The LOEWE Spring Summer 2023 women's campaign, shot by David Sims [IG], features LOEWE Global Brand Ambassador Taylor Russell posing as a form of acting.

A theme throughout the LOEWE Spring 2023 season, beginning with the late September 30, 2022 fashion show is artifice and provocation. LOEWE’s enormously-talented creative director Jonathan Anderson took his audience on a modern, almost clinical journey into the natural world, with anthurium flowers as his guide.

The music is modern but haunting, heard with a space age vibe but the refrain is often classical.

Enter the Anthuriums

The majority of the world, including the Vatican, fails to see the anthurium as dangerous. This ‘non-threatening’majority-view flower is the perfect hospitality gift, even for someone you don’t know well.

In reality, anthuriums are considered to be in the erotic flowers category, especially by women artists.

These modern flowers look like an erect phallus penetrating a flower that is in fact poisonous. Not only with pets but in the human mouth, you will experience a painful burning sensation with blisters and swelling if you eat an anthurium.

In this LOEWE Spring 2023 Campaign, Taylor Russell wears anthuriums as a breast plate. There’s a lot of human psychology going on here.

Accessories are protagonists in the still life images, which recall classic natura morta paintings set against dramatic black backdrops and interspersed with sculptures in age-worn marble. The effect is suspended and puzzling, the mise en scene bluntly revealed for what it is — a staged event.

It is staged fakery that mixes classicism with royal opulence and modernism. Again, the organic is missing — in a brand strongly defined under Anderson’s vision of organic craftsmanship. It’s as if for one moment, Jonathan Anderson has to shake things up at his LOEWE.