Notes on Design – LOEWE & The Poetics of Making

THE SKETCH – LOEWE. Rome.

Concept sketch: A Making Window Activation for LOEWE.

THE THOUGHT – The Poetics of Making

Luxury is often resolved in the final object – perfected, composed, and presented at a distance. But what if the focus shifted? What if the value wasn’t just in what is made, but in the act of making itself?

This thinking informed my sketch for this issue: a LOEWE making window, where front-of-house and back-of-house dissolve into one continuous condition. This temporary activation in Rome would align with the next annual LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize – a living atelier set within the storefront. A space where craft is not exhibited as outcome, but experienced as honest process.

The inspiration is drawn from the quiet theatre of the Roman osteria window, where pasta is made in full view of the street. While it plays on themes of nostalgia, there is no sense of spectacle, only practice – repeated, skilled, and unapologetically real. It is this everyday transparency that reframes craft as something to be witnessed, rather than revealed.

Translated into a retail context, the façade becomes a threshold between street and workshop. Artisans – whether leather specialists or Craft Prize finalists – occupy the space in real time. Cutting, weaving, repairing. Not as staged demonstrations, but genuine acts of production.

The intention is not to romanticise craft, but to restore its visibility. In doing so, the object and its making become inseparable. Value is no longer abstracted – it is understood through time, through touch, through attention.

Today, I feel we are in the midst of a shift, where consumers are feeling the pressure of speed, polish, and perfection, and therefore the act of slowing down, preserving process, and revealing imperfections, feels both radical and necessary.

For LOEWE, a house so deeply rooted in craft, this is not a departure – it is an amplification. A way to extend the ethos of the house codes into lived, daily experience.