Loewe Brings Cosima von Bonin’s Plush Sea Creatures to the Paris Runway Set
At Paris Fashion Week, the runway can feel like a stage set for ideas as much as for clothes. For Loewe’s Womenswear Fall/Winter 2026–2027 show, that stage was populated by sculptures by German artist Cosima von Bonin — a familiar cast from her practice: plush ocean creatures whose softness reads as both invitation and warning.
Von Bonin has long used stuffed, cartoonish marine figures as a kind of visual toolkit, returning to them across projects as stand-ins for larger questions about power, consumption, and who gets to play. The disarming materials are part of the point. Her characters may look cuddly at first glance, but the work’s tone is often sharper than its surfaces suggest.
That tension has been explicit in her exhibition titles. One past show, “Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea?”, frames the motif as more than a whimsical signature. The ocean, in von Bonin’s hands, becomes a theater for extraction and projection — a place where innocence can be performed, and where exploitation can be disguised as entertainment.
Loewe’s decision to feature von Bonin’s sculptures in the runway environment underscores how porous the boundary between contemporary art and fashion has become, particularly at the level of staging. In recent seasons, fashion houses have increasingly treated the runway as an exhibition-like space, commissioning artists to shape the atmosphere and the viewer’s emotional register before a single look appears.
Von Bonin’s art-world credentials are well established. She has exhibited with Petzel Gallery, and her work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Tate Britain. Those placements situate her within a lineage of artists who use pop-coded forms to smuggle in more complicated readings — a strategy that can feel especially pointed when transplanted into the high-gloss machinery of luxury.
In the context of Paris Fashion Week, the plush sea creatures operate on multiple frequencies at once: as playful spectacle, as sculptural presence, and as a reminder that softness can be a kind of camouflage. Whether encountered in a museum collection or on a runway set, von Bonin’s oceanic cast continues to ask the same question — who, exactly, is being used, and by whom.
As fashion’s collaborations with contemporary artists grow more ambitious, moments like this suggest a shift in emphasis: the runway is no longer just a backdrop for garments, but a site where art’s symbols and fashion’s narratives negotiate for attention in real time.
