LOEWE Designs Custom Handmade Work Coats for Prado Museum Conservators

When Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez visited the Museo Nacional del Prado's restoration workshop in 2025, they watched conservators work millimeters from the surface of Velázquez's Las Meninas and Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. What they observed, in their own words, was "depth of skill, patience and historical responsibility." The coats that followed are LOEWE's answer to that moment.

The Madrid luxury house has designed and is now supplying handmade lab coats to the Prado's restoration department, garments constructed specifically for the physical and technical demands of conservation work. The restorers who wear them daily have a name for them: "second skins."

The design brief was uncompromising. Every choice points back to function. The coats are built from dark, non-reflective materials chosen to prevent any glare from interfering with the surface of a painting, a non-negotiable requirement when a conservator's face is inches from a 16th-century canvas. Lightweight yet durable, the garments are engineered for long hours spent leaning into paintings and navigating scaffolding and studio tables. The standout technical detail is the enlarged pockets, reinforced with LOEWE leather and fitted with secure closures, sized deliberately to hold longer brushes so that restorers can move fluidly without tools shifting against or impeding the artwork. The entire design was developed in close dialogue with the Prado's conservators themselves.

LOEWE has committed to supplying new handmade coats to the restoration department each year, extending what is already a considered institutional relationship. In 2023, the LOEWE Foundation and the Prado launched "Writing the Prado," a program that invited writers to respond to the collection and published their work with Granta in Spanish. The new coats mark a different kind of contribution: less literary, entirely tactile, rooted in the same conviction that craft deserves recognition wherever it lives.

The Prado, which opened in 1819 with a few hundred paintings and now holds the world's most important collection of Spanish art, depends on its restoration team to keep that collection intact. Press images, photographed by Adriá Cañameras, show a conservator in a black LOEWE lab coat standing beside a painting in the restoration studio, tools and canvases filling the space around him. LOEWE's own framing for the project is characteristically spare: "a modest gesture of respect."

That modesty is earned. These coats will never appear on a runway or a sales floor. They exist entirely in service of work that happens quietly, behind closed doors, on art the world travels to see.