WEARING JOSEF & ANNI ALBERS

With all the musical chairs at fashion houses going on this last year, it was easy to miss how Jonathan Anderson used his final collection at Loewe to cement his reputation as a champion of craft.

- Whitney Mallett

Presented quietly in Paris in March, overshadowed by the designer's big move to Dior, the fall/winter ready-to-wear line spotlights a collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a perfect bookend to Anderson's 11-year tenure at the Spanish maison marked not only by the introduction of the Loewe Craft Prize, but an overarching innovative vision for integrating artisanal tradition into bold, concept-driven luxury fashion.

True to the spirit of Anderson's Loewe, there's an underlying wit to the collection. The jackets are like if you threw on a blanket. The handbags are similarly, deliciously louche. This simplicity feels deeply considered and aligned with the form-follows-function ethos of the Bauhaus, where Josef and Anni met in the 1920s, a philosophy they carried with them to Black Mountain College, where they landed after the Bauhaus closed under mounting Nazi repression. The same reason you could call this collaboration obvious is what makes it a concise thesis on the potency of Anderson's work over the last 11 years. Craft's 20th century Modernist revival offers a road map for understanding why his signature wabi-sabi surrealism at Loewe resonated so intensely, and no one channels this history quite like Josef and Anni.

"In our current era of extreme violence and unease, it feels so logical to return to the Albers' work, which was in itself a reaction to war," says author and artist Calla Henkel, whose latest novel, "Scrap," was set in and around the North Carolina craft community where the Black Mountain experiment spawned. "The Albers' creative output evokes some mystical idea of live-work balance; it's easy to imagine them at home, wrapped in the contemplative heat of making things side-by-side. I yearn for that time, also maybe because it was a version of America that was anti-Nazi."