It’s Loewe’s 180th anniversary year and the brand is making that a global phenomenon with a capsule collection, a frisky campaign, a special anniversary magazine and an animated film narrated by Spanish actor Antonio Banderas. The Madrid leather workshop is billed as the second oldest luxury fashion house, with Banderas noting that it existed before the light bulb, the telephone and the moon landing.

The hand-crafted animated film, directed by Isabel Garrett and produced by Blinkink, charts Loewe’s legacy with imagination and an uncompromising commitment to craft, and incorporates the distinct visual language of artist, Joanna Blémont.

The film was conceived as a piece of living art – a tactile, hand-painted journey through 180 years of cultural history, told through the eyes of a character as mischievous and warm as the brand itself. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the film operates as a continuous loop which honours Loewe’s philosophy that creativity does not end, it renews. The concept of 180 is to not be a full stop, but a turning point.

The project is deeply personal for director Isabel Garrett, a long-time admirer of both Loewe and Blémont. She has filled the film with the same rare sensibility that has defined her career – a talent for building intricate, atmospheric worlds that feel at once surreal and warmly human. Blémont was chosen specifically for her distinctive watercolour style, providing the visual foundation from which Garrett and her team developed their own language. 

Every frame was crafted by hand using acrylic and oil stick on watercolour paper, in painstaking process. Over 2,000 sheets of watercolour paper were used across production, sourced from local supplier Seawhite of Brighton, with a team of 10 painters working across the film. To manage the scale of the project, the team developed techniques such as painting in layers, while always maintaining Isabel Garrett’s intention to honour the integrity of traditional hand-made animation with as little digital intervention as possible.

The film begins with a suggestion of a world – loose, abstract shapes, a minimal palette, the quiet hum of something just beginning. As the Lion leads us forward through time, the imagery builds, more detail, more colour, more life, until eventually arriving in a fully realised, vibrantly textured present. The visual evolution mirrors Loewe’s own journey from a single craft workshop in Madrid in 1846 to one of the world’s most beloved luxury houses.

Along the way, the film weaves together key moments from Loewe’s history as well as cultural milestones of the last 180 years – the invention of the aeroplane, the first cinema screening, landing on the Moon, David Bowie, the Hubble Telescope. Each rendered with the same playful, hand-made energy that runs through every frame.

The Lion himself is as much a feeling as a character. Sometimes he is seen trotting through scenes, narrating as he goes; sometimes only a glimpse: a paw, a tail, a flash of red at the edge of the frame. He is the spirit of Loewe made visible: curious, whimsical, and impossible to ignore.

The film is accompanied by a behind-the-scenes short documenting the extraordinary craft process and the team of painters behind it, as well as a hand-printed Fanzine featuring hero frames selected during storyboarding, an object as considered and collectible as the film itself.