Handbags power modern luxury. So when Jonathan Anderson was hired to revitalize Loewe in 2013, he gamely set about delivering the Spanish leather goods house founded in 1846 with its first bona fide It bag. Enter, the Puzzle. The now coveted style first entered into the conversation in Anderson’s debut spring 2015 men’s presentation, breaking all the rules for what an It bag could be. It featured no monogram nor logo hardware and eschewed tasteful neutrals in favor of bold color combinations like the fuchsia, coral, and salmon combo that opened his fall 2015 women’s runway show and fully solidified its must-have status.
And then, of course, there was the Puzzle’s unusual shape: a tetradecahedron that could be styled as a crossbody, shoulder bag, or top-handle and looked like something you might build with a 3D model kit in high school geometry. Designed to fold completely flat, the Puzzle’s origami-like form married innovation and craftsmanship, and was finished with hand-painted detailing on the edges and vertices. “I set out to find a new way of building a bag, fundamentally questioning its structure,” Anderson mused in a press release upon its launch. “It was about deconstructing a conventional bag to create a flat object with a tridimensional function.”
Beyoncé with the original Puzzle bag at a basketball game in February 2016.
Carried by the likes of Sienna Miller, Cate Blanchett, and Beyoncé, the Puzzle was a new sort of luxury grail that, more than status, telegraphed arty eccentricity. Over the years it has became a regular presence in Loewe’s seasonal collections—Anderson’s final fall 2025 presentation featured a Puzzle collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation—and it has inspired a family of transformable bags including the Featherlight Puzzle and the Puzzle Fold, a capacious tote that collapses into a neat square regularly spotted on the arm of Jennifer Lawrence. And as scores of TikTok unboxing videos will attest, a decade on, the original is a house classic, one which Loewe’s new creative directors, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, will undoubtedly put their own stamp on.
To mark the Puzzle’s first ten years, Loewe is releasing the Puzzle 10 collection, a massive 19-piece capsule of re-editions being showcased in pop-up gallery spaces around the world, including at Bergdorf Goodman in New York, which features them all, plus a new confetti design covered in thousands of tiny leather sequins. Each is finished with a limited-edition metal plaque, suede lining, and two balloon charms and comes with a mini jigsaw puzzle. Taken together, the re-editions—which include a spring 2016 men’s manga design, a resort 2017 style featuring Pop-Art-esque color blocking, and a pre-fall 2021 intarsia model inspired by a Joe Brainard mixed media collage—demonstrate how the Puzzle has been reimagined in myriad materials, becoming a blank canvas for creative expression.
A new Confetti style features tiny leather sequins and is inspired by Italian artist Lara Favaretto’s site-specific confetti cubes from Loewe’s fall 2023 women’s show.
Artist Lara Favaretto’s confetti cubes from Loewe’s fall 2023 women’s show.
A self-confessed art history obsessive, Anderson’s references were wide-ranging, but he often returned to his favorite 19th-century Arts and Crafts designers who privileged handwork over mechanical reproducibility. Puzzle 10 features a painterly William Morris strawberry flower motif model, alongside pieces inspired by the work of architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ceramicist William de Morgan from a popular holiday capsule series. “Looking at people like William Morris,” Anderson told W in 2017, “you realize that the current idea of luxury is so gross. I thought, Let’s not focus on that.” Instead he created a new luxury paradigm that celebrates the art of craft. Along with the designer’s own aesthetic predilections, Puzzle bags highlight the many specialized leatherwork techniques perfected by artisans in Loewe’s Barcelona and Getafe ateliers, including applique, embroidery, embossing, printing, cross-stitch, patchwork, and marquetry.
For more information, visit the mobile site puzzle10.loewe.com.
Lead image clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Loewe; Getty; Courtesy of Loewe; Getty. Center: Courtesy of Loewe.
