“It was the idea of looking at the birth of man, at evolution, and the idea that we grow out of things and then we grow back into things,” Anderson said, almost confirming the self-referential thread some of us detected in the Loewe collection. Looking back at his debut show – although much less avant-garde and artistically-inclined than his work today – there were inklings of the investigations that still consume him. The bugs trapped in resin balls employed in his early jewellery resonated in the balloons trapped in the folds of dresses in today’s show, or even in the stilettos and child-sized cars immured under body-conscious dresses, deforming the natural silhouette.

It had an air of fetish

“I like the idea that by pushing a silhouette, you’re pushing it towards something that can be nonsensical; things that can be irrational, and the meeting of two things that are pleasantly disturbing,” Anderson said of the weird shapes that embodied the collection. He covered the torsos of models in second-skin transparent latex, distorted and elongated what looked like a traditional shearing boot into a malformed trouser manifestation, and forged what might have been an oversized plastic mould of a lip into a bustier. Throughout, materials and technique played ping-pong between the natural and unnatural, while motifs bordered the confrontational, the weird, and the fetishistic.

Anderson turned bags into shoes

Anderson’s accessories captured the organic-vs.-artificial spirit of the collection in ‘bag shoes’ borrowed from January’s men’s collection, which literally looked like models were walking with handbags on their feet. Stiletto sandals were tied with enormous, sharp aluminium bows, making the soft and glamorous almost dangerous. Bags reiterated the leather-centric values of the collection in matte, almost medical colours that went with its fetishistic aroma, while a handbag covered in shearling played with the idea of ‘useless’ fabrication (because, well, a handbag doesn’t get cold).