Recently during the Paris Fashion Week, Spanish luxury fashion house LOEWE, presented its Spring/Summer 2023 womenswear collection and its creative director British designer JW Anderson is going to very interesting places with his ideas.
The pieces look so straight out of Minecraft that it takes a second for your brain to adjust to what you’re seeing, especially next to dozens of ensembles that are normal-ish (other garments also take on interesting shapes and textures).
The trompe l’oeil effect — which translates to “trick of the eye” — is nothing new in fashion, and designers have been playing with optical illusions on garments for a long time.
PIXELATED GLITCH
The LOEWE’s show notes described them as “a pixelated glitch”. They look more like the unloaded texture of Sims clothing or what Minecraft characters wear.
It’s a great effect, deftly handled by clever 3D seams. The clothing loses its magic when viewed from the side but, in photos, they look all the world like 2D garments. Loewe’s new collection plays with the lines between real and fake, actual and imagined, literal and representative. Even the anthuriums reappearing on women’s blouses and tops look unreal like someone Photoshopped them on before uploading them to Vogue; they challenge you to consider what clothing looks like and what purpose it serves.
But as the Loewe show attempts to crack open these questions by carefully placing glitches, it’s the physical representation that feels most striking and challenging. Nobody’s asking what the Minecraft-esque hoodie will look like in the metaverse. Instead, we want to understand the technique involved in bringing it to life, allowing it to hang on the model — as real as anything else.
This is the peak of a bizarre and yet a creative artistry in the world of fashion. Welcome to the wild world of JW Anderson, where luxury clothing is a sandbox for boundary-smashing creativity. Anderson, for the most part, is objectively sending some different stuff down the runway and the people love it to the core.
