Loewe brings Mr and Mrs Albers to the catwalk

For the past 10 or so years, there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate Anni Albers so that she is taken as seriously as Josef, her husband. Josef was a tutor at the Bauhaus while Anni was a student there. He taught drawing and lettering; she learned weaving, set upon this thread by Walter Gropius, who didn’t think women could handle the labour of metalwork or painting. (Anni herself dismissed weaving as ‘rather sissy’ half a century later.) The culmination of the project to bring Albers out of her colourful husband’s shadow came with an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2018. Here, her Bauhaus work and the abstract weaving that she developed after this period was placed in full view. What became quickly apparent was her skill at manipulating her material to produce an effect that was entirely her own.

Anni Albers photographed at her weaving studio at Black Mountain College in 1937 by Helen M. Post. Courtesy the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina

But to look at these works solely as artworks is to miss something vital about them. Anni Albers was producing textiles. She specialised in making fabrics and threads deliver the effect – be it visual or something else entirely – that she wanted. One of the works for which Anni is best known, oddly, is a fabric that was used to line the walls of the Bundesschule Auditorium in Bernau in 1929. The fabric is silvery and looks solid despite being made from nothing more firm than cotton chenille and cellophane. The most important thing about it is that it was dust-repellent and sound-proofing, a practical response to how to cover the wall of an auditorium.

I was thinking of this in one of the least practical environments imaginable: a trip to Paris to see the Loewe fashion presentation. There was no Loewe fashion show this season; instead, for what, it transpires, is the final collection from Jonathan Anderson for Loewe, the house took over the Hôtel de Maisons, a building best known as the former residence of Karl Lagerfeld, and set up installations of this season’s clothes. Even on unmoving mannequins there was something fresh and exciting in the air. Perhaps the excitement was exacerbated by the presence of the fabrics designed by Anni Albers that Loewe had transformed into coats and handbags. To see a textile such as Open Letter (1958) or Pasture (1958) transformed into workable fabric is to witness an astonishing act of reinvention. By the late 1950s Albers was interested in finding pictorial allusions in her weaving, hence the evocative names, but she was also interested in the very pure ideas of craft that went into a textile, learning and reproducing techniques that she discovered in Colombia, which gave her work a unique look and feel. When you see one of her textiles hanging on the wall as a pristine sample, it is easy to get distracted by all the thought that has gone in to it. Yet when it forms a coat, it forces a different way of experiencing the fabric. All the aspects of thinking that are privileged in a gallery recede to the background and an aesthetic judgement of a different sort takes place: does it work as a fabric? And of course, it does work. But I wonder if it does something else, a sort of reverse archaeology. Instead of bringing to light all the serious thinking that has gone into the textile to give it that unique look, it necessitates a different discipline of appreciating only the surface and its mode of being.

Courtesy Loewe

Loewe has performed the same exercise with Josef’s work – his famous squares of colour are reproduced on handbags. What might sound irredeemably naff is instead a fascinating lesson in looking just at the colours and how they relate, precisely as Josef intended. Only, on a handbag such an act is stripped of any spiritual potential. One can’t help but feel that the artist who wrote the exact colour combinations he used on the back of his paintings so that anyone could do it would rather appreciate this. Curiously, the act of transforming these artists’ works into fashion makes them even more emphatically aesthetic objects. Suppressing the history of the original art’s creation offers the radical effect of forcing a highly attentive gaze at the surface of the works on view. The work demands appreciation and consideration and is somehow all the more rewarding for being liberated from its artistic context. Form follows function, as the Bauhaus believed, but in this display at Loewe form becomes function. No wonder there was something exciting in the air that day.

Courtesy Loewe