Loewe marks 180 years with a lion motif

A birthday framed around a name's hidden meaning

In 2026, Loewe marks 180 years since its founding in Madrid in 1846, a milestone the house says makes it the second-oldest luxury fashion brand still operating today. The anniversary campaign is built around a detail rarely foregrounded in the house's usual marketing: Loewe is the German word for lion, a reference to the German-born merchant Enrique Loewe Roessberg, who consolidated the original Madrid leather workshop under his own name in 1872.

A limited anniversary capsule collection uses a playful lion motif across signature bag lines, applied through techniques including calfskin intarsia and beaded embroidery, on styles such as the Amazona, Puzzle and Flamenco bags. The lion appears as a head charm, a tail charm and as an intarsia pattern woven directly into leather panels, turning a piece of etymological trivia about the founder's surname into a recurring visual device across the current product range.

A 1975 bag reissued for the anniversary

The centrepiece of the capsule is the Amazona 180, a reworking of the Amazona bag first introduced in 1975, a year the house connects to a new era of freedom and opportunity in Spain. Current creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez reinterpreted the original silhouette for the anniversary with softer construction and a more relaxed fit, describing the update as returning to the bag's original spirit rather than replacing it outright.

The anniversary campaign itself was photographed by Talia Chetrit and features an unusually cross-generational cast: the actresses Julia Garner and Sissy Spacek, the entertainer known as Giselle, the actress Salma Abu Deif, the Hong Kong film veteran Kara Wai, and the artist Kara Walker. Pairing a veteran actress from an earlier era of American cinema with contemporary streaming-era names in a single campaign is an unusual casting choice for a fashion anniversary, and it signals that the house wants the 180-year story read across generations rather than pitched only at its youngest customers.

Telling the origin story on screen

Loewe also commissioned a new animated film retelling its own history, narrated by the actor Antonio Banderas, one of Spain's best-known cultural exports internationally, released alongside the capsule collection under the title "Our history." Using animation rather than archival photography or a straightforward corporate documentary format lets the house present nearly two centuries of leather craft, ownership changes and creative-director transitions as a single continuous, family-friendly narrative rather than a dry timeline.

Anniversaries at this scale function as a controlled opportunity for a house to define its own foundational story for a contemporary audience, and Loewe's choice to centre the number 180 around a lion, rather than around a chronology of dates and creative directors, suggests the house wants its origin remembered as a piece of playful brand mythology first, with the underlying business history, family ownership until the 1996 LVMH acquisition, followed by several changes in creative direction, treated as supporting detail rather than the headline.

The anniversary also arrives at a delicate moment for the house's public identity, only months into McCollough and Hernandez's tenure. Building the campaign around 180 years of continuous leather craft, rather than around the new creative direction itself, lets the pair introduce themselves through the house's founding story rather than through a personal statement, borrowing the weight of 1846 while their own design vocabulary is still being established in the market.

The lion framing is also an unusual move within luxury branding more broadly. Houses named after their founders generally build their origin stories around a person's biography and specific dated milestones. Loewe's anniversary instead foregrounds a linguistic coincidence in Enrique Loewe Roessberg's own surname, treating etymology as more marketable than a strict corporate timeline. Whether that choice reflects the difficulty of building a clean single-founder narrative around a Spanish house with German ownership roots and multiple later creative directors, or simply a more playful marketing instinct under the current design team, the campaign leans on wordplay in a way few comparable heritage-house anniversaries attempt.

Loewe has not disclosed how long the anniversary capsule and campaign will remain in market, though luxury anniversary capsules of this kind typically run for a single season before the underlying bag styles, Amazona, Puzzle, Flamenco, revert to their standard, non-anniversary versions for the remainder of the year. The choice of Talia Chetrit as photographer also fits a broader pattern already visible elsewhere in luxury advertising this season: houses pairing a single, tightly briefed photographer with a mixed cast spanning film, art and earlier generations of celebrity, rather than building a campaign around one dominant face or a purely youth-oriented cast.