Now that I have more of an understanding of filmmaking and an understanding of costume within film, it’s helped me build a team around it—and I would like to continue doing it, because for me, it’s a great escape from my job. It helps me balance out a bit, and being creative without the commerce element feels like a very different exercise—it’s about characterization, and there’s no preciousness around it representing just one vision.

That’s what I love about very good cinema: Those textures you find in the 1950s or ’60s with the clothing—it’s never just a flat surface. You have Lee, played by Daniel, at the beginning wearing this shirt that’s optic white…. [There’s] this idea of it being pristine, like cocaine. By the end of it, after his heroin trip and everything else getting darker and darker, it becomes dirtier…. I like following those threads. With costume, you can do things like that which are more subtle, whereas sometimes with fashion, it has to be loud for people to grab on. In film, you have to lure the audience in and let them know who the character is in a way that unfolds. It’s not about the bang of fashion where it’s a 15-minute show that has to sell you this one idea.

What I find amazing about these pieces is that, as you said, they could be plucked out of a store today, and I did quite like having those things in the film—because sometimes we feel like we’re inventing everything now, but then you realize there were people in the past who were even further ahead than we are.

As the creative director of a fashion house—or two fashion houses—you’re always the decision-maker and the person everyone is turning to to weigh in on everything and have the final say. Working as the costume designer, did it feel pleasant to relinquish that total control for a little while? Yes, I enjoy it. It’s quite nice sometimes to be submissive in life. [Laughs.] I quite like not being in that driving seat all the time, because it makes you think differently when you’re back in the driving seat. I think it’s really helped me with my journey within fashion. It’s nice to restart—it keeps your feet on the ground. I think, in fashion, it’s very easy to levitate off the ground. It helped me to rechallenge myself, and to have those moments in Rome where I really felt like a student again, saying, “I don’t know how this works—but how do I make it work?”

I think with Loewe, for example, it might have affected the way I really reduced the menswear down in the recent show. It became a form of textural classicism—very precise. And I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

I think it’s really important for me to keep doing my day job, because it sharpens my knife outside of it. And I think they can dovetail into one another.

We were actually introduced by Karla Otto. It was one of those meetings where I felt like I had known Luca all my life. We were meant to just have a coffee, but then we chatted all afternoon. I just feel like we are searching for the same things but in different fields, so it’s really nice to be able to collaborate in this way—which requires a huge amount of trust in each other—but pushing each other too. And there are not many people, I think, who understand clothing as deeply as Luca does.

I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

there were plenty of memorable moments for Jonathan Anderson—but few were quite as awe-inspiring as his first day of filming, walking through the back lot of Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios. “One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and it reminded me of the scene when Norma goes to the studios, and there’s just cinema happening,” Anderson says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where Queer had premiered the night before, with genuine wide-eyed wonderment. “You enter into one of those dark spaces and find a stage lit as a 1950s Mexican street. Then you’re in the middle of the jungle. If you were to ask a child what cinema is, it would be this.”

These ribbons, upon closer inspection, appear to be two layers of machine-made fabric sewn together to form a single piece with one side puffed out like an arch in bridges, the “Alpine Loop” band that symbolizes the Apple Watch Ultra, which was just announced in the fall of 2022. The band is made of lightweight yet sturdy polyester fiber, the band is designed for outdoor activities by threading a metal hook through a hole in the fabric that expands in arch pattern, which prevents it from being pulled out in any direction. The fact that this intricate and delicate band is woven is astonishing.

The “Alpine Loop” uses 520 warp threads, which is far more than the number of threads used in ordinary fabrics, and this first process alone takes about six full days even for experienced employees.

After inspecting the heat treatment process on the first floor of the factory, I asked Tim Cook about his impressions of the company. “I love the the ability to scale something that is so intricate, something that is so detailed. And you know they’re making a lot of these as you can, tell but they’re doing it in such a high quality way. And the yields are very high.”

“They were very flexible, and willing to try new processes, new ways of doing things. This was the first time that this particular process was ever used. And so they have to be very nimble but that nimbleness has to be underpinned by great expertise. And they have that great expertise here. And I can’t stress enough the attention to detail and quality. These are the things that make the products look so great right out of the box.”

Apple prefers to use the term “supplier” over alternatives such as “subcontractor” because they believe in equal business partnership.

“What sets Apple apart [from other companies] is that they let us work as a team. If we have a problem, we spend time together to come up with a solution.” Seiji Inoue, managing director of Inoue Ribbon Industry, spoke from the opposite side of Cook’s statement.

In addition to bands for the Apple Watch, the company also produces handles made from woven paper for “Mac Pro” product packaging. Normally, nylon or other materials would be mixed into paper to give sturdiness, but Apple places importance on recyclability, so they need to make them from 100% paper. The team worked together with the Apple staff to find a way to meet these requirements, and when we introduced a manufacturer that could produce paper, they said, “Great,” and accompanied us to the manufacturer.

The first product they worked on was a band for the Apple Watch called “Woven Nylon.” It took four years to develop. At first, Mr. Inoue was fed up with the high quality requirements. Compared to other industries, the textile industry is not very strict about size control.

at some point the front-line workers became accustomed to Apple’s standards, and are now saying, “We have to do this much, don’t we?” and aiming for higher quality manufacturing. He added, “Apple taught me from scratch about quantification and other things. They taught me how to manage, how to make a table like this, how to do standard deviation like this, how to take data like this, and so on. You can’t learn so much even if you paid someone. But Apple shared all those knowledges sayin we are on the same team.”

Mr. Nobunari Sawanobori, the president of Teikoku Ink, which supplies white ink for the iPhone, once said, “The loss of learning through working with Apple is a bigger loss than the loss of orders from Apple.”

After working for so long with Apple, recently Inoue Ribbon Industry began to make proposal or provide supplement data when they work with other clients, Most of those clients are surprised and delighted.