Last fall, famed designer and Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson took a brief break from fashion to curate “On Foot,” a presentation of new and historic artwork at London’s Offer Waterman gallery. Now, Anderson is back on the runway—and he’s taken one of the exhibition’s artists with him.
For Loewe’s Autumn/Winter 2024 menswear collection, Anderson teamed up with Richard Hawkins, a veteran Los Angeles-based painter who draws on images from art history, tabloids, porn, and other sources to create dense portraits of queer performance and desire.
The collection debuted last Saturday in Paris, where models strode against a backdrop of twelve video collages that Hawkins made for the occasion. Inspired by Loewe’s iconic window designs of the 1960s, the videos intermix footage of celebrities, brand ambassadors, and OnlyFans models with motifs from the artist’s own paintings.
Hawkins’s work was integrated into several Anderson pieces as well, including knitted sweatshirts, trousers, and a pair of drooping onesies. The artist’s penchant for cramming disparate allusions into a single pictorial space seems to have attracted Anderson, whose new collection was conceived as a reflection of modern man’s contradictory impulses and fluid identities.
Fall 2024 runway looks. Courtesy of Loewe.
“An algorithm of masculinity” and “collaged realness” is how Loewe describes the 63-year-old artist’s signature style in a press release. “Hawkins’s collision of disparate imagery long foreshadowed the constant online stream of disparate images we are now seduced by daily.”
Hawkins’s achievements in mind, the Spanish brand calls its Autumn/Winter collection is a “sardonic attempt to impose rather than propose a look, much like what happens in the collaged reality we are all living in.”
Anderson has longed looked to galleries and museums for inspiration in his designs, and in recent years, the interest has led Loewe to incorporate the work of artists like Lynda Benglis and Julien Nguyen in its shows.
“In the next 10 years I think fashion and art will come increasingly close together because I think both are starting to rely on each other for advertising and endorsement,” Anderson told Vogue around the opening of “On Foot” last year.
He continued, “Andy Warhol birthed this idea of pop culture that ultimately younger people are consuming, and the hierarchies are different now. In fact, you realize that all these hierarchies are starting to disappear through inter-pollination.”