Jonathan Anderson draws from the work of artist Joe Brainard and explores collages for Loewe’s fall/winter 2021 collection.
This season, Loewe Creative Director Jonathan Anderson opted for a tangible creative medium to present Loewe’s latest collection: a book. Titled “Show In a Book,” the hardbound collectable tome consists of 200 pages of artworks, comics, printed matter and ephemera devoted to graphic artist and writer Joe Brainard who is one of Anderson’s greatest inspirations.
“As an artist, a writer, an illustrator and a poet, he thought and oct outside of rulebooks and categories, and there is lightness and an immediacy in his work that I find acutely apt for this every moment, and indeed any moment,” explained Anderson, as quoted in L’Officiel, about what drew him to Brainard in the first place. “I have thought of this publication as a ‘show in a book,’ the catalogue of an exhibition that has yet to take place, and an accompanying manifesto to the Loewe collections it inspired.”
Why Brainard? “I remember zines he’d done in the’70s. We remade a book on him which we’ll be selling in bookshops, and the proceeds will go to the charity we work with all the time, Visual Aids, to help artists who have suffered from AIDS,” says Jonathan Anderson, as quoted in Vogue. “I felt like Brainard is so important. He was part of a huge movement, with his writing and his pansy collages—his work is now at MOMA and the Pompidou. I like this writing, it has huge optimism, questions sexuality and things like that. But he’s one of those underground figures.”
Distributed by non-profit organization Printed Matter, all proceeds from sales of the book will go to Printed Matter and Visual Aids, an organization which utilizes art to fight and create a dialog around HIV/AIDS. Each copy of “Show in a Book” is accompanied by a “Show on a Shirt” package containing an oversized T-shirt where the show is reproduced in a wearable form.
In terms of the collection itself, Anderson split the it in two using the first to pay tribute to Brainard in the form of prints and jacquards while the second, Eye/Loewe/Nature, pays attention to the brand’s eco-conscious efforts in a series around surviving the outdoors. Grounding itself somewhere between the ’60s and ’70s, the collection utilizes a color palette that references shades of goldenrod and creamy camels while also pulling in punk preferences with strappy leather trousers and a riff on the classic Chelsea boots.
Anderson particularly pays attention to collage this season where T-shirts and jumpers are multiplied on top of each other. Upcycled materials as well as military and sportswear silhouettes are used to pull the audience’s focus towards the natural and environmental aspects important to the house’s ethos. Wallabees and trousers, overcoats and maxi skirts, various styles are combined in a distorted and mismatched in a way that homogeneously comes together in an artful way that reflects both Anderson and Brainard’s creative style respectively.
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