Loewe cultivated a reputation for collaborating with cutting-edge contemporary artists under creative director Jonathan Anderson, who exited the fashion house for Dior last year. But based on Loewe’s Fall Winter 2026 collection debut during Paris Fashion Week on Friday, those collaborations appear to remain a core part of Loewe’s ethos.
Sculptor Cosima von Bonin was the artist of choice this time around. Alongside designs by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the show featured plush whales, clams, crabs, and other sea creatures that sat on low plinths situated between the event’s attendees, which included the rapper Lil Yachty, the actresses Aubrey Plaza and Sissy Spacek, and former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
For the show, she also sculpted dogs that appeared alongside all this sea life for a new series called “The Beaux.” The canines loosely recall the memorable name of her 2024 survey at Mudam in Luxembourg: “Songs for Gay Dogs.”
Born in Kenya and based in Germany, von Bonin is beloved for sculptures of marine animals such as these. The 2022 Venice Biennale‘s main exhibition, for example, featured her plastic sculptures of sharks and fish—adorned, for some reason, with electric guitars—atop the show’s Central Pavilion. Nearby, on the grounds around the pavilion, there was a sculpture of dolphins in a motor boat.
What do those sculptures mean? Don’t ask von Bonin. “First of all, I never explain my work,” she told critic Eleanor Heartney in a 2018 interview for the Brooklyn Rail.
Here, however, is how critic Jason Farago wrote about von Bonin’s 2016 survey at SculptureCenter in New York, in a review for the New York Times: “The maritime theme is somewhat arbitrary, but that’s half the point. The assembly of all this wet stuff comes out as caustic and comical by turns, and this is a show that owes as much to ‘Finding Nemo’ as to Manet, Whistler and other artists who turned to the sea.”
McCullough and Hernandez said in a statement, “Humour, levity, and a bright, inclusive spirit—qualities we recognise as intrinsic to LOEWE’s Spanish heritage—led us to the work of Cosima von Bonin, an artist we have long admired and with whom we were fortunate to spend time recently. Her work mirrors many of the ideas we were seeking to articulate and manifest in physical form.”
