Jonathan Anderson loves a motif. He can’t get enough of them, actually. Each season the designer embraces some surreal element of the everyday, plants, lipsticks, fairy lights, saggy red balloons, iPads, tentpoles, that kind of thing, and sends them on a roundabout tour through his brain, where everything and nothing makes a whole lot of sense.

This season’s object du jour was a glossy anthurium. One imposing plant greets the guests of the Loewe’s SS23 catwalk, others can be seen hanging freely from dresses in the place of bra straps, askew as entire lacquered bodices. Sometimes they’re the leaf-clad strap of a high heel, or an accessory hanging daintily from a slinky handbag in lavender leather, other times these huge petals poke through zipped cardi’s and their knitted argyle pockets, obscuring the face and leaving behind a set of piercing, omniscient eyes.

Whimsy is kind of a bygone conclusion from any Anderson-led production these days, seen here in curvy Minnie Mouse-esque heels, incredible pixel hoodies plucked straight from *insert 2-bit game of choice* and striped polo-neck pinafores akin to a flare-skirted circus tent. The fun continues with a return of the balloons, legions of their flimsy spouts covering heels as if they were glamorous ruffles. Loose skirts in opaque waxy cottons channel a similar energy, the air escaping from their sales to leave a stretched, rubber-y core. Even mini-hunting jackets have caught the bug, devising new silhouettes with waists nipped and flouncy, echoed in floral, china-like bodices and wavy velvet evening gowns. Think of SS23, then, as a subversion of shapewear, a dining out on the new proportional realities fashion is yet to uncover. The kind of florals for spring that actually are groundbreaking.