“I think we live in a paradise. This is a Garden of Eden. Really. It is. It might be the only paradise we’ll ever know. And it’s just so beautiful. And you feel you want to paint it,” artist Albert York said.
Loewe presents a collection that celebrates being in the moment and Albert York’s sentiment that the real paradise is the one we inhabit—and the privilege that being alive represents.
To frame and contextualize the women’s collection, the show space was conceived as a maze or possibly an art gallery, bathed in three shades of green, one lighter than the other. The color references the abundance of greenery in the oeuvre of Albert York, the American painter known for his modestly sized depictions of idyllic landscapes and floral still lifes, and whose 18 works of art are featured on the walls.
Albert York was born in 1928 in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in Belleville, Canada before attending the Ontario College of Art as a young man. After he moved to New York, he studied painting under Raphael Soyer and worked at a frame shop owned by the artist Robert Kulicke.
It was Kulicke who introduced York’s work to the gallerist Roy Davis in 1962. Over the following decades, avoiding the bustling art scene of the city, York mostly painted around his home in Southampton, where he passed away in 2009. His paintings were famously collected by Jacqueline Kennedy, and today are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The tropes of class and wealth are turned on their head through Loewe’s distinctive lens: at once with bluntness and abstraction. The aplomb of an Etonian morning suit; the beloved dog in mosaic on a ring, or on an entire dress; wooden carvings that turn into coat collars; a floral tapestry from the drawing room beaded onto dresses or printed onto trousers; a profusion of caviar beading not only on clothing, but also on biker boots and Squeeze bags.
In exploring ideas of tailoring and couture—both languages of bespoke and prerogative, one masculine and the other feminine—get mixed. Faultless jackets and flowing slacks; neckties and sculptural short dresses; straight cuts and draping heighten the juxtaposition of hard and soft lines.
A quintessentially Loewe mindscape in which leather and the world around it matter: draped nappa blousons, leather aviator jackets, the Flamenco Purse in a new large size, and further drapes. Ostrich as a trompe l’oeil hyper real print. Buckles as decoration.
Prints have a material quality: they create illusions of other materials or represent checks that melt. Tartans are also rendered in mille feuille sliced chiffon, gaining further 3D materiality.
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