Loewe (fashion brand)

A Loewe boutique in Madrid, 1905

Loewe was founded in 1846 in Madrid by a group of Spanish leather craftsmen, and the brand originated in 1876 when Enrique Loewe y Roessberg, a German craftsman, joined the group.[6]

King Alfonso XIII of Spain granted Enrique Loewe y Hinton, a descendant of the original brand founder, the title of Purveyor to the Royal Court. His wife, Queen Victoria Eugenie, frequently visited the store on Príncipe de Madrid street.[7]

By the 1970s, Loewe was expanding into perfumes and fashion with the creation of the Loewe logo, first designed by Karl Lagerfeld. Giorgio Armani and Laura Biagiotti subsequently designed Loewe's womenswear collections.[8]

In 1986, LVMH bought the rights to Loewe's international distribution.[9] It acquired Loewe completely in 1996. That year, Loewe had sales of about $200 million, among the smallest of LVMH's companies; ready-to-wear was responsible for 10 percent of that total.[10] By 1997, Narciso Rodriguez joined the company as new creative director[11] and the brand had its first Paris runway presentation at LVMH headquarters in the fall/winter 1998 season.[12] Both José Enrique Oña Selfa (2000-2007)[13] and Stuart Vevers (2008-2013)[14][15] followed. During Vever's tenure, Loewe scaled back fashion to concentrate on handbags, leather apparel and a substantial gift business based on leather picture frames and leather boxes.[16]

Jonathan Anderson became Loewe's creative director in 2013.[17] His first ready-to-wear collections for Loewe were presented in 2014. He has also been deploying a series of publicity campaigns by Steven Meisel.[18]

Since 2014, Loewe's headquarters – including the design team, which had previously been based in Madrid – has been located on Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris.[19] The company remains based in Spain. Manufacture, particularly of leather goods, takes place in Barcelona and Getafe, near Madrid.[20]

Loewe in Osaka, Japan

The current King of Spain's mother, Queen Sofía, has been seen several times with Loewe handbags.

Loewe store in Hong Kong

Loewe stores are located worldwide. In 2014, Loewe’s 143 stores were concentrated mainly in Spain and Japan, which respectively had 37 and 27 locations.[21] The first London shop opened in 1963,[22] on Mayfair's Mount Street.[23] 

Loewe opened its first American outpost in New York – a three-story shop at the Trump Tower[24] – in 1983;[25] it closed in 1993.[26] Today, the company has three stores in the US, located in Miami's Design District (since 2016),[27][28] at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas (since 2018) and in New York (since 2019).[29]

In 2016, Loewe opened Casa Loewe Madrid, the brand’s first flagship in Madrid and – with 10,750 square feet (999 square metres) – its largest store in the world. It is located in the ground floor of the company's head office in a landmark 19th-century building.[30]

A leather handbag of Loewe in the Times Square store

In 1988, Enrique Loewe y Lynch, great-grandchild of the firm's creator, founded the Loewe Foundation, a private cultural foundation that supports cultural events and exhibitions.[31] The foundation received a Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts from the Spanish government in 2002.[32] Following an initiative of designer Jonathan Anderson, the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize was established in 2017.[33]