Happy birthday to the Loewe Puzzle bag

Times

a day ago

It was the first chic hands-free multitasker — an ahead-of-the-curve shape-shifting hybrid worker that proved as much a hit among the social media crowd as with attendees of Frieze Art Fair. If each era gets the fashion it deserves, then the tenth anniversary of Loewe's acclaimed Puzzle style bag this month marks a perfect conclusion to the decade that has passed since its launch. Unexpected, you might say. Challenging. On the face of it, a bit weird.
When the Puzzle launched in 2015, it was not only the debut bag from Loewe's then newly installed creative director, Jonathan Anderson, but the first from the Spanish leather goods label since the 1980s. Perhaps that hiatus proved useful for breaking with past convention. If 2015 was the beginning of the end of what historians call the long 20th century (and what many more refer to as 'the last normal year'), then the Puzzle is the first truly 21st-century It bag, not to mention the first of the nascent Instagram age. Given its creator has now been confirmed in the top job at Christian Dior, the industry is waiting to see what his next contribution to the canon will be.
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Compared with the previous generation of designer bags that were mainly rigid, often over-sized and — given tastes for Buckaroo levels of hardware — tended to feel heavy even when empty, the Puzzle when it arrived was much like switching up a classic car for one with power steering.
Back then, it was a key protagonist in the fledgling 'street style' scene outside fashion week shows, not to mention visible in the flourishing of 'selfies' (the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2013) from what were only just known as 'influencers'. Now, a 2017 iteration printed with William Morris's Strawberry Thief motif sits in the V&A museum, a design classic for the ages.
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Beyoncé and Sienna Miller have carried one, but so has Maggie Smith. Made from 27 geometric planes of leather into a tessellating cuboid, the Puzzle is a hard-working 5-in-1 design that can pass as top-handled tote, cross-body messenger, clutch, worn long on a shoulder strap or short and slung around the back. Thanks to the original's Frankenstein-like construction patched around small channels (down which a drop of water must be able to be run, per one of the atelier's more esoteric testing rituals), it also folds completely flat.
This sort of flexibility and — some zeitgeisty jargon here — 'nimble thinking' is something we have all had to master over the past ten years. The Puzzle bag just got there before us.
'I set out to find a new way of building a bag,' Loewe's Jonathan Anderson said at the time of its debut. 'Fundamentally questioning its structure.'
The resulting versatility — all the more universal for the fact it skews neither masculine or feminine —spoke to the real-world requirements of post-Crash luxury goods. Next, it fed into the pandemic-related 'vibe shift' that saw practical and utilitarian design become not only popular but aspirational. Lockdown walks were accessorised with Puzzle bags — what need was there then for status arm candy designed to sit in the crook of one's elbow and intimidate all who passed before it? Loewe's model set a precedent for the subsequent ubiquitous sweep of Uniqlo's nylon half-moon crossbody — called the people's It bag for its £14.90 price tag.
The Puzzle sits in rather different territory — colonising a window of Harrods this month, in fact. But it continues to evolve to suit, and reflect, the times. In 2023 its signature floating tectonics were re-engineered to create a sleeker style known as the Edge, which was more in line with what the internet likes to call 'quiet luxury', in shades of khaki and sand.
Artisan flourishes have gilded the idiosyncratic panelling over the years too. A collaboration with Studio Ghibli's animators added cult anime characters from the film Howl's Moving Castle, while inspiration from the LA ceramicist Ken Price saw landscapes of villas and cypress trees carefully recreated in complex inlaid leather in autumn 2020. In 2020 the Arts and Craft figure William de Morgan's flora and fauna were the basis for a textured suede dandelion motif.
These, and several more, are celebrated this month in a showcase of limited-edition reissues exclusively at Harrods for the Puzzle's tenth anniversary. The most complex is a brand new party-inspired Confetti style: hand-stitched over five days with thousands of slivers of coloured leather. It's a far cry from the style's utilitarian roots, but what ten-year-old doesn't feel a little showy on their birthday?
From £2,550 (£4,700 for the Confetti Puzzle), until June 22 at Harrods; harrods.com, loewe.com