LOEWE presents the Spring Summer 2023 precollection campaign, a playful reflection on individuality, personality and swagger, lensed once again by Juergen Teller.
The ongoing documentation features an array of creatives from multiple disciplines. Director Luca Guadagnino, with whom creative director Jonathan Anderson has collaborated for the upcoming movie Challengers (2023), costume designer Sandy Powell, and actors Taylor Russell, Tang Wei, Leo Wu, Chloe Sevigny and Naomi Ackie along with artist Roni Horn, model Jeanne Cadieu, singer Yeri, and performer Mari Natsuki.
Posing as living sculptures, the protagonists interact with iconic LOEWE bags such as the Puzzle, the Puffer Goya, and styles from the new Chinese Monochrome collection. Wearing pieces from the collection—a mixture of sport influences, humongous sculptural volumes and blunt surrealism—they look straight into the camera, insouciantly interacting with the viewer. Teller’s harsh, unapologetic gaze and taste for the absurd charges the shots with a twisted sense of humor, multiplying the facets to LOEWE’s prismatic identity.
The Chinese Monochrome collection shines a light on China’s ancient ceramic techniques and pieces from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The ceramics are renowned for their precise, understated elegance, each the result of centuries of painstaking experimentation by artisans who sought to capture the colours of nature, from ripe fruits to rain-washed skies. Exquisite shades—including Pale Aubergine glaze, Tea Dust glaze and Pale Celadon glaze— have
been skilfully applied to LOEWE’s iconic Puzzle, Hammock, Goya, Bracelet Pouch, Luna and Flamenco bags as an ode to the power and beauty of a single hue. Images of the ancient ceramics feature on T-shirts and sweatshirts worn by Tang Wei, Leo Wu, and Luca Guadagnino.
A short documentary accompanying the Chinese Monochrome collection explores the historical and cultural influence of the ancient ceramics, featuring ceramicists Deng Xiping and Natasha Daintry as well as Wang Guang Yao, a professor and research fellow at the Palace Museum in Beijing.
In celebration of the project, LOEWE presents an exhibition at this year’s ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair where the Chinese Monochrome collection bags sit alongside new monochrome works by Deng Xiping.
LOEWE will sponsor the creation of a new monochrome ceramics educational program at the Jingdezhen Ceramic University that seeks to preserve this ancient craft and its cultural heritage. Located in the thousand-year-old porcelain capital of Jingdezhen, the Jingdezhen Ceramic University is the only multidisciplinary undergraduate college in China that features ceramics studies.
