Luxury Brand Loewe Finally Evolved — All It Took Was Finding Someone Who Could Sell Good Looks | QDaily Business History

Without these, the brand's 170-year history might as well not exist.

In November, Loewe — the luxury brand known as "the Hermès of Spain" — opened its fourth store in Madrid. To be exact, it was the first flagship store Loewe had ever opened in the country it came from, built to mark its 170th anniversary.

Loewe put this 10,000-square-foot "Casa Madrid" inside a 19th-century building, hung it with works by the British artist Howard Hodgkin, added sculptures by Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley, and commissioned a ceramic wall from the Madrid artist Gloria Garcia Lorca. Alongside menswear, womenswear, bags, accessories and home goods, a Loewe flower shop opened here too.

The space will also host a run of public events, including an exhibition called "Past, Present and Future." All of it became something the press chased after — it read less like a rich man showing off his fortune than like an intellectual describing what he had seen and learned.

All of it follows the vision of Jonathan Anderson, the creative director Loewe hired in 2013. Two years ago, when he first started renovating Loewe's stores around the world, he was already worrying about the door handles and the pencils left on the tables in the shops.

"It's all about showing where Loewe's roots are," Jonathan Anderson said.

I. Who Can Give You a Reason to Buy Loewe?

By rights, Loewe should be a brand with no reason to feel anxious about its history. By the line Hermès likes to repeat — that time is the real luxury — Loewe counts as the genuine article.

It was founded in 1846, a little after Hermès, born in 1837, but 10 years before Burberry, 63 years before Chanel and 75 years before Gucci. Set against these famous juniors, though, Loewe has always kept quiet — quiet enough that when someone says the word "luxury," it is not the brand you think of.

There is another problem. For all the history in its hands, Loewe has never had the presence of an Hermès or a Burberry. No gimmick, no talking point, no charm.

Jane Birkin and the Birkin bag

Take Hermès. This leather house has at least one famous story attached to it: in 1984 the French singer Jane Birkin happened to sit next to the Hermès CEO Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight and "complained," offhand, that she could not find a handbag suited to weekends. Out of that came a bag named after her — the Birkin.

Prada has a reasonably famous story of its own: the designer Miuccia Prada made the house's celebrated nylon bags out of parachute fabric that her first boyfriend had paid for with his life.

As for Chanel, set aside famous products like the Chanel suit and Chanel No. 5 — the founder, Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel, was a walking talking point herself.

These stories are the core of how luxury sells. They do the same work a 21st-century celebrity street-style photo does: they stir something people feel. With them, luxury clothes, shoes, lipsticks and bags turn easily into objects of longing, and buyers get to feel "the presence of time," or "the classic," or even to form an "imagined community."

But no story is born ready-made. A story has to be distilled, summed up and, above all, told.

II. So What If You Have History?

Loewe began as a leather workshop set up by a group of Spanish leatherworkers, making small goods like wallets and cigar cases. In 1872 the German leather craftsman Enrique Loewe joined them and brought new designs with him, and only then was the Loewe brand really born. After that Loewe designed and made leather goods of every kind, tried its hand at women's handbags, and was among the first to work in crocodile and snakeskin.

In this period Loewe also won the favor of Madrid's aristocracy. In 1905 a longtime customer, the Duchess of Conquista, recommended the brand to the Spanish royal family, and Loewe became a supplier to the crown. From then on King Alfonso and Queen Victoria Eugenia were regulars at the Loewe boutique. From the 1950s onward, Loewe began building special ties with royal houses across Europe.

In 1945 Loewe's first creative director, Pérez de Rozas, designed the brand's first famous bag, the Boxcalf. In 1975, the year Franco's dictatorship in Spain ended, Loewe launched another famous bag, the Amazona, made to suit the new round-the-clock lives of Spanish women. It held a great deal and fit almost any occasion.

In 1947 the brand went into ready-to-wear. At first Loewe did not design its ready-to-wear at all — it sold Dior's New Look. By the 1970s, trying to build up a womenswear line, Loewe had even hired Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani as designers.

Ready-to-wear brought it no more attention. Before LVMH bought the brand in 1997, the year it turned 150, its leather-goods business was still doing contract manufacturing for Louis Vuitton.

To sum up: Loewe is an old brand, skilled in leather, with a hit bag 71 years ago and an early start in luxury spinoffs such as perfume. Like Hermès, it enjoyed the "glory" of royal connections — the normal path for a luxury brand, spreading down through the social order.

It looks as though Loewe had everything the other luxury houses had. But another problem arrives: it was still missing someone to tell its story.

III. What Is a Creative Director Actually For?

The luxury business is an intellectual-property business. Signing celebrity faces and building one or two signature products make up most of the marketing. But the designer has always been the most important part of it. Designers make the clothes for this business and sometimes set the fashion of an era. More often the designer is the most persuasive thing the business owns — the designer is the story that draws people in.

When these houses were founded they were independent, with a settled design style and a direction set entirely by the founder, who was usually the designer.

While Dior was still living through the era of its founder, Christian Dior, it brought 15 letter-named silhouettes to market, the classic New Look among them, and laid down its reputation: it was the true New Look of its time.

Chanel was the same. It became a house that set the fashion of the day while its founder was still at the helm, and any discussion of the brand since then still comes back to its first star designer, Coco Chanel.

Once these founders died, though, the houses entered a new stage, facing two questions. First, would the family keep the brand? Second, where would the next star designer come from?

In the end the market answered both.

LVMH was formed in 1987 and Richemont in 1988; Kering, older than either, was already there. As the three went around buying up couture houses, choosing who would design for a brand — that is, who would be creative director — turned into something like appointing a professional manager.

In essence, the creative director now had to be a figure with enough of a story attached. In the capitalized structure of the luxury business, the creative director is the core: not born of the brand, but hired to tell its story, through design and through ideas.

Gucci in the Tom Ford era

Gucci in the Alessandro Michele era, nothing like Tom Ford's

In the 1980s, before Gucci was bought by PPR, the predecessor of Kering, the Gucci family was locked in a long feud that pushed the brand into loss after loss. Investcorp, the Bahrain investment firm that had just taken Tiffany public on the New York Stock Exchange, wanted Gucci. In 1989 it bought back 50% of the shares from minority holders and took the other 50% from Maurizio, the third-generation heir and grandson of the original Gucci; with the brand entirely in hand, Investcorp named Domenico De Sole chief executive. De Sole picked Tom Ford, not yet a household name, as creative director — and what followed is the celebrated story of Gucci's revival.

Tom Ford threw out Gucci's old market position and put decadence and sensuality in its place, shaping every product line with care, from ready-to-wear to bags, perfume and packaging. He also redesigned Gucci's advertising and its store interiors, using shrewd ad tactics to pull public attention back to the brand. It looks a great deal like everything Alessandro Michele, Gucci's creative director since 2015, has been doing.

Loewe had none of this.

Right up to its 150th year, 1997, when LVMH bought it, Loewe had never had a star creative director. Once a luxury group buys a house, the standard way to remake it is to hire a young ready-to-wear designer willing to break the mold and start a trend, with plenty of personality, then repackage the brand and send it back out — the way Gucci once did.

That is also why, in the 20 years since LVMH bought Loewe, the brand has kept changing creative directors.

In 1997, "for a more modern face," Loewe brought in Narciso Rodriguez. Four years later it hired the Spanish designer José Enrique Oña Selfa, who was good at working leather into ready-to-wear and who stayed seven years.

Then came 2008 and another change. This time Loewe took Stuart Vevers, the creative director of Mulberry and an expert at making It bags. Not only that: it poached Mulberry's CEO, Lisa Montague, along with him, hoping to "replicate their success at Mulberry."

Now, at last, it was Jonathan Anderson's turn.

IV. The Jonathan Anderson Era at Loewe Begins

Ever since Jonathan Anderson dropped into Loewe in 2013, the brand has been far more visible, because the interviews he gives on its behalf keep coming — and he can not only talk about Loewe through his own past but find something new to say each time.

"Loewe wants to be more fashionable, but Rome wasn't built in a day," he said in a 2015 interview with Business of Fashion.

"We have to find a way to make people believe Loewe was already fashionable before," he said, also in 2015, to the British paper The Independent.

"Loewe used to work for royalty. Now, as a luxury brand, that is nowhere near enough — it's time to make something new," he said in a 2015 interview with The Guardian. "I want Loewe to survive in a luxury context, to make it relevant to culture. We need to build a brand that shows the era we live in."

"When Loewe started out, the money didn't come from vintage bags — back then the brand made modern bags for what buyers of the day wanted. So whatever era you're in, the product has to reflect modernity," he said in a 2014 interview with WWD.

Anderson had clearly grasped that his main job at Loewe was reform, and that the direction of that reform was the handful of points he raises in every interview: Loewe had to be more fashionable, to get past serving royalty, to be modern, to show where its roots lay and, above all, to become better known.

Jonathan Anderson

Handsome, and from Magherafelt, an obscure town in Northern Ireland, Jonathan Anderson first studied acting in the United States, then moved to London to train as a fashion designer.

In 2007 he set up his own menswear label, J.W. Anderson. He showed his first womenswear collection in 2010, and womenswear now brings in 70% of the label's revenue. On a concept of blurred gender and a design style that reads as neither male nor female, his own brand made its name fast. Whatever games he wanted to play with gender through clothes, Anderson made plain that he was after more than making clothes.

Pierre-Yves Roussel, president of LVMH's fashion division, took an interest in Anderson and at first wanted him to run Kenzo, another house in the group; that job went in the end to Humberto Leon and Carol Lim of Opening Ceremony.

"The timing wasn't right. But the first time I met him I knew we'd end up working together," Roussel said. "Bringing a writer to market isn't like publishing one book. If you sign a writer, you need to know he can write other books too. Even then I could feel Jonathan Anderson's capacity to 'evolve.'"

In the end LVMH bought 49% of J.W. Anderson, and on that basis asked Anderson to become creative director of Loewe.

Anderson really is a man of restless energy whose ideas do not run out. Those two qualities are exactly what a modern fashion house wants in a storyteller, and exactly what a Loewe in transition needed. Put plainly: in carrying the brand from the arms of the privileged into those of the middle class, the mere presence of a Jonathan Anderson — full of personality, good for a talking point — was the most effective marketing available, and perhaps the most gripping advertisement.

He has given interviews to all sorts of outlets in his three years at Loewe, and the subject always comes back to Loewe itself — yet the views he offers, the stories he cites, even the English words he picks, rarely repeat.

When he started, he said that "in fashion, the biggest obstacle is our middle-class view of fashion." In another interview he said that "'luxury' is an outdated word." Then: "A full runway look is essentially the same thing as a costume. I'm not against wearing a look head to toe exactly as it came down the runway — that's a personal choice — but I'd never force anyone to do it."

Designer though he is, his thinking does not stop at clothes. "We live in a culture that worships the 'like,'" he has said. "The images we like to consume are the sugar in the food."

He has views on the critics different eras produce, too, arguing that "the most basic principle in how we perceive criticism and art is not to question whoever we are listening to. But criticism built on knowledge no longer exists as an idea — those days are further and further behind us." He is plainly not a man who hedges or fears an opinion.

The same stance runs through his overhaul of Loewe.

"If you're relaunching a brand, you have to make people forget completely what it used to look like. At the start I wanted to change everything about Loewe — the look of the stores, the logo, even the hangers. But I didn't just stare at hangers and daydream; everything had moved a little within three months. I admit I watched it very closely," Anderson said in a 2014 interview with W magazine.

Loewe's elephant bag

Since then he has indeed pushed Loewe onto a track of tearing down and building anew. His method looks simple enough: everything centers on him, every change follows his taste, and whenever a product reaches the market he can give a full account of "why Loewe is doing this."

Having once worked as a window-display dresser at Prada, Anderson understands fashion beyond design — visual display, store operations, brand-building.

Once he took over Loewe's creative direction, the first thing he did, working from the idea of fusing "past, present and future," was to team up with M/M (Paris), the art-direction firm founded by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, to redraw Loewe's "Anagram" mark. The final version grew out of an original design by the Spanish artist Vicente Vela from the 1970s. Loewe's packaging was simplified after that, leaving only the "Anagram" pattern and the Loewe name on plain white boxes. The white he chose is based on Portland stone, the building material of the British Museum.

He has also kept using Steven Meisel to shoot Loewe's campaigns. "Loewe needs an educator in fashion, and Meisel can give a text form and turn an image into an icon," he said.

He redesigned the stores as well. He personally supervised the renovation of the stores in Japan, a market Loewe has always taken seriously; the flagship it has just opened in Spain, its largest anywhere, stresses history and even sells flowers. That is one idea among many of his. He believes he "broke Loewe apart and rebuilt it, then showed the part of its history people had forgotten." "To rebuild, a brand has to be broken first, but only a few brands are qualified for that," he said.

This year Anderson launched a Loewe fragrance called 001. Inspired by daybreak, it comes as 001 Man and 001 Woman, and — much like the blurred gender he plays with in clothes — the two can be mixed to make a different scent. "The fragrance is an important extension of what Loewe is doing in fashion now. I wanted the two worlds to cross over; that stands for Loewe today," he said.

To tell Loewe's history, Anderson also put out a "history book" for the brand's 170th year, sharing its title with the "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" exhibition mounted at the Spanish flagship.

the Puzzle bag

He has made his biggest moves, naturally, in leather, the ground Loewe knows best. He remade the most famous bag in the brand's history into the Puzzle — 40 pieces of leather, five ways to carry it — and it has become a hit. He reworked the Flamenco too, dropping the classic fringe for a plain, quiet Knot fastening. In 2015 he had Loewe launch a line of animal bags, which now runs to an elephant and a panda (with a China-only edition). Another hit is the cat-head charm.

Loewe has been made over at last, and it has gained a charming man willing to go around telling its story. "This isn't down to me alone, it's the strength of a team. I'm really just a senior salesman. In the end, if you want to succeed in fashion you have to turn to the best HR people — it's like playing politics. I put out a strong ego, then try to keep everyone happy," he said.

The changes have worked, too.

The New York department store Barneys plainly approves of what Anderson has done at Loewe. In 2010 Barneys carried only his own label, J.W. Anderson; in 2015, two years into his tenure at the house, it finally took on Loewe as well.

"The collections Jonathan makes for Loewe fuse luxury and modernity — very modern. And his own brand, J.W. Anderson, is super cool too," said Jennifer Sunwoo, a vice president at Barneys.

In 2015 Loewe's worldwide sales rose 40%. That year it also chose to open a store in Miami, in a North American market it had never paid much attention to. Loewe was not the only beneficiary: since its creative director took on both jobs, J.W. Anderson's sales have grown by double digits as well.

"He does his design from 360 degrees. It's not only product design, it's product image and brand image. His thinking about fashion is fresh, and he knows how to get important people to crowd around him," Roussel said.

That is roughly the attitude he had in 2007, when he set his sights on Stuart Vevers — who had worked at Calvin Klein, Bottega Veneta, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton, and had just made Mulberry's leather-goods business red-hot.

"We have been reforming Loewe, and now we want to bring out the strengths of its leather goods. For that we wanted someone who can make desirable bags, and Stuart Vevers met our conditions," Roussel said in a 2007 interview with WWD. For all LVMH's praise of Vevers at the time, the designer left Loewe after five years on the job.

Now Loewe has finally found itself a star designer — or call him a super-spokesman — and everything seems to be on a new track. But the question comes round again: how many years will Jonathan Anderson, the man carrying out this sweeping reform, stay at Loewe?

Cover and in-text images from:

ris.fashion.telegraph.co.uk, nichearabia.com, i.dailymail.co.uk, wikimedia.com, aceshowbiz.com, dailybruin.com, j-w-anderson.com, tonguechic.com, Jonathan Anderson @ instagram, bragmybag.com, resurrectionvintage.com, a2.files.fashionista.com, media.gucci.com, dazedimg.dazedgroup.netdna-cdn.com