Award-winning production studio Blinkink has unveiled a sweeping, hand-crafted animated film directed by Isabel Garrett, created in celebration of Loewe’s 180th anniversary with narration by Antonio Banderas. The campaign charts one of fashion’s most storied legacies with boundless imagination and an uncompromising commitment to crafts, 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 honors Loewe’s philosophy that creativity does not end, it renews. The concept of 180 is not a full stop, but a turning point.

For director Isabel Garrett, the project is a deeply personal one. A long-time admirer of both Loewe and Blémont, Garrett brings to the film the same rare sensibility that has defined her career: a talent for building intricate, atmospheric worlds that feel at once surreal and warmly human. Chosen specifically for her distinctive watercolour style, Blémont’s approach provided the visual foundation from which Garrett and her team developed their own language entirely. 

 


 

Every single frame was crafted by hand using acrylic and oil stick on watercolour paper, in a process as painstaking as it is beautiful. 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 director 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 iconic moments from Loewe’s history alongside key 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 we see him 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.

Formerly a resident artist at Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation and a graduate of the National Film and Television School, Garrett has built a reputation for work that is truly original, animating with non-traditional materials, combining techniques, and consistently transporting audiences somewhere they did not expect to go. This film is her most ambitious project yet.