Loewe presented its Fall/Winter 2024 men's collection on Saturday, during Paris Fashion Week, with the collaboration of the painter, who lives in Los Angeles and is a professor at the University of California, Richard Hawkins.
For the show, Jonathan Anderson, creative director at Loewe, tapped Hawkins to create digital collages meant to mimic arched stained glass, while clips of young people seemingly posing for private videos or engaging in casual shirt adjustments were overlaid. Seven paintings by Hawkins were strategically hung on the back wall of the venue, as if imitating a low-budget group exhibition.
As Laurie Guilbault wrote, luxury brands from Prada to Louis Vuitton seemed to be playing with "archetypes of masculinity" on the runway and beyond. Loewe, too, was experimenting with gendered looks, according to Guilbault, describing it as "a new kind of masculinity – one that is playful and sexy."
Hawkins' work, in this sense, may have been the ideal match. In 2009, New York Times critic Roberta Smith characterized the subject matter of Hawkins' work as a collection of "pretty young men cut out of magazines and clothing catalogs", rebelling against an "elevated and asexual" world of galleries and museums. ". Anderson appears to have been inspired by the suggestive cues that have consistently cropped up in Hawkins' practice since then: sending models down the venue's catwalk in undone clothes, belts unbuckled, and velvet coats partially covering their bare torsos.
During the more modest instances of the show, the men appeared fragile, immersed in oversized sweaters, with the characteristics of Hawkins teenagers, blank stares and half-open mouths, appearing in prints, jacquard knits and oversized Squeeze bags.
For fashion watchers, the show is perhaps an introduction to Hawkins' influence. A catalog accompanying the 2012 Whitney Biennial in New York, where Hawkins' work was presented, describes how her practice more broadly involves examining artistic conventions, exploring "sometimes taboo pleasures of the body and of observing the body ".
Going back more than a decade, Loewe's collaboration with Hawkins gives Anderson the chance to deconstruct disparate elements that shaped the concept of a muse, featuring Hawkins' depictions of internet idols interacting with disembodied classical statues. In recent months, the designer has made reference to the possibility of more collaborations with artists in future collections, stating that his goal is to move beyond art-related projects that seem superficially involved.
“We are committed to showing what you would see in a large gallery,” he said.
Source: ArtNews