amazing city,” said Jonathan Anderson, quietly pacing through the Loewe exhibition installed in the conservatory of the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid early this morning. The sun was sparkling, birds were singing, and all was pristine before the opening tonight. “I’ve been working on this for 18 months,” he remarked, maneuvering around a vast floral arrangement of almost neon-bright clashing roses, chrysanthemums, delphiniums, hydrangea, and berries in the exuberantly formal style of Constance Spry (who, among other things, was called in to do the flowers for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation). Trust Anderson to dare point at previously uncool things and to “cool” them again. “I’m proud of this,” he said. “The team I have to work with at Loewe is incredible, from the architect to the archivist.”
To one side of the greenhouse stretches a display of “the past, present, and future” of the Spanish luxury leather house, with vitrine displays of antique luxuries mixed with accessories, objects, advertising imagery, and bits of show furniture Anderson has added to the house during the three-year surge of multilevel activity he’s brought the label. To the other: newly commissioned work in a long gallery of photographs of Spry-style arrangements by Steven Meisel, with whom Anderson has struck up a working relationship since he acquired rights to republish some of the photographer’s archive pictures as Loewe mood advertising. “Since then, Steven has shot portraits and nudes for us, but he had never done still lifes,” said Anderson, pausing in front of a composition of orange poppies that looked, surreally, like a digital-age Dutch old master or Zurbarán, filtered through the sensibility of a Ladies’ Home Journal how-to spread. These incredible photographs are also printed as 2017 calendars—certain to be major Loewe Christmas gift bait at 250 euros in a limited edition of 500.
The exhibition sums up Anderson’s ambition that “Loewe should be a cultural brand.” That’s a high-sounding concept easier said than done, though “done” it inarguably is, as the revamped Loewe flagship store—the real reason for this week’s junket—proves. Here, Anderson follows through on the idea he talks about at his shows: that his customer is the kind of person who collects art. Ranged over three floors, the store is full of clothes and accessories placed in a domestic gallery of sorts—a space that has ceramics from Edmund de Waal, a painting by Howard Hodgkin, a recent piece by the young Northern Irish sculptor Siobhán Hapaska, and ’70s and ’80s art and craft works that have been largely overlooked until now. “We bought them through the Loewe Foundation,” Anderson noted.
It’s taste forming, of course: The impulsive confidence to point out what he personally believes are “good” things and to frame them in a new context is the essence of Anderson-ism. Cleverly, though, the art interest never gets in the way of bloodlust item shopping. This store is full of such things as blankets, brightly colored pouches with tulips intarsia-ed in leather, dripping gold waterfall bracelets, and knitted cashmere baby gift elephants, besides the serious high-ticket fashion. Oh, and on the side, there’s a flower store, Loewe Flores, where Spry’s original pseudo-classic vases can be purchased; Anderson has had his team scouring the Internet to resell them.
And now? It’s onward to tonight’s party, which, Anderson promises, is to move on from the gardens to one of Madrid’s grandest old clubs, where Spain’s finest drag queens will be in attendance, beginning at 1:00 a.m.