Loewe: how to hand off a vision
Loewe ended 2024 with €885.26M in revenue, up 9.17% over 2023. Operating profit fell 24% to €196.56M. Asia excluding Japan dropped 13.81% to €192.99M. EMEA grew 18.68% to €246.80M. Jonathan Anderson, the creative director who built the modern Loewe over 11 years, left in March 2025 for Dior. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, founders of Proenza Schouler, started on April 7, 2025. Their first womenswear show landed at Paris Fashion Week in October 2025 to a standing ovation from Anna Wintour and Delphine Arnault.
That timeline is the most interesting brand strategy problem in luxury right now. Not because the handoff is messy, but because the entire Loewe of the last decade was built on a single creative voice, and the house is about to find out whether the brand can carry the philosophy without him.
Perception
Loewe today is a contradiction the customer never has to think about. It is a 180-year-old Spanish leather house and a contemporary art platform. It sells a €3,500 origami bag and a €40 limited edition Howl’s Moving Castle keyring. It runs a €50,000 craft prize and a Studio Ghibli capsule. The visual language ties it together: warm color, soft sculptural shapes, the Anagram logo never doing the heavy lifting.
The brand voice is curatorial rather than declarative. The website reads like a museum, not a store. Product pages link out to artist commissions, the Loewe Foundation, the Crafted World traveling exhibition. The house tells you what it values (craft, color, weirdness, Spanish heritage rendered through a global filter) by showing you the world it is building, not by writing taglines about it.
This worked because Anderson’s curatorial mind was the same mind doing the collections, the casting, the campaigns, the bag construction, and the Ghibli phone call. The brand voice was a person. That is also the structural risk now.
Structure
Loewe sits in a specific seat inside the LVMH portfolio. It is not the volume engine (that is Louis Vuitton and Dior). It is not the heritage show (that is Hermès, which is not even LVMH). It is the house where craft credibility and creative experimentation are allowed to compound without quarterly pressure for hero handbags.
| Brand | Founded | Iconic bag price | Positioning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hermès | 1837 | $11,000+ Birkin | Heritage maximalism, unmatched provenance |
| Bottega Veneta | 1966 | $3,800+ Andiamo | Italian intrecciato, quiet leather authority |
| The Row | 2006 | $5,000+ Margaux | Ultra-quiet American luxury |
| Loewe | 1846 | $3,500+ Puzzle | Spanish craft as art-world platform |
| Celine | 1945 | $3,000+ Triomphe | Parisian sleek, logo-discreet |
| Saint Laurent | 1961 | $3,000+ Loulou | Parisian sex, sharp tailoring |
The Puzzle bag is what made Anderson’s Loewe a household name, but it is not the most strategically interesting product. The bag is constructed from over 40 cut leather panels stitched and folded into a flat-packable origami shape. It is genuinely difficult to make. That difficulty is the positioning. Where Hermès trades on scarcity and a 200-year story, Loewe trades on visible craft complexity. You can see the engineering. The seams are the marketing.
This matters because Loewe’s price tier is full. Saint Laurent, Celine, and Givenchy all live in the same €1,800–€4,500 leather-goods range. The house does not win on price, distribution, or heritage volume. It wins on a third axis: the customer can articulate why the bag is hard to make. That is rare, and that is what Anderson built.
The art-world wedge
The single sharpest structural decision Anderson made was treating Loewe as an art-world institution rather than a fashion brand that does art collaborations. This sounds like a vibes distinction. It is not. It changed who the brand was in conversation with.
The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, launched in 2016, gives €50,000 each year to a working craftsperson. Past finalists are the kind of names that show at the Venice Biennale, not at Paris Fashion Week. The prize is on its tenth edition. The Crafted World exhibition opened in Shanghai in 2024 and has since toured to Tokyo and beyond, treated by curators as a museum show with a brand attached, not the inverse.
This is a defensible cultural position. Most luxury houses do art collaborations as marketing spend; Loewe runs an art program with a fashion business attached. The proof is that the art world treats the brand seriously. The risk is that the new creative directors do not come from that world. McCollough and Hernandez built Proenza Schouler as a New York runway label and a wholesale-led womenswear business. Their cultural reference set is American art and music, not European craft pedagogy. The Foundation will keep running. Whether the brand voice stays curatorially credible depends on whether they can speak that language at the same level.
Alignment
The cross-cultural fluency at Loewe is the thing the bag-buying customer experiences without ever naming it. The house is Spanish on paper and global in execution, and it pulls this off without performing either.
Anderson is Northern Irish. He was hired in 2013 specifically to internationalize a brand that had been read for decades as a Spanish purveyor of conservative luxury leather goods. What he did was the opposite of localization. He did not soften the Spanishness for export markets. He amplified the parts of Spain that already traveled (color saturation, sculptural craft, surrealism, a particular comfort with the absurd) and let the global customer meet the brand on those terms.
The Studio Ghibli partnership is the cleanest expression of this. Three capsule collections (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle) ran from 2021 through the final installment that closed Anderson’s tenure. These were not the standard luxury x animation deals where a logo gets slapped on a t-shirt. The collections rebuilt Ghibli’s stills as embroidered jacquards, intarsia knits, and hand-painted leather. The reverence for the craft was the alignment. Two craft cultures, one Japanese and one Spanish, talking to each other in a language they both speak fluently.
This is why the brand grew so fast in Asia between 2019 and 2023, and also why the 2024 Asia decline (down 13.81%) is more nuanced than the headline. The Asian softness is a sector-wide reset, not a Loewe-specific positioning failure. The brand still has flagships in Tokyo, Chengdu (two), Shanghai, and Beijing, plus the Crafted World tour anchored in Asia. The pipeline is intact. The question is whether the next collection cycles maintain the cultural depth that made the brand resonate, or default to the Anglo-American reference set that travels less well.
Lazaro Hernandez gave the early answer at the SS26 debut. He told W magazine he wanted to bring back “a certain Spanishness with heat, skin, and emotion.” The collection was tactile, saturated, with draped towel-like dresses. The reference set rotated from Anderson’s surrealist Englishness toward a hotter, more body-conscious Spain. Whether that holds, and whether it travels, is the next two years of brand work.
Identity
Loewe’s identity has rotated three times in 180 years.
First identity: 1846 to 1996. A Spanish leather house. Founded as a craftsmen’s collective in Madrid, consolidated under Enrique Loewe Roessberg in 1872, granted the Royal Warrant by Alfonso XIII in 1905. The Anagram logo, designed by painter Vicente Vela, arrived in the 1970s. The Flamenco bag (1970) and the Amazona (1975) are from this era. The brand was synonymous with Spanish establishment luxury.
Second identity: 1996 to 2013. LVMH acquired the house in 1996. The brand was treated as a strategic asset but not yet a creative one. Revenue grew steadily, the house felt sleepy. Several creative directors cycled through without leaving a defining mark. The Anagram was on everything.
Third identity: 2013 to 2025. Anderson was hired as creative director in 2013 at age 28. He killed the all-over Anagram, rebuilt the house aesthetic around craft, color, and surrealism, launched the Foundation Craft Prize in 2016, introduced the Puzzle and Hammock bags, made the brand a billion-dollar business by the early 2020s, and turned Casa Loewe (the flagship store concept) into a network of 16 art-museum-as-retail spaces. Anderson is the entire third identity. There is no separating his taste from the brand he made.
Fourth identity: April 2025 onward. This is the brand strategy question, not the design question. McCollough and Hernandez are talented, demonstrably commercial, and well-liked by the LVMH executive team. The first show was warmly received. None of that answers whether the brand voice can survive the transfer.
The closest comparable in luxury history is Tom Ford leaving Gucci in 2004, when Gucci had to figure out whether the house was Tom Ford’s vision or its own. It took Gucci a decade and Alessandro Michele to find a new voice that worked. Loewe is in the same position, with one important difference. Anderson kept the Foundation, the Casa concept, the Craft Prize, and the curatorial brand voice as institutional assets, not personal signatures. He spent 11 years building scaffolding the next person could climb. Whether McCollough and Hernandez climb it, or build their own structure next to it, is what determines whether the third identity becomes the platform for a fourth, or gets gradually replaced.
Foundation
The proof points are real and partly stress-tested.
Revenue grew tenfold over the Anderson tenure, to €885M in 2024. Operating profit at €196.56M is a 22% margin, healthy for a brand of this size. EMEA grew almost 19% in the most difficult luxury year of the decade. The Foundation Craft Prize is on its tenth edition and is a credentialed institution in the contemporary craft world. The Studio Ghibli partnership ran for a full creative arc and closed cleanly. The Puzzle bag holds resale value comparable to Hermès Birkin and Chanel Classic Flap, which is the rarest thing a non-heritage bag can do. Production stays in Spain, the leather story is intact, the workshop apprenticeships continue.
What could break the positioning. The 24% operating profit drop in 2024 is partly cyclical and partly the cost of investing through a creative transition (new directors, new shows, new campaigns, two new Casa flagships in Paris). LVMH first half 2025 reported continued pressure, with profits down 22%. If the Asia softness extends another 18 months, the McCollough-Hernandez era will be evaluated against a falling baseline, which makes any creative reinvention look like a commercial failure.
The Anderson legacy is the second risk. He did not just design collections. He selected the artists, wrote the press notes, picked the music, approved the casting, signed off on every Foundation finalist. Replacing one person with two is structurally fine. Replacing a singular taste with a duo’s negotiated taste is harder. The early signal from SS26 is that the new directors are leaning into a more accessible, body-positive, color-first vocabulary. That is a commercial choice. Whether it stays culturally credible depends on the second and third collections, not the debut.
The third risk is the institution drift. The Foundation and the Casa retail concept are Anderson’s least-replicable contributions. They require a creative team that genuinely cares about craft pedagogy and architecture as brand expression, not just runway. If McCollough and Hernandez treat them as inherited assets to maintain rather than to extend, the brand becomes a fashion label with a museum attached, not a museum that makes fashion. The difference is small in operations and total in positioning.
Expression
The Loewe website is the cleanest expression of the brand voice in luxury fashion right now.
What works. The site treats the Foundation, the Stories, the Casa locations, and the product as one connected universe. Stories are long-form, well-photographed, and not trying to sell anything. The product photography is consistent across categories: warm light, neutral background, soft contrast, the same visual grammar whether it is a €40 keyring or a €4,500 bag. The Anagram is present but never loud. Mobile performance is solid for a brand with this much editorial weight. The store finder treats Casa locations as destinations with hours and architectural notes, not just addresses.
What does not. The Foundation Craft Prize lives at a separate URL (loewe.com/foundation), which means a customer who finds the brand through a Puzzle bag may never discover the Foundation that justifies the price. The discovery path runs in one direction only. Stories are richly produced but rarely link to the products that share their cultural reference set, which means the editorial work does not compound into the commercial work. The Studio Ghibli collaboration product pages have less storytelling than the Stories archive entries, which is backward. And the brand is silent about the creative transition. The site shows McCollough and Hernandez’s work without acknowledging the handoff. For a brand this self-aware, the silence reads as defensive, not confident.
The positioning gap
Loewe spent 11 years becoming a brand with a curatorial voice instead of a marketing voice. That voice was Anderson. The positioning gap is now structural, not creative.
The brand needs to make the curatorial program institutional rather than personal. The Foundation Craft Prize already is. The Casa retail concept partly is. The Stories editorial program is not. There is no editor-in-chief, no masthead, no clear continuity of point of view that survives a creative director change. Right now the Stories voice is whatever Anderson wanted it to be in any given month. That worked when Anderson was the brand. It does not work when the brand is between authors.
The fix is not louder marketing. It is naming the thing Anderson built so that McCollough and Hernandez can extend it instead of recreate it. A brand book most luxury houses would never write, because it would feel commercial. Loewe needs it specifically because the brand voice was built on the absence of one. The Foundation, the Craft Prize, the Casa concept, the cultural reference set, the relationship to Spanish heritage, the cross-cultural fluency: these are positioning assets that should outlast any single designer. Right now they are mostly held in one person’s head, and that person works at Dior.
The brand should publish a self-authored articulation of what Loewe is. Not a tagline. A point of view, written down, with examples. So that ten years from now, when the next handoff happens, the next creative director inherits a thesis instead of having to guess at one. That is the difference between a brand that grew tenfold under one designer and a brand that can grow another tenfold under the next.