Loewe Hosted Kit Connor, Naomi Ackie and Lesley Manville at an Art-Filled Country House Retreat

“It’s one of the few narrative pieces I’ve made,” Odundo says of her collaboration with artisans at Wedgwood. “It combines the history of this house, [and] who owned what during the transatlantic slave trade. Where we are placed. How we find ourselves where we are today – in terms of the global ‘we’. I wanted to dig into the history of this building, and into my own history growing up in Kenya. [We had] quite a tough time in a semi-apartheid colonial system, until Kenya gained independence in 1963.” Sir Robert Walpole invested in the South Sea Company, which profited from the proceeds of the British slave trade. Odundo also said she’d uncovered Cholmondeley relatives among the Delameres, colonial settlers in Kenya. But the Wedgwood piece also enshrines her reverence for the ceramics magnate Josiah Wedgwood, the “hugely humanitarian” campaigner for the abolition of slavery.

Odundo’s 40-year practice in ceramics began when she came from Kenya to study in the UK in 1971. That Anderson arranged for the Loewe Foundation to sponsor the exhibition is a patronage of true fandom. His relationship with the artist, whom he laughingly addressed before dinner as “my Beyoncé, my superstar!”, tracks back to 2017, when he put her burnished, sculptural vessels into conversation with fashion silhouettes in Disobedient Bodies, the exhibition he curated at The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire (he also collects her work). The admiration is mutual. “I like the way Jonathan uses cloth, fashion and textiles to blur the lines between craft and art,” said Odundo, as guests were frolicking on the sundrenched lawns at Houghton. “And that’s important to me, as someone who’s distilling movement into a static situation. It’s like having a dancer, a ballerina, an acrobat… and arresting their movement in ceramics. It’s the idea that the work breathes.”

When Anderson set up the now prestigious Loewe Craft Prize, also in 2017, fashion still lagged snobbily behind on valuing anything associated with the artisanal and handcrafted. How that’s changed. That Anderson’s never accepted hierarchical distinctions between whichever creative practitioners set his visual instincts alight is the principle of unpredictability which constantly keeps fashion on its toes. His Houghton Hall weekend guest-list read like a Venn diagram of the people from disparate fields he’s connected – or blurred – since he reset Loewe as a “cultural brand” 11 years ago. Amongst the actor circle: Josh O’Connor, Kit Connor, Jeff Goldblum, Naomie Ackie, Dan Levy, Lesley Manville and Ruth Wilson. Amongst the artists: Anthea Hamilton and Rachel Jones. And in the circle of everyone who came as themselves, yet also dressed in Loewe (which was everyone): Tish Weinstock, Laura Burlington and Rose Cholmondeley herself. Manville and Goldblum even topped off the evening with an impromptu after-dinner turn at the piano.

Late into the night, as the dancing broke out, Manville chatted about the part she’s just wrapped in Luca Guadagnino’s new movie Queer, an adaptation of the William Burroughs novel. Jonathan Anderson has costumed it – post their last collaboration on Challengers. But this wasn’t a moment for talking about business – fashion or otherwise. “I have a house up the road,” Anderson shrugged, smiling. “This is the most ‘homely’ thing we’ve done, where old creative friends and new creatives could meet people they’d never [otherwise] meet.”