Fashion’s love affair with flowers is well-documented. Christian Dior had a passion for lilies of the valley, Alexander McQueen leaned into the symbolism of roses and their inevitable thorns, and Coco Chanel regularly affixed camellias to her pristine LBDs. When designing his spring/summer 2023 collection for Loewe, however, Jonathan Anderson turned to a less obviously lovely bloom for inspiration: the plasticky (and vaguely phallic) anthurium, or laceleaf.
“I like this idea of something in nature that looks fake but is real, and this idea of iconography: that when you see something it reminds us of something as a repeated motif,” he told ahead of his Paris Fashion Week presentation in September. “I think it can represent two things. Or three things…if it vibrated.”
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
In spite of (or, more likely, because of) its suggestive nature, Anderson’s anthurium designs have become a favourite of models and actors over the last six months, from Kendall Jenner to Zendaya. The Euphoria star actually managed to get her hands on a white laceleaf gown via stylist Luxury Law before Taylor Russell had even opened Loewe’s SS23 show at the Gendarmerie Nationale-Garde Républicaine. “Plucked from a beautiful garden,” the image maker captioned a video of the Euphoria actor posing against a tile backdrop in the enameled metal look.
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Cut to the AW23 collections, and Emily Ratajkowski joined Naomi Campbell, Chloë Sevigny, and more on the front row for Anderson’s most recent presentation on 3 March in an anthurium top, styling the acid-green and fuchsia-pink flower with low-slung black trousers—and proving there needn’t be anything pretty or prim about spring florals in the process.
.jpg)
As Vogue’s Nicole Phelps wrote back in September, “These were not femme fleurs in the way fashion used to conceive of the term…. The flower is poisonous. The women who will wear these dresses fancy themselves more dangerous than dainty.”
This article first appeared on British.
