PARIS
Most fashion houses mark a milestone anniversary with a retrospective exhibition or a single splashy campaign image. LOEWE has opted instead for something closer to a curated reunion: a global campaign shot by Talia Chetrit that places Hollywood veteran Sissy Spacek, visual artist Kara Walker, global ambassador Julia Garner, and fellow faces Giselle, Kara Wai, and Salma Abu Deif inside the same frame—all in service of a single idea. At 180 years old, the Spanish house wants to argue that its archive isn't a museum piece; it's still being used.
The campaign anchors a broader anniversary rollout that includes a lion-themed capsule collection (loewe is, fittingly, the German word for lion), an animated short narrated by Antonio Banderas, and a special publication that arrived as the eleventh issue of Loewe Magazine on June 15. But the centerpiece, both visually and commercially, is a bag: the Amazona 180, a reworking of one of LOEWE's most enduring designs, now filtered through the sensibility of its newest creative leadership.
A Bag With a Forty-Year Head Start
The original Amazona dates back to 1975, a structured top-handle bag that became one of LOEWE's signature silhouettes long before "It bag" was a phrase anyone used. For the anniversary, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez—the design duo who took over as creative directors and unveiled their debut collection this past spring—have reworked the Amazona into the "Amazona 180," softening its famously structured silhouette with supple calfskin and suede while keeping the proportions and hardware that made the original recognizable across five decades.
That balancing act—reverence for the archive without simply replicating it—has become the throughline of McCollough and Hernandez's early tenure. The pair, best known for founding Proenza Schouler before taking the reins at LOEWE, used their debut collection to signal a softer, more wearable register than the brand's previous, more conceptual era. The Amazona 180 functions as both a literal product launch and a mission statement: take what already worked, and make it feel current without erasing what made it iconic.
The capsule collection extends that idea into ready-to-wear and small leather goods, with the lion motif appearing in beadwork, intarsia knits, leather charms, and even tucked into bag interiors—a recurring visual signature rather than a one-off logo moment.
A Campaign Built on Contrast
The decision to shoot with Talia Chetrit, known for a documentary-style, slightly off-kilter approach to fashion photography, sets the imagery apart from the glossier, more conventionally posed anniversary campaigns other heritage houses tend to produce. The casting does similar work. Putting Sissy Spacek—an Oscar winner whose career predates the Amazona itself—alongside Kara Walker, whose work has spent decades interrogating American history through silhouette and scale, signals that LOEWE wants this anniversary read as cultural rather than purely commercial.
Julia Garner anchors the campaign's more fashion-facing side, alongside Giselle, Kara Wai, and Salma Abu Deif—a roster that spans continents and generations exactly as LOEWE's anniversary messaging has emphasized. The imagery puts the Flamenco clutch and the Puzzle bag in conversation with the new Amazona 180, framing the campaign less as a single-product launch and more as a survey of the handbags that have defined the house across eras.
Why This Moment Matters for LOEWE
Anniversary campaigns are common in luxury fashion; few double as a referendum on new creative leadership. McCollough and Hernandez are still early in their tenure, having only shown one collection under their own name. An anniversary campaign gives them a low-risk, high-visibility way to demonstrate how they intend to handle LOEWE's archive going forward—not as a vault to be left untouched, but as raw material they're willing to physically alter, soften, and reissue.
That's a meaningful signal in an industry where archive reverence can tip into creative paralysis, particularly at heritage houses where a beloved silhouette can become more sacred than useful. By choosing the Amazona—not the Puzzle, which has more recently defined the brand's commercial identity, but an older, quieter design—McCollough and Hernandez are making a quieter statement: that LOEWE's archive runs deeper than its most Instagrammed hits, and there's value in mining further back.
What This Means for Shoppers
For LOEWE customers and handbag collectors, the 180th anniversary capsule represents one of the more substantial archive-driven releases of the year—a chance to buy into a design with real historical weight, reworked for current tastes, rather than a purely nostalgic reissue. The broader rollout—spanning a capsule collection, a narrated animated short, and a dedicated magazine issue—also reflects how heritage luxury houses are increasingly treating milestone anniversaries as multi-platform storytelling moments rather than single product drops.
Whether the Amazona 180 becomes a genuine successor to the bag's original cultural footprint will likely take longer than one campaign cycle to determine. But LOEWE's bet, encapsulated in a single frame featuring an Oscar-winning actress, a celebrated visual artist, and brand ambassadors a generation apart, is that 180 years of design history is best honored not by freezing it in place, but by handing it to the next set of hands willing to reshape it.
