Complete with a life-size Totoro, a gigantic ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ bag and Picasso's ceramics, Loewe’s exhibition is a kaleidoscopic adventure. Ellen van Loon, the brains behind the exhibition’s design, speaks to us about her process
The Shanghai Exhibition Centre was the stage for a treasure hunt in late March. Loewe held Crafted World, its first-ever exhibition paying tribute to its Spanish heritage, celebrating 178 years of craft-making and all the memorable results of a decade of creative direction by Jonathan Anderson. Wandering through the wing of the famed landmark—an example of 1950s Sino-Soviet architecture—transformed into a series of interactive roomscapes is like opening one chocolate box after another.
At the exit of the exhibition, where a larger-than-life raffia Loewe logo took over the centre between the stairs, Tatler sat down with Ellen van Loon, who led the design team behind the show, to discuss how it came together.
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It’s not the first time Van Loon, the only female partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has designed an exhibition for a fashion brand. The Dutch architect is behind many of the renowned practice’s projects, from Beijing’s CCTV headquarters and Casa da Música in Porto to more recent, fashion-fan-familiar work: the Bulgari Fine Jewellery Show and Off-White’s Paris flagship store in 2021; and in 2022, the shops-in- shops for Jacquemus at Selfridges and Harvey Nichols in London and Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
“It started with architecture,” says Van Loon of the first fashion project OMA took on, for Prada. “It was in 1999; they came to us because they were looking for a new branding strategy for their stores. That was the moment where we started saying maybe not all the stores should be equal if you have epicentres; of course, now people call those flagship stores.”
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