Paris Fashion Week has seen its share of spectacle, but few runway moments are quite as disarming as finding yourself seated beside a sprawling plush octopus—tentacles splayed across three reserved chairs, bug-eyed scallops obstructing sightlines to the glossy yellow runway below. This was Loewe’s Fall/Winter 2026 show at the Château de Vincennes: a collision of couture and creature, orchestrated with anarchic precision.
Creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez invited Cologne-based artist Cosima von Bonin to co-author the experience—not as a decorator, but as an equal protagonist. Her studio-sewn menagerie of hermit crabs, killer whales, bulldogs, and St. Bernards occupied white platform benches like veteran front-row guests. Each upholstered sculpture perched atop giant shoeboxes that have served throughout her practice as readymade pedestals, fulfilling what the artist describes as the “conflicting roles of spectator and spectacle at once.”
The result was less a fashion show than a living installation: a charged encounter between the house’s exacting craft tradition and the wry, socially inflected universe von Bonin has spent decades building.
The Spirit of Making
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Courtesy of LOEWE.
For their second collection at Loewe, McCollough and Hernandez began not with silhouettes but with a premise: that making is, at its core, an expression of joy.
“The path taken matters as much as the end result,” they wrote in the show notes. “It is the idea of play as rigorous experimentation and problem-solving, moving between instinct and experience, between a devotion to craft and its endless opportunities for innovation.”
The question they returned to repeatedly was how their first season’s sun-drenched, optimistic physicality might merge with this spirit of experimental making—becoming something more nuanced and layered while remaining, in their words, “profoundly LOEWE.”
The answer arrived through a long-admired artist.
“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.”
Her humour, they noted, cloaks rigorous questioning and critique—a tension between outward levity and a quietly subversive undercurrent. “Humour can be revolutionary,” they wrote, “at times the most piercing way to deliver a serious message.”
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Through their conversations, the idea emerged for von Bonin to create unique artworks for the show space, entering into direct dialogue with the collection—an exchange of experimentation, ingenuity, and wit across mediums.
The pair found themselves returning often to a line from game theory: “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
What, after all, is fashion if not an open field for endless creative play?
“Before our first meeting, I had prepared an exit strategy. Within a few minutes, it became clear that water damage would not be required—I fell in love with both of them almost instantly.”— Cosima von Bonin
Latex, Air, and Looped Leather
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Courtesy of LOEWE.
The collection itself carried the same tension between structure and softness, humour and rigor.
McCollough and Hernandez pushed Loewe’s leatherwork tradition into genuinely strange territory. Slip dresses and pyjama tops were 3D-printed and cast in latex, their liquid materiality both familiar and alien. Coats were reconstructed component by component—sleeves, pockets, and fastenings moulded in latex to achieve a trompe-l’oeil solidity.
Elsewhere, garments moved toward weightlessness: parkas and scarves laser-cut and bonded into inflatable volumes, light as held breath.
Bouclé coats appeared in looped lacquered leather. Tartan knits were woven from ultra-thin leather yarn. Shearling coats were trimmed in gradient tones reminiscent of meticulous poodle grooming. Color was unapologetic—bright, joyous, optimistic.
Cosima von Bonin’s Universe
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Von Bonin arrived cautiously, exit strategy in hand. She is not an artist accustomed to subordinating her vision to commercial imperatives.
For over two decades, her soft, deeply unsettling animal characters have navigated the uneasy border between comedy and tragedy, tenderness and hostility. Show titles like Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea? make clear there is far more to these creatures than their squishy surfaces suggest.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA and Tate Britain, and she exhibits with Petzel Gallery.
The exit strategy, of course, was never deployed.
Von Bonin’s zoomorphic universe extended beyond the scenography into the bones of the collection itself. Her sculptural sea creatures appeared as minaudières, charms, jewelry, and accessories. Found florals and ginghams surfaced in linings or were repainted by hand onto glossy latex silhouettes—including a porcelain reinterpretation of the Amazona 180.
Five Pieces to Know
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Courtesy of LOEWE.
Amazona 180
Celebrating 180 years of Loewe, the iconic bag appears scaled to duffel proportions in dark leather and calfskin, adorned with dog and crab charms echoing von Bonin’s sculptures.
Flamenco Clutch
Rendered in Loewe’s signature intarsia leather-marquetry, featuring blue-and-white mosaic patterning.
Whisker Bag
A season debut: structured top handle meets supple glazed calfskin body—hard and soft resolved into a single graceful object.
Animal Minaudières
Evening bags translating von Bonin’s plush creatures directly into sculptural accessories.
Dive Slingbacks
Rubber-moulded footwear bringing a sportswear logic to close the loop.
McCollough and Hernandez are playing an infinite game—and Cosima von Bonin, it turns out, always was too. The joy of the collection is all the more charged for knowing what lurks beneath it.
Courtesy of LOEWE.
