The New Loewe Campaign Speaks The Truth

To coincide with the Fall Winter 2020 Men’s show, LOEWE previews images from its next advertising campaign, featuring athlete and activist Megan Rapinoe, as a series of billboards across Paris. 

The project is a further installment in the ongoing collaboration between LOEWE’s creative director Jonathan Anderson, photographer Steven Meisel and creative studio M/M (Paris).

The campaign is a tryptic of character, fashion and product images, kept together through LOEWE’s prismatic identity. An idea of distortion —of facial features, body postures and object surfaces— runs through.

A headshot of Megan Rapinoe, the American professional soccer player and captain of the winning US team during FIFA Women’s World Cup, is featured as the character image. Rapinoe’s trademark pink hair is highlighted by the solidity of the Her eyes are grinning, the tongue peeks a boo between the soccer player’s signature expression when she wins. the viewer, directly, inviting to react. ‘Use your voice. Speak from your heart. Be honest. Find the truth – and it’s uncomfortable sometimes, but – find it, live in it, be it!’ says Rapinoe in For Real, the accompanying series of short films directed by Benn Northover.

Of the project as a whole, she declares ‘I am so thrilled about this partnership with LOEWE and Jonathan Anderson. Multiple worlds crashing together, creating something bigger, different, and more exciting than either could alone. To me, the goal of a collaboration should not be to stand next to one another, but rather become something else, together.’

A wide-angled distortion of an austere set made of gray walls and a startling transparent piano as a prop is featured in the fashion image, charged with an experimental theatre atmosphere. The landscape crop, new for LOEWE, enhances the spatial distortion. Three models interact within this enclosed frame. 

With their curly hair and lean bodies, at first they look like the same person, but they are not. Two of them are wearing variations of an identical look —inlay shirt with necktie, trousers, torrential leather belt— walking in converging directions. The third is lying on the floor, in a grey coat, probably a dress. The performance-like situation is channeled through exaggerated postures, but the narration is suspended and spare. An accompanying series of short films further expand the dynamism of the set up. 

A stark depiction of LOEWE’s Puzzle bag in brown calf is featured as the product image. An evident fold in the flap, and creases on the sides, suggest the bag has been used, manipulated, lived. Across the whole campaign, distortion comes across as a synonym of life, movement and energy.