A new silhouette was born on the catwalk at Paris fashion week on Friday morning. Flat at the front, with a tight black panel running from the abdomen to the throat, it puffed out at the hips and lower belly around the curve of a deep scooped bodice.

That unfamiliar shape was presented three times, in forest green, cobalt blue and buttercream brocade, on the Loewe catwalk. Other novel shapes followed: three more gowns with tight black bodices, in cinnamon, cream and electric blue, covered the upper torso with a large off-the-shoulder ruffle, and sprouted out, in a cascade of brocade, at the mid-back. Later there were three dresses with drop shoulders, balloon sleeves and a drop waist at the side of which were two pannier-like points of fabric.

“I was looking at building new kinds of silhouettes that can work in an abstract world,” said the creative director, Jonathan Anderson, backstage. “I like the idea of creating a totemic look,” he continued, describing it as “a fashion silhouette – pushed and experimental”.

Loewe is a brand that is comfortable with weirdness. Its unconventional designs appeal to fashion heads who swoon over challenging shapes the way jazz fans thrill over certain configurations of grace notes. It is not, however, a brand that fills its catwalks with objets d’art designed to provoke thought but not to be worn, in the manner of a label such as Comme des Garçons.

Being the ultimate label for the craft-obsessed wealthy gallerist crowd, the Spanish leather house is a huge source of highly covetable handbags – the puzzle and the balloon have become modern classics – and is a reliable source of trends. In a few seasons’ time, will our eyes acclimatise and these shapes end up in our wardrobes? Stranger things have happened.

‘Engineered panels’ designed via a collaboration with Takuro Kuwata were embedded into gowns. Photograph: François Guillot/AFP via Getty Images

Further luxurious oddities came via a collaboration with the Japanese ceramicist Takuro Kuwata, whose “crater-like, meticulous” designs became “engineered panels” – as Anderson called them – that were embedded into gowns. He also made charms the size of a fist that looked like mutated flower heads, which hung from bags and around the neck of one of the models.

Anderson’s references were typically esoteric. Bridget Riley, he said, was one starting point, although not because of anything as straightforward as the visuals of her work, but in “the way in which, as a person, [she has] this kind of bluntness, this very harsh exterior”. The collection was also “an interpretation of a moment” – the time, after the second world war, in Spanish fashion when “fabric was limited, so they reappropriated things – patterns, not garments, were sold”. This led to Spanish dressmakers remaking Parisian designs in fabrics the original designers would never have planned to use, bringing “a new dynamic – it becomes flatter, maybe makes it more modern”.

There were plenty of more straight-up commercial pieces on the catwalk, too, such as the ruched flamenco bags, the covetable trench coats with thick tweed collars, camel-coloured trapeze coats with contrasting dove grey sleeves and neat black skirt suits with gold-buttoned jackets featuring subtle peplums. The shoes – kitten heels and loafers – looked like commercial winners, coming with bejewelled shoe clips.