The Spring/Summer 2026 womenswear debut of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe (Instagram) was always going to be under a microscope. After Jonathan Anderson’s surrealist, cult-shaping reign, the question wasn’t just what’s next?, it was how do you follow a tomato clutch, a pixelated hoodie, a blurred trench coat?
The new chapter opened with what felt less like a clean slate and more like a strategic interference: one where Loewe’s now-iconic codes were carefully reinterpreted, then reined in. The silhouettes were there (sculpted shoulders, bulbous sleeves, rubberized mini dresses that could double as caution signs), but the drama never quite spiked above that.
McCollough and Hernandez brought a chiselled sensibility to the construction; those inflated sleeves, those curved hems, those jackets that seemed to inflate around the ribcage. But each sculpted silhouette was tethered to a sense of wearability, almost as if every off-kilter proportion came with a fine print: Don’t worry, you could still sit in this.
These were shapes meant to suggest edginess while keeping the edges smooth, from the straight-forward shapes of the mac and the bombers, to the polos and the five-pocket jeans. The collection also flirted with asymmetry and firm tailoring. Where the silhouettes softened, colour brought the punch. Canary yellow tights, cherry red trenches, Crayola blue skirts, the collection brushed aside minimalism with kindergarten gusto.
This wasn’t a collection devoid of the Loewe signatures. We saw the legacy of left-field luxury. The technical knits. The glossy moulded clutches that looked like pebbles, or Play-Doh blobs. Accessories that glanced back at Loewe’s past weirdness without fully embodying it.
Still, their debut wasn’t without an ideology. In a press note that referenced artist Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Panel with Red Curve, the duo framed their Loewe as an ongoing inquiry into both craft and identity. They spoke of reimagining Spanishness without nostalgia, of stretching the handmade so far its very seams disappear. You could see echoes of it in the shredded leathers, the moulded seams, the slouchy Amazona 180 bag that slinks open or clasps shut like a soft-spoken statement.
There were hints of self-aware humour: bulbous outerwear, bulb-bright dresses, shoes that looked like they’d squeak when you walked, but the stakes felt lowered. Rubberized leather, neoprene-soft shoes, moulded plastic, these were materials that felt forward-thinking, mirroring the collection’s measured tone. The Loewe we once knew, the one that put an egg on a sandal, that built a ‘car-dress’, was more dialled down in this debut.
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