Loewe Makes Dresses That Look Like They're Glitching
In the new series What I Loved Yesterday, Harper's Bazaar editors highlight one standout look from the previous day at Paris Fashion Week.
Whenever I really like a piece of clothing, I tend to call it "dreamy." It's not that I want clothes to look like something from my own personal subconscious, but instead like something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams. Basically, I'd like everything in my life to be far removed from reality because reality sucks right now. It's why I love Loewe and everything Jonathan Anderson does. There's just something about it that doesn't feel real.
For his fall 2023 collection, Anderson made dresses that looked like they were loading, blurred in the middle of appearing on a screen. In the show notes, he described the decision to play with blur as "a way to stress that fashion, rather than being about the moment, is about the later. About putting into focus what may seem unclear right now." The dresses remind me of how the-one-that-got-away purchases appear in my head when I'm trying to describe them to a friend. They look like a core memory materialized by enduring devotion.
Last season, Anderson played with these glitchy notions with pixelated t-shirts, and he sees the new dresses as an extension of that idea. "The tension between focus and out-of-focus sets the pace, smoothly. Impressions that fade, the pixels of the previous season are now blurred," he writes in the show notes. "Dresses, trench coats and faux fur coats become an impression: a ghost, a memory that fades or returns, and sticks. Like the cardigan turned into a sticker."
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I love that these dresses feel like they exist outside of the realm of reality, like a memory you can't yet access but can feel forming. Right now, everyone seems to be either dressing for the real world or for the daydream that helps them escape it. And Anderson is truly a master of the latter; he's basically making the escapist's new uniform.
What makes these blurry dresses particularly special, though, is the fact that they don't just operate on the wearer. Not only do they remove you from actuality for a second, if you wear them, but they do the same for anyone who sees you. Most dresses promise a feminine fantasy of glamour, and Loewe's blurry dress does, too. But it offers something even more alluring: An ethereal air of dreamlike splendor, bewitching in a way that's impossible to accurately describe, just like the woman confident enough to wear them.
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