LOEWE Just Designed Lab Coats for the People Restoring Some of the World’s Greatest Paintings
LOEWE has designed new lab coats for the restoration department of the Museo Nacional del Prado, and the project is exactly as considered as you’d expect from the Madrid-born house. The coats are worn daily by the restorers working on paintings like Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the kind of work that demands both technical precision and serious patience.
The brief was functional first. The coats needed to offer comfort and durability while using materials that wouldn’t reflect light onto the pictorial surfaces being worked on. LOEWE developed larger pockets with secure closures, made with the house’s leather, designed to hold longer brushes and allow restorers to lean close into a painting without anything getting in the way. The restorers call the coats “second skins,” which says plenty about how central they are to the daily work. LOEWE will continue providing handmade coats to the department on an annual basis.For creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, a 2025 visit to the restoration workshop in Madrid was the catalyst. “Observing the restorers at work offered a rare insight into the depth of skill, patience and historical responsibility embedded in their craft,” they said, describing the coats as a gesture of respect for the people doing that work.
The project sits within a broader relationship between the two institutions. LOEWE FOUNDATION and the Prado have been connected since 2023 through the Writing the Prado programme, an initiative that invites writers to engage with the museum’s collection and publishes their work through the Spanish edition of Granta. Lab coats and literary commissions might seem like an unlikely pairing, but the thread is consistent: a shared investment in craft and cultural heritage, in whatever form that takes.