During Paris Fashion Week, Loewe presented its Autumn/Winter 2024 menswear collection, featuring collaboration with Los Angeles-based painter and University of California professor Richard Hawkins.
Creative director Jonathan Anderson collaborated with Hawkins to produce digital collages reminiscent of arched stained glass windows. The show incorporated clips of young men seemingly captured in private moments or engaged in casual activities. Strategically placed on the venue’s back wall were seven paintings by Hawkins, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a low-budget New York group exhibition.
Hawkins’ work, known for its focus on “pretty young men cut out of magazines and clothing catalogs,” provided a fitting aesthetic for the collection, rebelling against the perceived high-mindedness of the gallery and museum world. The runway showcased models with garments undone, belts unbuckled, and velvet coats partially covering bare torsos, drawing inspiration from Hawkins’ consistently suggestive artistic cues.
The collection featured moments of fragility, with men donning oversized sweaters that incorporated features from Hawkins’ adolescent subjects—blank stares and mouths ajar—appearing in print, jacquard knit, and on oversized Squeeze bags.
For those unfamiliar with Hawkins, the show serves as an introduction to his influential work. Hawkins, featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial in New York, is known for scrutinizing artistic conventions and exploring “sometimes taboo pleasures of the body and of looking at the body.”
Loewe’s collaboration with Hawkins provided Anderson with an opportunity to deconstruct elements shaping the concept of a muse. The collection featured Hawkins’s depictions of internet heartthrobs intermingling with disembodied classical statues. Anderson hinted at the possibility of more artist features in future collections, expressing a desire to move beyond projects that feel superficially engaged with art.
