What Will Jonathan Anderson Transform Next?

Meeting him at the Prado made good sense, though. Anderson is a serious collector of ceramics and paintings, and he is also a patron of the arts: he inaugurated the now annual Loewe Craft Prize and is on the board of the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. I welcomed the opportunity to see the Spanish monarchy’s art collection through his eyes, even if it meant scurrying at his elbow through crowded galleries filled with Madrileños at the outset of a holiday weekend; Spanish museumgoers regarded with half recognition the tall, boyishly handsome Irishman striding swiftly through their midst, discoursing intensely and confidently about art history. A docent provided by the Prado hovered discreetly behind us, to steer us efficiently in the direction of works Anderson asked to look at (“Let’s do Van Dyck,” “Do you have any Canalettos?”), like a personal shopper handling a very important client at a high-end boutique.

The paintings by Titian and Rubens had arrested Anderson’s attention the very first time that he’d seen them, he explained. In realizing one’s own vision, he continued, an artist is in the position of Rubens: taking in the œuvre of an accomplished precursor, studying and emulating another’s technique before daring to create something new himself. “If you are learning from a master or from a great work, ultimately your job is to find a new narrative in it,” Anderson said. “It’s, like, the jean will always be the jean. You have to find a new way to represent the jean.” In recent Loewe collections, Anderson has repeatedly accomplished this feat. He has swagged the fabric around the front pockets of a pair of bluejeans so that the pants billow across the thigh almost the way the skirt of an heiress painted by Gainsborough does. Anderson has also wrapped denim into an asymmetrical form so that the fabric drapes diagonally from one jutting hip, falling as fluidly as an elegant gown painted by John Singer Sargent.

Contemporary society, Anderson said, now often fails to see the value of connoisseurship, and it fails to sufficiently appreciate the past. “It’s about learning from it,” he told me. “As much as Titian and Rubens were superstars of painting, ultimately, in this period, this would have been seen as a craft. You were not Francis Bacon—you were employed as a craftsman for Philip II.”

“I said, ‘Your approval means nothing to me,’ not ‘Stop giving me your approval’!”

Cartoon by Emily Bernstein

The patronage of monarchs is evident everywhere on the walls of the Prado. “It’s about power and regalia,” Anderson said, as we walked among halls displaying the works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, along with other court painters such as Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, who, in 1665, portrayed the fourteen-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa, of Austria, in a silver-and-peach silk dress with a pannier skirt almost as wide as she was tall. “I’m obsessed with the structures underneath clothing—the understructure of these garments is insane,” Anderson said. “You’re going to find boning”—most frequently, whalebone. “You’re going to find layers and layers of fabric and wadding. It was incredibly heavy. You’re not going very far in this.” In Loewe’s latest runway show, presented in September, in Paris, he featured his own series of structured, wide-hipped dresses, though his versions had drastically abbreviated, buttocks-skimming skirts, permitting considerably more movement. In lieu of whalebone, he’d layered long, floaty floral-print gowns over stiffened petticoats, combining volume with a summery translucence.

In a gallery of medieval religious art, we stopped in front of “The Descent from the Cross,” painted in the mid-fourteen-hundreds by the Dutch master Rogier van der Weyden. The complex composition shows the anguished Mary collapsing in folded blue robes before the deposed body of Christ. “I think this is one of the most amazing depictions of fabric,” Anderson said, noting the narrow gray trim on Mary’s sleeves, from beneath which poked what looked like a fitted, long-sleeved undershirt in a matching ultramarine. It was tempting, if possibly sacrilegious, to compare the effect to that of an illusory double cuff, created through inventive stitching, on a merino-alpaca sweater in one of JW Anderson’s recent collections. Anderson said, of the painting, “It’s the beginning of the depiction of humanity. You get this idea of clothing and the power of clothing. And you see, as you go through history, clothing ultimately dictates how we see ourselves.”

In the context of hundreds of paintings rendering sumptuous fabrics, the paired canvases by Titian and Rubens of the Garden of Eden were especially suggestive: each artist had captured the very last moment when clothing was unnecessary. Before Eve bit into the forbidden fruit, nobody had ever felt obliged to fuss about fashion. “It is, ultimately, the dream,” Anderson said, as we regarded Adam and Eve, their genitals obscured by a few strategically placed leaves. “It’s before any form of consumerism. Somehow, it’s, like, this is where we did not need it, until we decided we were not going to do what we were told. Maybe deep down there is an odd fantasy—would it just be better to be naked somehow?”

My trip to Madrid, with its whistle-stop tour of the Prado, was the first, but far from the last, time that I was asked by a professionally regretful member of Anderson’s team to accommodate the demands of his ever-evolving calendar. There was also the fitting I was supposed to observe in Madrid, eliminated just after I’d flown into the capital, because Anderson had to attend an L.V.M.H. corporate event. (A gorgeous bouquet from Loewe, sent to my hotel room, was at least some consolation.) A last-minute invitation to a promotional event in Paris, where Anderson lives part of the time, for the publication of a book celebrating his decade-long tenure at Loewe, came with a warning that, though I was of course welcome to attend, Anderson would be far too busy signing books to speak to me. (More lovely flowers were sent to my hotel room.) At the party, which took place at Loewe’s Avenue Montaigne store, I received a complimentary copy of the limited-edition book, large enough to fill my roller suitcase on its own. When I reached the head of the book-signing queue, Anderson inscribed the lavish volume with “Lots of love, Jonathan.” There was the meeting in London, where Anderson lives the rest of the time, that was confidently scheduled and then indefinitely postponed but never definitively cancelled. The prospect of it hovered tantalizingly out of reach for weeks, in a way that somehow made me think of Anderson’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection for Loewe, in which he offered A-line silk dresses printed with blurred trompe-l’oeil images of other, vintage dresses, one gown superimposed on another in a clever but slippery gesture. In the course of several months, it began to feel almost as if Anderson himself were a grand monarch of the Hapsburg Court—like one of Velázquez’s aristocrats, whose supercilious visage sneers down from the walls of the Prado—while I was a humble supplicant at the palace gates.

There was some explanation for his elusiveness, quite apart from the everyday hauteur of the fashion industry. For much of last year, it was rumored that Anderson was heading for the exit at Loewe, and that he was soon to be appointed the creative director at Dior, another house owned by L.V.M.H. This was the topic of gossip at the Spring/Summer 2025 runway shows in Paris in September, when Loewe lured throngs of fashion followers to the Château de Vincennes, a medieval fortress on the outskirts of the city, for a collection in which Anderson displayed his gowns with the voluminous petticoats. (Another witty creation was a khaki trenchcoat that, thanks to hidden wires in the hem, splayed open at the bottom, as if a strong wind were blowing.) The Paris collection was not just a show but a scene: outside, hundreds of live-streaming onlookers, many dressed in the previous season’s Loewe, bayed at the arrival of V.I.P. guests. These included Jeff Goldblum, deeply tanned and grinning in a leather jacket and taupe pants; he prowled around with slow-motion, photograph-me movements before sitting next to Anna Wintour inside a vast all-white structure that had been erected in a courtyard. Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz received similar adulation as they emerged from a town car and entered the fortress gates, both dressed in fuzzy Loewe sweaters. Craig had met Anderson while filming “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s recent adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella, for which the designer created the costumes; afterward, the actor modelled for a Loewe campaign, posing gamely in patterned sweaters and belted but unbuckled jeans. (Craig told me later, “Jonathan loves the creative world, and the fingers of what he does in his own world go everywhere. He’s not just one thing, Jonathan—he’s many, many things.”)