The king of leather

With his Hispanic origins, Belgian training and passion for leather, José Enrique Oña Selfa is just what Loewe, Spain's answer to Hermÿs, needed as its new womenswear designer. Jamie Huckbody meets the latest enfant terrible of the catwalk

Fashion is a funny old business. No sooner had it come over all folksy and hippie than it decided to hang up its virginal white broderie-anglaise petticoats for something completely different: hardcore sex clothes. At Prada there were see-through plastic trench coats and the highest Allen Jones heels; at Gucci, tight pencil skirts and bondage stilettos; at McQueen, corseted underwear with thigh-high boots. And then there was Loewe, the LVMH-owned Spanish luxury leather-goods brand, with its new womenswear designer, José Enrique Oña Selfa. "Loewe is leather!" proclaims Oña Selfa, whose first collection for Loewe was one of the highlights of the autumn/winter Paris collections. Like Helmut Newton bull-fighting infantas, girls stormed out in complete outfits of shiny soft leather, fitted like a second skin, for Oña Selfa's fusion of bourgeois luxury and high-voltage sexual energy. Even the chic tweed jackets were lined with leather, pockets were lined with leather, and there were skirts with horizontal welt pockets like a pouch (lined with leather, of course).

That passion was there in dresses and vests heavy with tiny jet beads that hung in swags as if clawed and ripped from the body, the straps edged with rose thorns that climbed the neck. And, more importantly for the LVMH counting-house and those with a less-than-Rich Bitch budget, the accessories were just as sexy. Leather and tweed stilettos and knee-high boots had strips of ruched leather that snaked up the foot, while others were entirely covered in fine gold chains that cuffed the ankle. Bondage games have never looked so elegant.

Oña Selfa has an aesthetic fetish for sado-masochistic strictness; his muse is the nun, the Latin widow, the horse-rider, the Latino dancer. Discipline lubricated by delicious torture is what floats this designer's fashion boat. "I had a Catholic education," he says. "My mother is a devout Catholic and for five years I was an altar boy. My parents would even change the TV channel if there was sex on it, so I am a bit neurotic." His parents are from Andalusia in southern Spain but moved to Brussels in the Sixties. Oña Selfa was born there in 1975 and attended the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, receiving a Masters in fashion design of the highest distinction.

"I didn't always want to be a fashion designer," he says. "In the beginning, I wanted to be a dancer – I love the tango and flamenco – but I didn't want to go to Spain to learn to dance professionally and so I thought, 'How else can I express myself through the body?'. The answer was clothes! I learnt the history of clothes, the movement of clothes," he says, jumping from English to Spanish to French. "I finished school in 1999, but two years before that I was already working with Olivier Theyskens. We met at college, where we were in the same year, and I assisted him as a pattern-cutter and knitwear designer when he dropped out to start his own label. After that I did my own collections."

Oña Selfa presented his first show for autumn/winter 2000 to international acclaim. His directional and revolutionary knitwear was very much a product of his mixed heritage, a fusion of passionate Latin energy and brooding Belgian romance; something that wasn't lost on Ridgely Cinquegrana, president and CEO of Loewe: "José Enrique has a highly versatile style that will allow him to combine the technique and discipline of the designers of northern Europe, with the passion and sensuality of the South, in a harmonious balance that fits Loewe's goals to perfection." Sex sells and Oña Selfa's aesthetic had the cut and thrust that Loewe, a relatively unknown label compared to LVMH's other brands (Christian Dior, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton, Céline) needed. "My skin and heart is Spanish but my education and life is Belgian," the designer says. "And when I got Loewe it was so cool because I can do the Belgian bit for my own label and the Spanish bit for Loewe." It would appear that that "Spanish bit" was exactly what Bernard Arnault, the big daddy at LVMH, was searching for to replace Narciso Rodriguez's American minimalism. "We are always looking for the best new talents, and José Enrique is certainly one of them," said Arnault at the time of signing Oña Selfa's three-year deal. "His vision is pure Loewe."

But what is Loewe? Pronounced "low-ay-vey", the label started from a leather-goods workshop in Madrid in 1846, supplying the Spanish royal family and Madrid's aristo- cracy. By the end of the Civil War, Enrique Loewe Knapp, Loewe's third generation, had embarked upon a new phase that resulted in securing the exclusive sales rights in Spain for Dior's 1947 New Look and a foothold in Europe (the first London shop opened in 1963) and the Asian Pacific. By the 1970s, Loewe was expanding into perfumes and fashion with the creation of the Loewe logo, the first man to get his hands on it being the king of Chanel's double-C and Fendi's double-F logos, Karl Lagerfeld. Since then, Giorgio Armani, Laura Biagiotti, and Narciso Rodriguez have all designed Loewe's womenswear collections.

LVMH's involvement goes back to 1986, when the luxury-goods conglomerate bought the rights to Loewe's international distribution, eventually buying the label outright in 1996 and holding its first Paris fashion show in 1998 to claim its stake in the growing leather-goods market. "I love Loewe. It's serious and it's smaller than the other brands," says Oña Selfa. Indeed, Loewe is to Spain what Hermès is to France. And with the best craftsmen in the LVMH stable of ateliers, it is often called upon to make what the others can't.

"When I first started to design the Loewe collection, I drew from both the Spanish and the Belgian influences in my life," says Oña Selfa, "but there was a fight, so I wrote a list of what Loewe is and what I am, and I got rid of all the similarities. What was left were two different things." Earthier and a lot less aggressive than Loewe, the designer's signature collection had that Belgian spin on sincere chic as championed by the Antwerp school. "The palette was inspired by woodland and shooting; the colours you see under the trees. I wanted it to be easy, so I did very casual shapes. We even scratched the shoes as if the girls had been walking through the forest in them." Swaggering greatcoats, corduroy jodhpurs softened with cardigans, and knitted dresses had a shrugged-on sensuality. "The new thing about this collection was that every skirt shape was worked from a trouser," explains Oña Selfa. "The skirts have a leg inside to keep the movement of trousers; they're not so flirty. Then there are trousers that become a skirt from side to back. I like trousers; there's something cavalier about them."

And it's this sensitive design, and the fact that he never loses sight of the complex demands that women make of fashion, that marks José Enrique out as a star. "I love women; I love the essence of women," he says. "Women's fashion shouldn't be to pleasure a gay man, because afterwards he has no use for her." So ask yourself, is your designer using and abusing you? Is he leaving you high and dry when he's lived out his fantasies and left yours unsatisfied ? If so, do yourself a favour, get into leather, get into Loewe.