The idea of playing around with a luxury house 180 years old (this year!) with a couple of billion bucks riding on its wares seems a touch blasphemous. But that’s why it’s such a great idea. Jack McCollough and Lázaro Hernandez are deadpan serious about having fun with their Loewe, with inflatable coats and citrus colours and tacky, plasticky textures, a bunch of giant cuddly toys onlooking (the work of the artist Cosima von Bonin, rather than Jim Henson). “An intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness,” was actually what the duo wrote, a way to unpack the looks thumping out on their Lurpak-yellow catwalk for Autumn/Winter 2026.
That doesn’t sound like a great deal of fun. But luckily, McCollough and Hernandez’s actual take on the idea at Loewe was less analytical and more instinctive, reactive and genuinely enjoyable. That birthday seemed to engender a party, an Autumn/Winter 2026 show of easy to understand pleasures, clothes tactile and slithery in sharp Play-Doh shades of satsuma, grape, chilli pepper red and green. McCollough and Hernandez shot their first Loewe advertising campaign under the beating Brazilian sun last October, and that idea of searing, too intense colour, framed in a degree of Spanishness, banged out at a frenetic pace – sin siestas. There was contrast after brilliant and simple contrast, within outfits and between them, models clutching luscious crocodile bags in pale lemon or Truvada blue, looking like slick, plasticised board game pieces as they whizzed on by.
Toys, tricks, cartoons, playfulness with playthings. They were all here – puffed-up leather jackets inflated, literally, buoyed with air like life-vests in plays with volume; knits humped around the body, trailing to the floor. A pair of big bird feathery halter dresses had beaky orange and yellow legs dangling, and the moulded leather chassis-like jackets of McCollough and Hernandez’s first Loewe collection reappeared, but within this context they seemed like tin soldier clothes rather than slick automobiles, more innocent. Ordinary clothes seemed to have been scribbled out in shiny latex, squidgy lingerie dresses with dinky little bows, pale chambray jeans given a jellied effect, as if frozen in aspic. They looked great, but the movement was what really caught your eye, the way these clothes swayed and bounced – the blancmange wobble of a searing SpongeBob-yellow overcoat, the unreal jiggle of a latex polo-neck worn over corduroys carved out of shearling. Those were weird, weird enough to make you want to discover more.
Of course, playing doesn’t just mean kiddie stuff. It can mean toying, trying things out, the process of craft which is so integral to our contemporary perception of Loewe. So McCollough and Hernandez played a bunch with technique, like creating that chunky, furry corduroy, and crafting other coats of loops of leather. This was also the designers’ first outing in menswear – they hadn’t so much as made a sweater for themselves before, and the plan is to present a stand-alone mens show in the near future. These cleaved close to their women’s counterparts, with the same slick textures and puffed-out volumes.
There was an enjoyability to this show, a lightness of clothes with all that air, but also a lightness of hand and thought. McCollough and Hernandez are clever, intelligent, often intellectual designers, who consider what they do instinctively – or at least, have for years. It was great to see them lighten up a bit, to have some simple-minded, pleasure-seeking fun. “For us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy,” the duo said. It was joyous to see.
