Sticks of green asparagus, verdant lettuce leaves, little round radishes: Loewe’s A/W 2024 womenswear collection featured a veritable cornucopia of produce, reimagined in cloth and intricately decorated with thousands of tiny, hand-stitched caviar beads.
Of these pieces designer Jonathan Anderson said it was about taking the familiar out of context, in part inspired by Albert York’s ‘small but intense’ Edenic landscapes and floral still-lifes which decorated the Paris show space in a rare exhibition of the American painter’s work. Little-known but collected by figures like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Anderson imagined these bucolic scenes of nature trapped away in luxurious Upper East Side apartments.
Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: Loewe’s beaded vegetables
It set the stage for a collection that Anderson said turned the ‘tropes of class and wealth on their head’, riffing on markers of wealth, from Etonian morning suits to prints inspired by 18th-century ceramics. Caviar beading – a craft associated with the historical art of haute culture dressmaking – featured throughout, across heavy biker boots, slouchy handbags, or harem-style pants.
These pieces spoke of a throughline of Anderson’s recent collections for Loewe, whereby painstaking craft has been translated into distinctly contemporary garments – whether beading or hand-painted feathers, or tiny shards of shells evocative of the inside of a jewellery box. Like the extraordinary beaded vegetables – which were the year’s most appetising accessory – the results are spectacular and surreal. ‘I like the idea of craft becoming something else,’ says Anderson.
Find all the Wallpaper* Design Awards winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today
