Designers in Touch With Pre-Modern Craft in the Digital Age

Why are designers turning to pre-modern crafts in the digital age? Could the future of fashion be handcrafted?

 

In a studio corner, scraps of linen curl under heavy shears, ink sullies a tracing paper, and a pair of hands stitch unnoticed as designers begin turning away from the digital blue toward something tactile, slower, and more resonant. From Loewe’s clay-laced runway to Paloma Wool’s Barcelona collages, in an age of immediacy, the pull of the handmade lies in its precision and human care.

Johnathan Anderson courtesy of The Wall Street Journal

Few have articulated this shift more evocatively than Jonathan Anderson, the creative force behind Spanish luxury house Loewe from 2013 to 2025. In 2016, he introduced the Loewe Craft Prize, which honors global makers in ceramics, weaving, leather, and basketry, each piece rooted in ancestral technique and taking center stage in exhibitions and campaigns . However, for Anderson, the importance of craft didn’t only begin to take hold in his mind alongside the emergence of the digital age; it was rather intrinsic to his Irish upbringing. In an interview with Crafts Council in 2018, he disclosed, “going to the factory to see fabric being printed with my grandfather really got me into this idea of making, the art of making,” and “Ireland is one of those places that is very craft-oriented, so it’s almost like it’s built into you.” 

2025 loewe craft prize winners. 

1-Name of finalist: Kunimasa Aoki, Name of work: 'Realm of Living Things.' 

2-Name of finalist: Studio Sumakshi Singh, Name of work: 'Monument'.

3-Name of finalist: Empar Juanes, Name of work: 'AURA'.

In recent seasons, the Loewe runway itself has taken on the feel of a sculptor’s studio. For Fall/Winter 2023, models moved among rough-hewn clay busts and ceramic vessels, echoing the organic textures and earthy hues of the collection while emphasizing a design process grounded in materiality. 

Loewe Fall/Winter 2023

That same philosophy extended into Loewe’s Weaves project, where artisans reimagined everyday objects like the Galician chestnut roaster, hand-forming them from raffia, leather, and reed. The resulting collaborations not only inspired Loewe’s cult-favorite basket bags but also elevated domestic craft to the realm of collectible art. 

 

The garments themselves often reveal the practice of the handmade, as seen  in Spring/Summer 2024, where frayed hems, visible seams, and sculptural pleating suggest pieces not yet finalized but suspended mid-process.

Nonetheless, what marks the exigence of such intricate and thoughtful craftsmanship is how digitized the fashion realm is now and the potential it has to become even more so. Anderson articulated this need immaculately in a conversation with Jo Craven at The Guardian, “We are so dependent on digital media that we need to counteract that with something more human. No matter what your educational, social, financial background, we naturally want to touch things. We see so much online two-dimensional imagery, and craft is a three-dimensional antidote to that.” 

If Loewe’s approach to craftsmanship operates on a monumental scale with its museum installations, global collaborations, or a formal prize, then Paloma Wool offers a more intimate, studio-bound expression of the handmade. Founded in Barcelona by Paloma Lanna, the fashion house feels, in some aspects, like a palpable conversation between artists, materials, and the people who wear them. Garments become canvases printed with the ink drawings of local artists; lookbooks take the form of analog collages layered with scissors, tape, and paper, rather than relying on Photoshop. The care operates on a smaller scale but is no less intentional as each step resists digital uniformity in favor of something deliberate, ornate, and sensorial.

Paloma Lanna courtesy of The Great Discontent

via Paloma Wool on instagram

Lanna’s collaboration with painter and illustrator Fátima Moreno is an example of the way garments become artistry-infused at Paloma Wool, as they transformed Moreno’s poolside “ephemeral scene” into a silk piece for wear. 

Similarly, working with multidisciplinary artist Sara Yuiko, Lanna pictured “nostalgic imagery through playful object associations” and translated them into various clothing items. The creative manner prioritizes physical intuition over digital precision. 

As Lanna puts it in a 2018 interview with The Great Discontent, “It’s a slow process, but it brings a feeling that I love. Everything goes through my eyes and my hands before being published.” That sensibility extends across the project from its mood boards assembled with cut paper and scribbled notes to its partnerships with small ateliers in Spain and Portugal, where production remains intentionally small, allowing each piece to retain the care and character of its origin. 

Though physical and intricate craftwork often implies delicateness or gracefulness, at Marni from 2016 to 2025, creative director Francesco Risso confirmed it to be a powerfully and erratically gripping tool. Risso is comparable to Anderson in that he also had an ador for the handcrafted in his early years, having grown up in a frenzied Italian household. On the Business of Fashion Podcast, Risso told Imran Amed, “I started to develop this need to make with my hands as a means to communicate. I would find something in my grandmother’s closet, start to disrupt it, and collage it to something from my sister’s wardrobe, and we have a new piece.” 

This hands-on, intuitive process carried over to his work at Marni, where visible construction, patchwork, and unexpected combinations became signatures of his design.

 

Marni Fall/Winter '23

 

A prime example of this philosophy was in his Spring Ready-To-Wear show in 2022, where he dressed the audience in “Marniphernalia” or “Miscellaneous Handpainted Treasures,” a variety of upcycled garments. When speaking to Vogue about this collection, he explained he had “grown discouraged by the digital focus of the job during the lockdowns,” and that his idea “was about going back to the practice of what we do, which is making clothes for people, one to one.” It was a significant moment of fashion rejecting scale and speed in favor of elaborate intentionality and creative strength, an expression of the same desire animating other houses: to harness craftsmanship not to evoke nostalgia, but to show resistance to a less thoughtful and less resonant digital emergence. 

 

 

The return to craft doesn’t merely reject the digital, but challenges what has been lost in its rise. Things like material presence, irregular beauty, and the mark of the maker. Though whether that future takes hold industry-wide remains uncertain, the work of designers like Anderson, Lanna, Risso, and many others continues to instill the unequivocal truth that the magic and resonance of what’s made by hand cannot be replicated.