Why Loewe’s Puzzle Bag Remains a Must-Have, Ten Years Later

Handbags energy trendy luxurious. So when Jonathan Anderson was once employed to revitalize Loewe in 2013, he gamely set about turning in the Spanish leather-based items space based in 1846 with its first bona fide It bag. Enter, the Puzzle. The now coveted taste first entered into the dialog in Anderson’s debut spring 2015 males’s presentation, breaking the entire regulations for what an It bag might be. It featured no monogram nor emblem {hardware} and eschewed tasteful neutrals in prefer of daring colour combos just like the fuchsia, coral, and salmon combo that opened his fall 2015 girls’s runway display and entirely solidified its must-have standing.

And then, in fact, there was once the Puzzle’s odd form: a tetradecahedron that may be styled as a crossbody, shoulder bag, or top-handle and seemed like one thing it’s possible you’ll construct with a three-D style package in highschool geometry. Designed to fold utterly flat, the Puzzle’s origami-like shape married innovation and craftsmanship, and was once completed with hand-painted detailing at the edges and vertices. “I set out to find a new way of building a bag, fundamentally questioning its structure,” Anderson mused in a press free up upon its release. “It was about deconstructing a conventional bag to create a flat object with a tridimensional function.”

Carried via the likes of Sienna Miller, Cate Blanchett, and Beyoncé, the Puzzle was once a brand new type of luxurious grail that, greater than standing, telegraphed arty eccentricity. Over the years it has turned into a normal presence in Loewe’s seasonal collections—Anderson’s ultimate fall 2025 presentation featured a Puzzle collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation—and it has impressed a circle of relatives of transformable luggage together with the Featherlight Puzzle and the Puzzle Fold, a capacious tote that collapses right into a neat sq. continuously noticed at the arm of Jennifer Lawrence. And as ratings of TikTook unboxing movies will attest, a decade on, the unique is a space vintage, one that Loewe’s new inventive administrators, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, will indisputably put their very own stamp on.

To mark the Puzzle’s first ten years, Loewe is liberating the Puzzle 10 assortment, a large 19-piece tablet of re-editions being showcased in pop-up gallery areas world wide, together with at Bergdorf Goodman in New York, which options all of them, plus a brand new confetti design lined in hundreds of tiny leather-based sequins. Each is completed with a limited-edition steel plaque, suede lining, and two balloon charms and is derived with a mini jigsaw puzzle. Taken in combination, the re-editions—which come with a spring 2016 males’s manga design, a lodge 2017 taste that includes Pop-Art-esque colour blockading, and a pre-fall 2021 intarsia style impressed via a Joe Brainard blended media collage—show how the Puzzle has been reimagined in myriad fabrics, turning into a clean canvas for inventive expression.

A self-confessed artwork historical past obsessive, Anderson’s references have been wide-ranging, however he frequently returned to his favourite 19th-century Arts and Crafts designers who privileged handwork over mechanical reproducibility. Puzzle 10 includes a painterly William Morris strawberry flower motif style, along items impressed via the paintings of architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ceramicist William de Morgan from a well-liked vacation tablet collection. “Looking at people like William Morris,” Anderson informed W in 2017, “you realize that the current idea of luxury is so gross. I thought, Let’s not focus on that.” Instead he created a brand new luxurious paradigm that celebrates the artwork of craft. Along with the clothier’s personal aesthetic predilections, Puzzle luggage spotlight the various specialised leatherwork ways perfected via artisans in Loewe’s Barcelona and Getafe ateliers, together with applique, embroidery, embossing, printing, cross-stitch, patchwork, and marquetry.

For additional information, seek advice from the cellular web site puzzle10.loewe.com.

Lead symbol clockwise from peak left: Courtesy of Loewe; Getty; Courtesy of Loewe; Getty. Center: Courtesy of Loewe.