Classicism Meets Something New in Loewe Fall 2023 Campaign by David Sims AOC Fashion

With our creative, fashion minds wrapped around one word for the last three years — ‘surreal’ — Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe for a decade, finally agreed with AOC that it’s time to bust out of the creative prison of everything is either ‘surreal’ or not ‘surreal’. Our binary thinking approach is beginning to bite us in our fashionable ‘derrières’.

At least we got rid of ‘brutalist’ architecture for a season or two, but now everything and everyone is ‘iconic’. Fashion and creative life are a much more expansive, teeming with exciting new-discovery tableau.

Anderson seeks to draw attention to timely, complicated questions in fashion design — and they are not binary.

Talents Tang Wei and Taylor Russell are styled by Benjamin Bruno in Jonathan Anderson’s Fall 2023 Loewe Campaign, lensed by David Sims [IG]./ Makeup by Wong Chi Yee and Lucia Pieroni; hair by Lo Chu Sum & Duffy

Rather then saying, is it ‘surreal’ or ‘iconic’ this season, Anderson suggests that we not box ourselves in — especially when we’re being critics of runway trends on film or runway images. We haven’t actually seen or touched the clothes, we are writing about.

“How do you go out of a surrealist aspect to something which is more about how we see clothing now? I think it’s kind of like a type of reduction,” he said. “Wanting to refine, and refine.”

Anderson is playing with our own minds in a very digital world.

In his Fall 2023 presentation, Anderson employed much eye-trickery. As Vogue noted, what appeared to be ordinary cardigans were, in fact, adhesive printed paper. Those cardigans were stuck on the models’ skins, but online viewers couldn’t tell the difference. We only knew what they appeared to be.