Loewe and the basket-cases
Leathergoods brand Loewe used the 2022 Salone del Mobile in Milan as a platform for ‘Weave, Restore, Renew’, a project that breathes new life into old objects and materials.
A new project from Loewe shows the important role leather can play in giving new life to old things, in this case baskets of different shapes and sizes. With the title ‘Weave, Restore, Renew’, the Madrid-based brand commissioned artisans in different parts of Spain to use ancient techniques in leathercraft and basket-weaving to restore abandoned objects. The designers used strips of surplus leather from Loewe’s accessories production to create a series of objects that went on display at the 2022 Salone del Mobile in Milan. It has now made some of the basket-bag styles that emerged from the project into a new collection for its customers to purchase.
Loewe says it wanted to showcase the beauty that repaired objects can have, taking inspiration from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery. Among the notions that kintsugi gently puts across is that there is no need to throw something away if it no longer looks brand new. If imperfections are still visible after repair, the viewer should interpret these as a valid part of the object’s noble past; an effective repair can make it usable again and endow it with a new and different beauty.
Sustainable centrepieces
For Weave, Restore, Renew, Loewe’s starting point was a series of antique woven baskets from around the world, which artisans Idoia Cuesta, Juan Manuel Marcilla Marín, Belén Martínez and Santiago Besteiro restored. They used leather to refurbish raffia, wicker and straw weaves in the baskets. In this way, they created some of the centrepieces of the display that the brand presented in Milan and embodied the conviction of creative director, Jonathan Anderson, that craft must be sustainable to be authentic.
Barcelona-based Belén Martínez says she enjoyed working on the project because it struck her as being in complete contrast to the way much of modern life happens. “Everything now seems to be about immediacy,” she says, “with everyone putting on display what they are doing at any given moment. This was a lovely project because, for most of the time, we were out of sight, working away, calmly and without any stress, as though on something secret, a treasure.”
For her part, Idoia Cuesta, a textile designer and leather artisan based in a small town near Lugo in the far north-west of Spain, says she enjoyed working on her contribution to the concept because of the opportunity it gave her to bring an abandoned object back to life. “Because a basket has had a life,” she explains. “It has been used in different situations and different places. This project has been an opportunity to have an object like that in my hands and be able to see where the damage is, look after it, pamper it and repair it.”
Skills that survive
Ms Cuesta has combined basket-weaving techniques and her skill with leather to produce designs for Loewe in the recent past. She took part in a 2019 project that invited basket-weavers from a variety of traditions to incorporate thin strips of Loewe leather into their work. She said she loved the initiative, which involved basketry experts from Japan and Ireland, as well as from Spain. “Basket-weaving is spread throughout all the countries of the world,” she said at the time. “The fibres people use may change, but I think the techniques have been passed on from generation to generation and have survived.”
Following this, Jonathan Anderson picked out something Idoia Cuesta created as one of the highlights of the Loewe spring-summer 2021 collection: a braided top made from strands of calfskin. “The basket became the top, the top became the basket,” the creative director said, adding that he found it interesting that basket-weaving techniques that had been around for generation after generation could still help create such a contemporary effect.
Life is a dream
Returning to 2022, Santiago Besteiro is another designer who is based in a small, rural community in Galicia. Leathergoods is his specialism and he, too, had worked with Loewe before. He applies what he calls a contemporary perspective to his work with leather and creates pieces that he claims owe much to sculpture, all of which came in useful for repairing an old, abandoned basket.
For the Weave, Restore, Renew project, though, he says the most important ‘tool’ he had to have at his disposal was his imagination. The basket he worked on as part of the project was in the shape of a large, elongated oval. “I had to think about how an artisan had created this basket,” he says, “and the task was to rethink the work of that other person.” Using strips of leather to repair the basket involved “finding a solution that wasn’t written down anywhere and that no one had taught me before”. To do this, Mr Besteiro says it was essential for him to give free rein to his imagination.
The fourth of the basket-repairers, Juan Manuel Marcilla Marín, echoed this thought. “If I don’t find myself dreaming about a piece I have to design, I cannot make it,” he says. Less used to leather, Mr Marcilla works in Lezuza, a village in Albacete in La Mancha. He is an artisan weaver, working mostly with wicker, but leather also featured in his contribution to the Salone del Mobile exhibition.
What happened in Milan was a continuation of the initial basket-weaving project from 2019. Loewe says it wanted to introduce “the nuances of a new material” to practitioners of the skills and techniques involved in basket-making craft, some of whom had not used the new material before. This new material is, of course, leather, which has shown itself once again in these basket-case initiatives at Loewe to work wonderfully with other natural materials, to lend longevity to products and to allow designers to turn their dreams into reality.
Loewe has introduced a range of basket-bag styles with leather strips.
Credit: Loewe.
