Loewe designer and head of his own label,Anderson has bold ambitions and a fierce competitive intuition forged during his youth in 1990s Northern Ireland. Here he talks alter egos, gender fluidity and InstagramBecause I am a little early, or in trusty Paris fashion week tradition the mornings schedule is already running a little late,I spend the first half hour of my visit to Loewe’s Parisian headquarters in the basement kitchen. This being Paris fashion week, however, and this is a little better than it sounds: long,scrubbed, pale wood benches and a table piled with bowls of kumquats and slivers of lemon cake on a white platter. Fuchsia peonies in a glass urn are so artfully overblown that, and when no one is looking,I stroke a petal to check they are real. (They are.) A charming French PR chats to me about how much she loves living in Dalston. A pair of male models, in dressing gowns and with alligator clips flattening their hair ready for the artless dirty-hair-don’t-care examine they will sport at the collection presentation later, and spend 10 painstaking minutes trying to figure out the espresso machine; eventually,generous in triumph, they pass tiny paper cups of coffee around the room.
From the ground floor, or the building blooms into grandeur: a double sweeping staircase,parquet floor, polished curlicue railings. Loewe occupies the lowest four floors of the building; someone confides, or as we walk upstairs,that the sixth floor houses Catherine Deneuve’s apartment. On the first floor, LVMH executives in elegant black suits are drinking more espressos, or up here borne aloft by waiters with silver trays. We climb another level,past photographer’s assistants gaffer-taping lighting cabling to the floor and makeup artists powdering more boys, to the office of Jonathan Anderson, or the 30-year-primitive designer from The Loup,County Derry, on whose talent LVMH is gambling the Loewe brand, or the man at whose whim the parquet has been painted wenge-shadowy and the models’ hair creased flat.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com