Rick Owens (Q5629)
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Rick Owens is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Rick Owens |
Rick Owens is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2004
intern
There were texts flying back and forth all over town. Is Rick really outside? It’s been a gloomy Paris Fashion Week, and it didn’t look like the rain would let up as showtime approached. In September, Rick Owens’s shows are usually held outside, staged on the monumental and highly cinematic terrace of the Palais de Tokyo. But then, by some stroke of luck, or maybe it was the tiny Ganesh figurine placed under the bench in Row B to ward off the clouds, the sun finally broke through. It was as if Cecil B. DeMille or Ken Russell, two of the movie directors Owens often quotes, were calling the shots from somewhere off-set.The gothy elegance and high camp of Owens’s sui generis aesthetic was built on the sweeping epics of old Hollywood, as he reminded this reporter backstage when the rain was still pelting down. The crumbling grandeur of the setting, the evocative hair and makeup by Duffy and Daniel Sallstrom, the otherworldliness of his models, the extremity of his clothes—when everything comes together it can leave the audience in raptures.This season, Owens changed the script. Instead of his usual cast of strange beauties, he invited students from Paris design schools to model. The motivation, he explained, was the unintended exclusivity of the show he held inside his Left Bank home last season. “My answer to that was, okay, we’ll invite everybody, and they can all be in the show,” he said. Students, unlike professional models who tend to the ever-more ectomorphic side of things, come in all shapes and sizes. “And the advantage, the plus side, of that is we get all of these body types to think about, and this is a great exercise for our company,” Owens said. “How do we make good stuff that fits all of these people? It’s so easy to do one size of everything.”The student cast made for the most diverse runway of the week (Paris, like the other fashion capitals, is backsliding on this issue). It was also the most inclusive of Owens’s career, and in that spirit well-aligned with the origin story he tells about leaving small-town rural California to join the “weirdos and freaks” of Hollywood Boulevard.Owens’s long narrow skirts with fishtail hems—their silhouettes lifted from old Hollywood movies of the ’30s—can sometimes be challenging, even for models who walk runways for a living. Throw in rain-slicked marble and some of the students struggled around the Palais de Tokyo’s vast spaces.
It’s hard to witness that kind of discomfort, and it compromised the come-one, come-all message of the show somewhat.
27 September 2024
“We need civilization.” Rick Owens’s reason for choosing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 Allegretto to soundtrack this show worked just as well to explain the whole spectacular shebang. In what should be an instant addition to our recent Most Unforgettable Shows Everpost, Owens this morning gave us 10 looks, each repeated 20 times, on a total of 200 models. It was an assembly, en masse: a mass. Most looks came out in groups of four models in five lines, walking as a phalanx. In one of the later looks a group of barrel-chested strongmen in Tanja Vidic=designed wrapped knit shirts, side-split shorts, and Geobasket sneakers acted as stern litter-bearers to a trio of contorting corseted gymnasts who flew a flag on which was printed two forearms, clasped together. Following the intimacy of last season’s Porterville shows at Owens’s home, this Hollywood sequel on the Palais de Tokyo esplanade was all spine-tingling grandeur.The show was both subjectively Rick-specific and like all true art much more broadly resonant. The personal stuff related to Owens’s transition from (relative) innocence to (relative) experience. While still at school in Porterville, he was influenced by his parents to adore the epically choreographed spectacles of Hollywood’s Golden Age: the kaleidoscopic choreography of Busby Berkeley and the swords and sandals splendor of Cecil B. DeMille. “Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra has always been my favorite idiosyncrasy,” said Owens. This show’s format reflected that epic inspiration: part mass tribute, part martial tattoo.With ceremony must come pomp: yet this pomp was radical. The 200 strong cast included many Owens regulars and some returned prodigals too: Jakob Jakobsson first walked for Owens 22 years ago. The majority of it was populated by those who had responded to the designer’s fashion school-issued open casting for anyone who wanted to join his “white satin army.” Explained Owens: “After I had the shows in the house last season, I realized it was so restrictive. I ended up excluding so many people. So I thought this season, we’ll invite everybody. And all the fashion students who are usually outside the fence, we’re going to have them in the show.” This, he added, made the show “a great exercise in thinking about body types. Because I’m thinking we have 10 looks that have to accommodate every single body. So how do we do that? How do we make it convincingly look like Rick Owens looks? And I think we came up with an answer to that.”
20 June 2024
We were back at Rick Owens’s Place du Palais Bourbon manse today. As he did during the January men’s season, Owens traded the bombast (his word) of his Palais de Tokyo shows for a setup moreintime.Owens’s singular, sweeping vision remains plenty big enough for the monumental Palais. Batwing shoulders scraped the earlobes, puffer vests swaddled torsos like protective shells, and leather-and-down boots that riffed on the inflatable rubber ones he put on his men’s runway evoked space costumes, as if his models might’ve just returned from a walk on the moon. The deep pink dress worn by Matières Fécales’s Hannah Rose Dalton looked like it had sprouted wings in back.But presenting chez lui—the former French Socialist Party headquarters and a space Owens has called “gentle, eternal, and raw” in the past, a fitting description—gave him a reason to focus on smaller gestures too. Like sweaterdresses that limned the body from neckline to platform shoes, with a porthole in back to show off a mesmerizing tattoo, say, and extremely elegant bias-draped dresses accessorized by shearling capes that reflected his obsession with ’30s references—hello, Jean Harlow.“It’s not easy for a lot of designers to be so autobiographical,” said Owens, and he wasn’t just referring to the fact that he struck the real-estate jackpot when he bought his home 20 years ago. As one of Paris’s last independent designers standing, he has fewer voices in his ear and independence to do as he pleases. This was a collection in which his gothic instincts duked it out with his inclination for goddess-y silhouettes—both sharpened during his outsider childhood—and both sides came out victors.“When I’m talking about Porterville”—his California hometown, whose name appeared in an Art Deco font marching across capes—“I’m talking about oppression and intolerance, and that’s a fact of life that’s never going to go away,” he said. “Part of my role in life is to counterbalance that with this cheerful perversity.”He pointed out that the shaggy mohair coats with shearling swatches adding definition to their shoulders were modeled on army-blanket versions he made in his early days as a designer on Hollywood Boulevard, the first place where he could be who he wanted to be. Resurrecting them was less an act of nostalgia, an overused tendency in fashion at the moment, than a gesture of hope.
“I’m offering other options than the narrow, strict, almost cruel aesthetic standards that we’re bombarded with every day,” he said. “It’s not an aggressive war, it’s a gentle teasing: Let’s blur the lines. When you blur the lines aesthetically, it makes other attitudes about acceptance blur.” The online trolls are probably beyond fixing, but this show was a reminder to other designers, independent and not, of the power and persuasion of fierce authenticity.
29 February 2024
Like all of us, when Rick Owens catches a flight he is obliged to transit through airport retail. This does not sit right with him. He said: “We are herded through that gauntlet of a very specific beauty and aspiration: of a certain kind of sexuality, a certain kind of face shape, a certain kind of body shape—and it’s unattainable.”For Owens this experience epitomizes contemporary mass luxury and what he observes as an intolerance of difference that is the result of its function to sell a dream of sameness—a standard. “I call that standard ‘airport beauty.’ And I oppose it. And when I wear my platform boots as I go through the airport it is to oppose airport beauty. This is my resistance.”Not unlike laughing at a bully, deploying absurdity is one of the most potent ways to subvert enforced conformity. Which leads us to why Owens opened his house in Paris for his menswear show this morning. “That standard is dishonest… but this is a fully resolved Rick Owens experience. It can’t get any more honest or authentic than this. And that was my basic urge this season: to be sincere.” He added: “I’m trying to participate in and contribute to all alternative beauties: to bombastic beauty, sometimes, but also kind and soft beauty.”The collection was entitled Porterville, after the California town in which he was raised. “Bleak,” is how he describes it. “I remember it for its intolerance—although the intolerance I experienced was mild, obviously, compared to any intolerance that we’re seeing today.” By contrast this house—which Michele Lamy secured when she and Owens moved to Paris just over two decades ago—is a sanctuary. And today Owens threw open its doors because, he said, “I want to be a haven. A force of anti-intolerance.”This house was reputedly once an office of Francois Mitterand’s Socialist Party (before it went bankrupt). Owens honored creative collectivism today by inviting multiple collaborators to share his platform(s). The fantastically insectoid inflatable rubber boots that puckered and popped as the models walked in them were by London based designer Straytukay (which is also his handle). Owens said he saw another Londoner, Leo Prothman, posting his take on Rick’s Kiss boots—the airport beauty shoe—and asked him to add them to today’s collection. Challenging to manufacture but fantastic to watch were the jackets and pants made by rubber couturier Matisse Di Maggio.
The family of Owens models—which was given one of the most encouragingly and empathetically intelligent pre-show briefings by casting director Angus Munro that I can ever remember witnessing—were this time joined by the Russian trans artist (and exile) Gena Marvin.As well containing absurdist subversions of the conventional, Owens’s collection was also a form of personal insulation against the bitchy and the banal. The almost ecclesiastically spiked shoulders of his duvet jackets, the airbag embrace of his balled body wrappings, and the beastly toughness of his fluffed jumpsuits and capes both projected and protected character. There seemed to be a story about the archetypes of adolescence narrated through the proposal then distortion of the totemic perfecto. There was also an unusual appearance for his Geobasket sneaker that further hinted at the audience Owens was maybe most keenly thinking of: everyone who is currently stuck in their own Porterville.Outside Owens’s window a crowd was forming for the next of what the venue’s reduced size demanded was a multiple-performance show. The statue they gathered under was of Justice.
18 January 2024
Diana Ross was on the soundtrack singing “I still believe in love” at today’s Rick Owens’s show, but it turns out that a Björk concert is what got his juices flowing for spring. “During her show,” Owens said, “I thought ‘oh, this is so positive,’ and I felt kind of dumb for being so gloomy all the time.”Did Paris’s Prince of Darkness find the light? That might be overstating things, but the opening looks did feel unexpected. Yes, the models wore contacts that turned the whites of their eyes black, but beyond the otherworldly special effects were three of the most elegant looks seen on the Paris runways this season. Fitted close to the body and perched on top of impossibly high platform sandal-boots, they had the look of 1930s screen goddesses on steroids. It feels strange to use this word in the context of Rick Owens, but they were downright pretty.The deep reds and mauve-ish pinks kept the positive vibes flowing. Owens may prefer to use shades of black and gray, but he’s always had an eye for color, and it was on display in a look that combined a dusty pink peak-shouldered shrunken leather motorcycle jacket and one of the show’s many long skirts with ultra-high waists and mini trains in caramel leather.Flowing is the right word for the silk capes that he designed with rounded hems to catch the wind and billow like parachutes. They were a sensational sight as the models made their slow perambulations around the Palais de Tokyo plaza. Owens was after lightness too with the accordion pleated tulle and organza “donuts” he modeled on the circular poufs he introduced last season in heavier metallic fabrics. “They’re like sugar candy,” he said.Walking through the fuchsia pink and acid yellow fog and showers of rose petals, the final five models wore loose-fitting jumpsuits that conjured hazmat suits, not least of all because of their coordinating sheer veils. After that Björk concert, Owens may have considered joy “a moral obligation,” but he can’t help his own tendencies. Other shapes rematerialized alongside the donuts: the collars that soared past the ears, the shoulder pads like something out of a gladiator game. Owens sees the big, bad world the way it is, and that’s why we love him.
28 September 2023
Out. In. Out. BANG! Every eight or so seconds, one of Rick Owens’s models would walk past. Not invariably but mostly, their silhouettes were like bowties: out and wide at the shoulder and ankle and cinched inwards at the middle. As Owens observed from between his mega-brimmed baseball cap backstage, even portlier people could work the look—those pants sat high to create a center-point at the base of the sternum, north of the paunch.And then came that bang: also every eight seconds or so, fireworks would detonate from one of six towering rigs set in the Palais de Tokyo pool and fill the space with swirls of purple and yellow smoke. The smell of cordite was in the air. Ash rained down. The scene seemed simultaneously apocalyptic and ecstatic, some gothic Pompeii, fiddling while Rome burns.Owens played it straight from beneath that brim backstage. The IMF and World Bank were meeting in Paris today at a summit aiming to recalibrate the global response to climate change and natural disaster. Bain & Company last year predicted global luxury spend will grow by around 25% by 2025. Said Owens: “It’s human nature that’s dictating what’s happening. But I don’t understand exactly why: Is it a response to fear, relief at survival after Covid?” Personally, I think he was giving the hive too much credit: luxury is lovely, delicious, denial.Louis Vuitton was not the only brand to Get Lucky climate-wise this season. Just as on Pont Neuf, the rain receded shortly before this outdoor show too. The collection was entitled Lido, after Owens’s home across the water from Venice from where he streamed several almost audience-free shows during the pandemic. He said: “This morning when it was raining I was almost hoping it kept raining during that show. That no one would turn up. Then we’d have that same vibe, that emptiness, which is what I loved about those shows. It was like ‘even under these circumstances, we’re going to forge ahead and run it even if nobody shows up. We’re still gonna do this. Because we’re unstoppable.” He said he and Michele had watched Diana Ross’s rain-lashed 1983 concert earlier this morning to prepare for just such an eventuality.Owens’s simultaneously ancient and futuristic Italian-crafted riff on Victorian stricture, structure, and suture—those hard shoulders against the coiling soft folds of draped silk organza—contrasted with a more primitive habit: goth-phase Flintstones fare.
There were high top versions of his leg-brace boots and “brutalist concrete sandals.” Ah, concrete shoes: Owens again tried to divine what’s pushing us to party. “Maybe it’s just to celebrate while we can. Is that what people are feeling?” Arguably, the designer was having his cake and eating it; yet this was mindful consumption, contradiction with a cause, fashion with a position. Bang! It was beautiful, for the damned.
22 June 2023
Tommy Cash, the Estonian rapper, was wearing a prosthetic vagina and not much else. You felt for him, with his bare ass on the hard metal bench, but he wasn’t even the most outrageously outfitted person in the audience. Rick Owens attracts a proudly strange breed of followers: extroverts with a flare for the extravagant. His grandkids were in the crowd, too.The real action was on the runway, though. This season it was elevated, and as the models made their slow procession around the Palais de Tokyo, fog machines blowing beneath them, they looked impossibly large, towering over us like goth goddesses.There were no half measures here. Not with the grilled platform boots, not with the contact lenses that turned some of the models’ entire eyes black, and not with the proportions of the clothes, which included collars that arched up around the head like bat wings and a whole lot of cowl and ‘donut’ poufs draped from the shoulders and encircling the torso. “Conditions in the world being the way they are, it’s kind of a delicate time,” Owens said pre-show, alluding to the war in Ukraine. “And I was thinking I wanted to do something earnest, and more formal and more deliberate. I kept thinking of the word exquisite.”In pursuit of the exquisite he leaned into matte sequins, not in the gaudy red carpet colors you associate with embellishments like that, but in more muted tones of lime green, art deco pink, and bordeaux; and not, of course, in the fishtail silhouettes that seem to multiply during awards season, but in those donut duvets and inflated draped miniskirts.Those sequins aside, Owens was working with humble materials. The cutaway skirts that exposed the hip bone on one side and trailed down the runway in a long train on the other, and the dresses sliced to the armpit? Those were ribbed knits made from GRS certified recycled cashmere. And those decaying and fraying half-skirts and coats? That was indigo denim from Japan, which had been treated with a mineral wash and shredded by lasers. Extraordinary effects out of relatively simple materials.“That’s my job,” said Owens, “to present the most excellent aesthetics I can. I know I’m commonly referred to as dark. I think no, I’m just realistic and I’m acknowledging the beauty and horror of the world. There are some people that prefer something more sugar-coated, and that’s fine, I don’t criticize that. But I prefer something with more nuance.” He had a front row full of people on the same wavelength.
2 March 2023
Rick Owens has become the Prada of Paris. His is the show in this city that we most collectively anticipate. It is also the show that most consistently rewards that anticipation. Today, Owens went Victorian. This was not in honor of Victoria Beckham, who was (along with David) a surprise addition to the congregation. Instead he wanted to imbue his collection with an “elaborate modesty,” partially drawn from the British queen’s 19th-century reign. Said the designer: “It’s a Victorian silhouette. There’s a prudishness. We remember that era so much for suppressing sensuality, but doing it in such an elaborate way that you couldn’t help but think about it.”Cloaks, skirts (some almost pencil), tightly gathered parkas, and voluminous pyramid-paneled shearlings that had a ladylike grandeur, heightened by the handbags, were the chief protagonists in Owens’s pivot to would-be primness. A further act of withdrawal, of self-containment, was played out in the “donut” padded pieces—wearable soft furnishings—into which some models were inserted. “That’s me trying to reduce garments to the simplest shape I could. They’re literally duvet donuts. They’re like the fog machine of clothes—dumb and super-simple.”There was much more in this collection to relish, including many fine denim and cow-hide spike shouldered jackets, and the increasingly amazing pieces—this time oversized bombers—that Owens’s team is crafting from pirarucu. Because the runway was raised around a meter or so we got an eyeful of the footwear, which included a powerful new orthopedic variation of his glamorous platform boots. However the central tension rested in Owens’s urge to consider modesty in a collection that was as typically laden with sexuality as ever. Backstage Owens was the first designer I’ve heard mention the Russian invasion of Ukraine this season, before confessing a sense of unease about promoting a carnival of consumption during a land war in Europe. He added: “And that’s all I can think about. But, you know, the houses in Paris represent the best of the fashion industry and it’s their job to present excellence—I get it.”There is always a sly irony secreted in this designer’s gothic bombast, a space where he posits questions despite, or more likely because of, the lack of an easy answer. And there is a highly autobiographical element too. He said: “I’m indulging in the exercise of taking my misdirected uncertain youth and reshaping it as a 61 year old man at the height of my powers.
Being able to revisit that and create what I wanted life to be then, it’s so fun.” This comment led me to propose that Tyrone Dylan, who has now opened so many of Rick’s shows, has become a sort of personified cipher for Owen’s idealized youth. “Absolutely! Tyrone is like an idealization of that kind of vitality that I don't think I ever actually really had—although I probably had moments of it. But I’m able to really project it on him. And also, you know, having him open each men’s show it’s sending a message about values; about not having things be so disposable. It’s about loyalty, about family, and about how my personal life is completely connected to what I put out there.” Heart on sleeve.
19 January 2023
Backstage after his show Rick Owens was talking about travel. He hasn’t been doing much of it. After all, “What location could possibly be worth going through all that airport stuff?” he asked. “You’re channeled through this gauntlet of perfume ads promoting these very specific values of privilege, aspiration, the jet set; a very certain kind of makeup; a very certain kind of come-hither sexuality. It feels like an assault. And I realized what I’ve always been doing is, I’ve been saying, ‘we have this other way of being over here. We have this other kind of thing that can happen.’”The otherness that Owens peddles—as unusual as it might seem to strangers who stumble upon him at the airport—has turned his show into one of the top tickets at Paris Fashion Week. Today Cher slipped in just as the music was starting, but the people-watching always abounds, his diehards towering over the rest of the crowd in their grilled platform boots. They’re the sort of “self-invented creatures” Owens talked about backstage. “They’re a relief,” he said, “because you see them and you think, ‘Oh, there are other possibilities.’”With the sun beaming down on the Palais de Tokyo and the fountain going full tilt, those possibilities started gliding down the marble stairs. Owens’s materials this season were remarkable. The translucent rubbery latex look of the opening pieces? Cowhides collected from the food industry that are treated with natural glycerin to give them their suppleness and sheer quality, “like wearing gelatinous fruit roll-ups,” the show notes elucidated. The spliced stripes of the voluminous numbers at the end were actually lacquered denim. From a distance, they might have been eel.Equally as singular is what Owens did with those materials: draping sinuous dresses with vestigial sleeves like furled wings and long trailing hems, exaggerating the arches of the shoulders of jackets up to and past the chin, creating odd, yet compelling volumes. The show’s many zip-front bombers were paneled like scarab carapaces. The ancient Egyptians considered the scarab a sign of renewal and rebirth, which is relevant. Egypt is a county Owens likes well enough to have lifted his travel ban earlier this year. He named this show Edfu, after a temple on the west bank of the Nile.The bell-shaped frilled jackets that he repeated in solid brights and vaguely art deco-ish diamond patterns were a novel development, a shape Owens devotees might raise a skeptical eyebrow at.
Ditto the prodigious mantles made from hundreds of yards of recycled tulle, like something, perhaps, out of a perfume ad. But he leaves room for sweetness. “When you’re proposing more options aesthetically people open their minds in other ways too,” he said. “They become more empathetic.” Who can look askance at a proposal like that?
29 September 2022
Armageddon. Apocalypse. End of Days. This Rick Owens show was the end of the world. Or at least that is what the three 2-meter-ish across orbs that were set alight by technicians, slowly lifted by crane high above us, and then dropped to a sizzling impact in the Palais de Tokyo fountain were there to represent. Ruminating during the line-out pre-show, Owens said: “The fireballs are flaming suns, arcing across the sky, and crashing to the ground. But I did it on repeat because it happens over and over.”He was referring to human fear of our extinction—whether through war, pestilence, or other generationally specific worst case scenario. “'I’m always trying to reassure myself that whatever is happening in the world right now—whatever conflict or crisis or discomfort—it’s happened before. And somehow goodness has always triumphed over evil, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here now.”Something else that happens on repeat, way less cataclysmically, are remarkable Rick Owens shows. This was another. His level is so high and his language so distinct—despite the tribute acts—that sometimes you almost wish he’d deliver a dud just to cleanse our collective palate.Promisingly for those looking for a dud, this show sprang from one of the cheesiest templates in the book: It was a what-I-did-on-holiday collection. Owens had been in Egypt and named the collection Edfu, after the site of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus. However the only literal souvenirs of that journey on the runway today were the three top-to-toe tulle looks near the end, “because when I was there I was wishing I had a mosquito net caftan.” Instead his time in Egypt had got Owens thinking about how its cultural aesthetic had been revived again and again across the millennia since its inventors turned to dust.Owens tweaked his own codes today, introducing a flared-upper version of his killer platform boot. Another novelty was technical wear, delivered in the loose pants, shirts, and inverted jackets cut in gray ripstop nylon shot through with Dyneema, a fiber Owens said was “apparently one of the strongest in the world. I find it reassuring.”A few pieces were produced with Paradoxe, a Parisian label that unweaves surplus or vintage denim and then applies the threads to other denim pieces to create a richly textured effect. “It’s almost like lace,” said Owens. There was an otherworldly jerkin in iridescent purple made of pirarucu, a food by-product of Amazonian fish skin.
Owens purists might be reluctant to embrace his rare forays into punchy color, but the eruption of yellow, pink, green, and that purple here provided extra visual texture even beyond the steaming meteorites. The volumes, especially in the shoulder, were on the up again. For Rick Owens, this was just another judgment day.
23 June 2022
The fog machines at Rick Owens were pumping the scent of his new collaboration with Aesop into his show space at the Palais de Tokyo. Models also carried thuribles, modern mechanized versions of the censers that priests use to dispense incense in church. Owens was a Catholic school boy. In a pre-show interview, he talked about his upbringing: “thinking and talking about morality in school all day and studying Cecil B. DeMille’s 1930s Art Deco black-and-white interpretation of the bible,” by night. “That’s what formed me,” he said with a laugh. “I’m so transparent.”Owens was after something a bit more solemn following his January men’s show, whose lamp helmets and zip-all-the-way-to-the-hairline hoods look aggressive a month-and-a-half later amidst the onset of war. He quoted from his press release: “During times of heartbreak, beauty can be one of the ways to maintain faith.” Swapping the anarchic for the elegiac, the acid bass artist Eprom was out too, and in his place Owens chose Gustav Mahler’sSymphony No. 5. Someone more knowledgeable about music than me said that Mahler composed it after a hemorrhage nearly killed him. The symphony also soundtracksDeath in Venice.There’s a connection there. Owens spent the pandemic in Venice, which isn’t far from his Italian factory. But analyzing and explaining his motives here is a little beside the point. This was a beauty of a Rick Owens collection, starting with a full complement of evening dresses, including a few Oscars red carpet contenders in “dusty sequins,” draped with evocative asymmetry from the shoulders and featuring collapsing volumes at the back or around the hips.Cropped and shrunken jackets and lean and languid bias-cut skirts caught a bit of the Old Hollywood glamour also seen at Saint Laurent this week, but these weren’t in Cecil B. DeMille’s black-and-white. Owens combined peach and apricot, and a whole spectrum of oranges. The yellow and aqua blue pairings inevitably conjured visions of the Ukrainian flag.In a season of strong outerwear, few pieces can rival Owens’s for audacity. There were puffer jackets whose sleeves extended to the ground, duvet jackets that curled around the torso like nautilus shells, and “Theda Bara” parkas with goat fur trim that look like commercial hits in the making. “I’ve been hearing people being apologetic for presenting fashion right now,” Owens said. “We’re an industry that has to support a lot of people, there’s no reason to make an excuse for that.
We are people who express the best that aesthetics has to offer. And that’s of great social and cultural value.” He won’t get any arguments from this corner.
3 March 2022
“I’m not the kind of designer that says, ‘I just went to China and this is my inspiration,’” prefaced Rick Owens as he sat on a staircase in the Palais de Tokyo. “But I just went to Egypt, and they have those shapes, those beautiful shapes, and I thought if I did that as a Dan Flavin helmet, that would be so cool.” By combining the headwear profiles of Ancient Egypt with some adroitly applied Philips light bulbs, Owens created headpieces that doubled as lamps—“they’re all free-standing.” He named the collection Strobe.Those lamp-helmets will probably overshadow the rest of this collection, but it is worth illuminating. From Tyrone’s metal meshed torso to the mask-era zipupable hoods, it was a presentation that wallowed wantonly in the hormonally driven. The on-and-off-again lighting meant that much of the detail—the goat hair, the duchesse, the patchwork shearling—was suppressed from the eye: what was left were silhouettes. These were alien masculine, wonderfully unconventional and diverse, and ranged from Owen’s originally parodic mega shoulder to whorled arthropod curlings rendered in piumino. “Men are pigs,” said Owens flatly.Sitting on that stairwell, he also considered John Berger-esque ways of self-seeing, self-editing, and being seen in relation to social media—RickTok?—and hinted at an NFT project to come. He compared the Land Art of the 1970s to the emerging meta-stuff, but remained refreshingly detached. Much more passionately he dug deep into the Made In Italy provenance of his pieces, dishing detail on the family companies that fashion his progressive fashion with artisanal techniques. The great upside of this, he hinted, is that it advertises traceability. “That’s information that’s important. And I like being in a company that is talking about that, but which is also saying ‘We’re not that good at it, but we’re trying.’”
20 January 2022
On a gloriously sunny morning, Rick Owens returned in splendour to his grand open air stomping ground at the Palais de Tokyo. It was a comeback that felt like a ritual celebration of survival—and a show of strength—both intensely personal and collectively symbolic. And who else but the high priestess Michèle Lamy, Owens’s spouse, oracle-in-chief and eternal inspiration, to head the triumphal procession?Plumes of white smoke poured from the central fountain. Two black-robed women standing high on a Deco rooftop a hundred feet above scattering something to the winds. It turned out to be “dried jasmine leaves gathered from plants on my Lido terrace, in memory of the Covid shows we had there,” wrote Owens in his show notes.A little earlier he’d explained how, for four seasons at home in Venice, “we showed, performed this ceremony in front of nobody on the beach. And it was the most bonding, beautiful thing. There was a melancholy to it, but there was also kind of this defiance: that we’re going to do our very best under the circumstances. That we’re going to strive for excellence, under any threat.”Going through that period emboldened and sharpened his philosophical resolve about why and how he would make his re-entry to Paris. Amid all the soul-searching about the raison d’être of fashion, its wastefulness and its justifications for its existence, and measuring that against all the trauma and adversity of these times, he had no doubt: this was not to be any timid or apologetic comeback. “I always considered myself somebody that would do anything in the pursuit of beauty, and to maintain a certain standard of beauty—and that was the meaning of life. So we have to flex here,” he said.Carpe diem, then, and on with a spectacle that pushed everything in the Owens arsenal of accomplishments to its creative best. Who else can signal the siren glamor of old Hollywood draping, sculpt wildly freeform shapes from haute couture materials and fuse it all together into such a modern armory of erotic power? If we’re talking about sex and body-exposure this season—and everyone is—then Rick Owens is the past-master of all that. The empowering art of his cutaways to skin never looked more faultlessly engineered, wired into bra-tops with no central fixing, structured into stretch bodysuits glimpsed through sheer layers and multi-strapped into thigh-high gladiatorial robo-boots.
There was a grandeur to it as well: caped dresses with the solemn dignity of robes; his vast-shouldered leather jackets; the off-handedly cool ’30s elegance of his trailingly beautiful bias-cut skirts and dresses.Rick Owens has been doing this a very long time. Scroll back through Vogue Runway history and you find that his first show, planned for New York, had to be cancelled because of the 9/11 attacks. Over 20 years he has always faced—and reflected—the sturm and drang of the many political and human adversities that history has thrown in our way. That’s what forged the ultimate triumph of experience and imagination that brought him back to the runway at the end of the momentous year of 2021. It was an ambitious, cathartic, uplifting and—yes—beautiful thing to witness; true to the times, and above all true to himself.Quite humbly, he put it this way: “I concentrate on making good stuff that has value, that people want to buy and that is worth it. And that is so recognizably me that you can’t get it anywhere else. I was thinking: that is the right thing to do.”
30 September 2021
It was 260 days ago that Rick Owens presented his first collection of the COVID-hiatus near his home on the Lido di Venezia—a mighty-but-melancholy fall-cloud-shrouded show that was chiefly inspired by Mann’s Death in Venice. Eight months on, the Man this afternoon held his fourth and last show here, drawing a final line in the sand to mark the end of this excellent Venetian mini-Owens-epoch and augur the rebirth of something like before that will not remain the same.To be precise, the lines in the sand were mostly traced by the stacked soles of Owens’s platform boots, which were cut down this season from thigh-high to mid-calf and outfitted with special side pockets in which to stash mini fog machines (emitting purportedly non-toxic, sustainable fog) and create a vivid vapor trail. The models walked the shoreline of the beach directly in front of the Excelsior Hotel, whose cabana-renting guests watched enthusiastically, creating an accidentally serendipitous Martin Parr–meets–Helmut Newton backdrop. A few feet offshore were installed four powerful waterjets, which spurted joyful blasts of seawater up, up, up into the flawless blue sky: “ejaculation,” said Owens, “is joy.”Those vast and joyful ejaculations aside, the chief conceit here were the three sizes of portable fog machines after which this collection, “Fogachine,” was named. “I fixated on the whole fog thing because we are entering a period of celebration. And I just love fog in its ambiguity. It’s got religious overtones, it’s got amyl nitrate overtones, it’s got stadium rock concert overtones...and they’re all these celebrations of everybody getting together to reach a different level of experience, a different supernatural level.”As the twangily twisted techno soundtrack by Mochipet fired up, the models—lead by Tyrone “Tadzio” Dylan Susman—began their promenade. Susman’s boxily baggy pant (which speedily became significantly sand-contaminated) was a key silhouette piece for the season, and was worn by him under a panel-slashed eco-cotton bodysuit. Both were undyed and off-white, a highly unusual hue for Owens, as was much of the collection that followed—a natural, softer-than-often touch the designer meant to reflect a softer-than-usual sentiment beneath.As he said: “I sense this moment of excess coming, that I can’t really participate in because I’m not an excessive guy anymore.
But anyway, I had recently said that I thought we had learned some humility in the recent past—however I don’t think we did. But I am suggesting that we still can, and that is what this collection is about. It’s softer. It’s hedonistic, but I hope it’s a responsible, gentle, nice hedonistic. Although of course I am always looking on the dark side. And you know, I was able to satisfy all my appetites and I would never wish for anybody else to be deprived. But I am a little leery of the intensity that is going to come.”
24 June 2021
“I would never put something on the runway that no one would wear,” said Rick Owens before his first show dedicated to menswear. He doesn't want men to look stupid, which is why his motto is “Don't be a dick.” Still, the presentation itself was polarizing in its insistent reiteration of Owens’ unyielding aesthetic. "Celebrate the freak, create the creature" are equally words he lives by. The influence he name-checked for his collection was the late New York performance artist Klaus Nomi, famous for his operatic sci-fi cabaret. His soundtrack was the music that accompanies the final scene of the opera Salome. And the models embodied the anti-glamour Owens exalts. Like warriors in the wasteland, they stomped stony-faced, hair streaming or skulls shaved, in his layers of black.The numbingly noir nature of such a presentation can distract from the clothes, but Owens offered singularly strong pieces, in proportions that were much more accessible than in the past. His skins, in particular, stood out. His raw materials have always been his strength: here, for instance, in a floating gazar coat, a fur-trimmed alligator vest, a techno trench, and a glazed military jacket. As sepulchral as his shows are, Owens also has a hearty sense of humor, plus a passion for the band Kiss. It was no surprise to see echoes of Gene Simmons in the stegosaurus points of a parka.This review was originally published onmen.style.comon January 23, 2009. It has been added to Vogue Runway in June 2021 as a part ofThe Lost Season.
11 June 2021
Rick Owens was just waking up from a nap an hour and a half ahead of showtime. You can do that when your show is on the beach across the street from your house. Fall 2021 is season three on the Venice Lido for Owens and his small Italian team, four if you include the men’s video he made last July. “Doing these shows without an audience is becoming a kind of private ceremony because we’re sort of doing it for ourselves,” he said on a FaceTime call. “There’s a sweetness to it.”Sweetnessis not the word that came to mind watching the livestream of the show on his website.Cinematic, otherworldly, andsuperheroicare more like it. Owens’s models looked like a fabulous troop of aliens whose spaceship wrecked in the fog of the Lido, and rather than send up a distress signal they decided to make the best of it by throwing a disco couture rave.As at his men’s show in January, staged the day after the U.S. inauguration, today he was talking about the fear, anxiety, and rage triggered by the “the forces that almost won the American election.” He said, “The menace of that is still there, and that disturbs me and it’s something to be really vigilant about.” He won’t hear any arguments on that subject from this writer. But to focus on his politics and his pronouncements risks eliding the obvious: that Owens is a designer of cinematic, otherworldly, and yes, superheroic vision. When Chloé Zhao gets her second Marvel movie, she should hire him.Owens has channeled his disturbance into a collection that synthesizes the comfortwear of the pandemic—bodysuits, knits, the ubiquitous puffer—with the grandeur of haute couture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more glamorous gown this season than this show’s closing look, a fully sequined ivory hourglass stunner with a sculptural, asymmetric neckline and a single sleeve that was worn with a black gauntlet and matching mask.Equally cool were the couture-ish things he did with the more would-be-plebeian attire: the puffer capes that looked like protective carapaces, the coats with power shoulders that, as he so poetically put it in his notes, “turned the body into an architectural bulldozer,” the shredded denim twisted and draped into a sinuous platform-scraping dress. Every rave needs sequins. Owens’s sequins came via over-the-shoulder thongs worn with cashmere bodysuits.
On the subject of underthings, the pentagram briefs from the January men’s show reappeared here wrapped around evening clutches, the implication being that these alien females had handled the “unhinged male aggression” that those briefs signified. Is that reading too much into things? Probably, but that’s absolutely part of the thrill of a Rick show. Here’s what Owens had to say about it: “During times of strife, you gotta step up.”
4 March 2021
Rick Owens is on the side of the angels. To stay there he remains highly sensitive to the dark. Striding down the seafront past a parked 1965 Ford Mustang toward a temple-like ossuary and church, Rick Owens’s cast today resembled disciples of some sexily sepulchral masculine order stepping out to face their demons. Leather bodysuits—the latest chapter in his onesie narrative—sometimes enveloped, and sometimes hung half-worn as if flayed. Hooded habits came in recycled cashmere, waste plastic, or quilted material. You couldn’t make it out on the video, but the star on his newly Rick-ified Converse Chuck Taylors had been reworked into a pentagram, as had the traditionally Y-front fly on the organic cotton tighty-whities worn above cowskin thigh-highs. The oversized shoulders on slashed-arm overcoats and crop-top bomber jackets were meant to “mock male conservatism” in a collection Owens noted was an exploration of “male suppressed rage on every side of the moral divide.”Down the phone, Owens confessed that he’d thought twice about facing rage in a collection presented just as four years of American carnage seemed to be over. “I thought this morning, Does it feel a little tone deaf because now all of a sudden everything has shifted? Now that it’s all about optimism? But that dark element has not disappeared. And the fact that it came so close, this moral war, is horrifying.”Owens’s clothes are fundamentally playful provocations to conservatism and complacency. As well as a determination to remain uncomplacent about male aggression more broadly, Owens is sensitive to his own capacity for it. He said, “I’m always conscious of my own aggression. And the older that I get, I feel like I should have reached a level of serenity that I just haven’t; I get impatient, I get itchy, I snap at people sometimes. Aggression is something that I’m fascinated with because I’m constantly conscious of wrestling with it, personally. And I think that that’s true of every man.”Jackets with inbuilt gloves and masks were equipped for care of both the self and others through distance-dressing. And alongside those satyr-appropriate thigh-highs and knowingly titillating bodysuits were garments designed for a broader constituency; examples included supple hooded shearlings, specially woven Japanese selvedge denim jeans, the Converse, and meandering olive cashmere knitwear. Owens said, “There’s a lot of regular-guy clothes in this collection, more than I have had in the past, maybe.
I like that mix because it suggests more tolerance. I’m trying not to alienate or exclude.”This second show staged near Owens’s summer home on the Lido near Venice showcased a convincing interaction with the regular-guy world as passing locals watched the collection unfold. Showing here, said Owens, has become “like a private ritual” for him and his team because of that lack of a formal physical audience. The result was a film simultaneously intimate and grandiose. Owens observed, “I always kind of comfort myself that the world has always existed with darkness and light. And for some reason, there always seems to be enough goodness in humanity to just balance it out, and just to keep everything going. It’s close…but hope springs eternal.” By remaining sensitive to that human chiaroscuro through the creation of garments that subvert its darker shades, Owens contributes to the light.
21 January 2021
“Let’s get biblical.” Rick Owens was FaceTiming from the Venice Lido, on the street that separates the Lido Casino from his favorite beach. He was watching the rehearsal for his spring 2021 women’s show, whose name, Phlegethon, he ripped from Greek mythology. Phlegethon was one of the five rivers of the Underworld, less famous than the Styx, but just as deadly. In Dante’sInferno,it was a river of blood that boiled souls, Attila the Hun’s and Alexander the Great’s included.You know where this is going. Even at the remove of the Lido—a two-hour drive from his Italian factory that he describes as completely quiet and provincial—Owens has a preternatural gift for tapping into the collective unconscious and amplifying it in the most propulsive and cinematic of ways. He sees the hellscape that is the current world situation—COVID-19, irreversible global warming, the U.S. presidential race, you name it—and responds with defiant bravado.In his press notes, he used the words “grim gaiety.” On the phone he referred to the way French women’s hats became more extreme during World War II as a subtle way of taunting their German occupiers. “We can think of clothes as frivolous or we can think of clothes as one of our first steps towards communicating with other people, which is a powerful thing,” Owens said. “Clothes don’t change the world, but they’re part of an attitude that influences the way people think. They’re signifiers, little messages people send to each other, like those hats.”This collection was prettier than some recent Rick shows, with its preponderance of bubblegum pink and red, its many flowing sheer fabrics, and the sparkly “beach bustles” he knotted above hips. But it was fiercer too, with Tina Turner inThunderdomeshoulders, and vests and leather cutoffs that looked like they could double as tactical gear. The models’ masks might’ve been the most obvious signifiers. Now that they’re a necessary accessory, every runway without them is a missed opportunity. “A mask kind of works with my clothes,” Owens said, “but it’s also a vote. It’s also promoting consideration of others. You might not believe in a mask, but it sends the right message.” As it happens, the collection’s sexy fishnet dresses were upcycled from the masks models wore in his fall 2012 show.The Casino piazza setting—his “backyard,” more or less— was even more monumental than Owens’s usual Paris venue, the Palais de Tokyo.
Owens called this a “bare-bones” production, put on by a “skeleton crew,” but there were smoke machines and strobe lights placed inside the doors of the shuttered casino. The way they pulsed was positively Kubrickian. Models strode through the fog in thigh-high platform boots that the designer dubbed “waders”—Venice is sinking, after all, and don’t forget that river of blood.The fascination of an Owens show is that as dark and disturbing as his theme may be—as hellish as we all feel—he inevitably leaves you galvanized. “In the face of adversity,” he said, music pounding in the background, “we have to pull ourselves up.”
1 October 2020
Titled “Phlegethon,” after the river of molten fire that Dante said swept the agonized damned through the seventh circle, this collection was previewed by Rick Owens from his place at the Venice Lido. Down the Zoom he appeared moist and was topless: “I just got out of the water. It is beautiful.Delicious.”Both in Italy and France, the Big Picture has been shifting in a more positive direction of late—working upstream, not drifting down—and this was, Owens said, one of the contributing factors to a sudden change of direction the day before this video presentation. Shortly after he was released from “le confinement” Owens traveled to Italy where he made not one but two collection videos. The first was for “Performa,” the fall 2020 collection he showed in January but whose distribution had since been shut down. The second, a little later, was for this collection, already mostly planned. Owens’s original scheme was to offer “Performa” once more at this digital Fashion Week.He explained: “At the time it seemed like the smart and kind and rational and logical thing to do. I thought, ‘I can kind of press reset and start doing this from now on.’ So that was my plan. And then yesterday morning I changed my mind…because for better or for worse, the world has become accustomed to being able to see everything at the same time—the preview of what’s coming and imagery of what is available right now. My plan would have been to only be providing what was available right now, and not having what was coming. And after a while that was going to start feeling old. We’re used to seeing something that is fresh out of the oven. And I don’t think we can go back. The genie’s out of the bottle…it might seem logical, but emotionally it just doesn’t make sense.”Owens’s team worked all last night—“I gave my people a heart attack”—to edit the video you see here of Owens fitting and styling Tyrone Dylan Susman in this new (but auto-Owens referential) collection. The format, especially when compared to the epic sweep of an Owens runway show, is, Owens agreed, intimate. He said: “Doing something spectacular and confrontational and transgressive would not have been the right thing to do now…so I showed the real action of us working on the collection, which I thought was the most genuine expression that I could come up with.”
10 July 2020
Gwendoline Christie, who might top seven feet in Rick Owens’s Kiss platform boots, looked agog with delight at the designer’s show this afternoon. Where else but at Rick’s do you get smoke machines, Gary Numan on the soundtrack, and a seatmate in the form of Michèle Lamy? Owens’s wife had the very latest It bag perched in her lap, a shoulder tote molded in rubber from the designer’s own head. It was, by far, the best front row sighting of the week.In a season in which fashion has often come up short against growing coronavirus anxiety, Owens made it look easy. “It’s a collection about play,” he said backstage. “I see myself balancing out a world that can be kind of very strict in its aesthetics. There have to be people like me that have other suggestions.”Among those he had for fall were shoulders so peaked on a leather moto jacket, and so “monstrous” on puffer coats and pilled knits, that they grazed the earlobes, and recycled plastic platform boots that inched up near the hips. The one-leg Kansai Yamamoto by way of David Bowie jumpsuits that made such a major impact at Owens’s men’s show a month ago were transformed here into clingy dresses whose asymmetrical hems curved around the models’ legs as they slinked. There have been countless bourgeois blanket coats parading up and down other runways this season, but only Owens has floor-sweeping sleeping bag capes in black, sky blue, and silver. The trio of models that wore them looked like alien royalty.The collection owed a real debt to Numan, Owens said beforehand. “Seeing someone like that as a doomy adolescent in Porterville, [California, the designer’s hometown] his glamour gave me my direction, the way David Bowie did.” It can be hard to reconcile the insecure teenager that Owens describes with the man today; his vision is so absolute and so persuasive. But it’s clear that he feels affection for his younger self, and that he has good memories. “I’m not putting myself in Numan or Bowie’s league,” he said, “but I want to be that for people. I want to be somebody who says, ‘You’re fine, you’re going to do it this way and you’re going to be great. You’re never going to bethatkind of beautiful, you’re going to bemykind of beautiful.’” All misfits and weirdos welcome. And seven-foot-tall warrior goddesses too.
27 February 2020
Tyrone Dylan Susman opened this Rick Owens show in a one-legged, one-shouldered jumpsuit modeled after one made by Kansai Yamamoto for David Bowie in 1973. But where Yamamoto’s was a vivid pattern drawn fromyakuzatattoos and kimonos, Owens’s was drably dun, and in the felty cashmere from which he crafted it was—on purpose—blankety. That connected the collection to another great Owens influence, the artist Joseph Beuys, whose origin story (it really was a story, a ripping yarn since debunked) and work was wrapped up in blankets.John Berger once wrote of Beuys something that applies to Owens: “He took objects and arranged them in such a way that they beg the spectator to collaborate with them…by listening to what their eyes tell them and remembering.” On a more elevated level the rearranged objects in this collection that begged via the eye for collaboration and remembrance were many: the “monstrous” shoulders near the end; the huge steel-fronted platforms; and of course—I mean, just use your eyes—the bodies of his models.Owens talked about “graphics of exposed flesh” carved by his cut-out cashmere layers, and alongside those were the graphics of silhouette. Also graphic, and way less elevated (in fact exactly halfway down) was the bushy tuft of human male yarn unseen on an Owens runway since fall 2015 that curled southwards from one blue cashmere jumpsuit. Where there was not such (albeit accidental) full exposure, there was the implication of translucency in the semi-transparent seamless vinyl coats and shorts, an almost violence of color on shearlings and moto-pants, screaming striped prints of oversize python, and hints of cleavage delivered via the deep-V tees so recently beloved of ripped Rick himself.Which led us back to the author of it all. “I was a lot more introspective 10 years ago. And, you know, I think as you get older, you just get a little more reckless, more comfortable, more confident, more playful.” He noted also a tendency to get cranky, but added: “I'm here, you know. You’re invited to the party, bring something. And that’s what I’m trying to do.” And he did.He added: “The most reassuring thing you can do as far as fashion is concerned, I think, is to streamline it. I’m looking at the graphics of exposed flesh. And, I’m going through my own exposed flesh moment, which I wouldn’t have done a while ago.
”Ah yes! Those cleavage tees! His wife Michèle Lamy’s insta-vid of Rick topless in bed! What has led to this recent rush of Rick revelation? “It’s just a grim determination to make the best of what you’ve got. Which I think is the most moral thing anybody can do.” Just like Bowie (the striped looks weretrèsYamamoto also) and just like Beuys, this collection was both provocation and stimulation for the eye. From where I was sitting, morality didn’t really come into it.
16 January 2020
Rick Owens has lately made headlines for his celebration of Larry LeGaspi, a designer whose name is little known but whose influence was vast, having helped the American rock band Kiss codify their signature costumes, face makeup, and menace. A major Kiss fan, Owens devoted his Fall men’s and women’s collections to LeGaspi and published a book on him with Rizzoli. He signed copies at a postshow party at his Palais Royal store. On the runway, though, he honored another influence on his life: his 87-year-old Mexican immigrant mother.Owens was raised in the United States, lives in France, and manufactures his clothes in Italy. “That all wouldn’t work without open borders,” he said, alluding to the fight in the States over a border wall with its southern neighbor. But in place of the aggression that’s accompanied some of Owens collections in the past, the ambience he conjured at this show was sweet and affectionate. Men and women in black robes arrayed themselves around the perimeter of the Palais de Tokyo’s shallow pool and let loose a flotilla of bubbles “like something out of Disney’sFantasia,” as Owens’s models did their perambulations.As for those models? They looked like otherworldly goddesses in their towering platform boots and their Aztec-by-way-of-Fritz-Lang’s-Metropolisheadgear. If you cared to, you could read in Owens’s fantastic vision a pointed criticism of President Trump, who’s called Mexicans “animals” and “criminals,” and worse. TheMetropolisreference is no coincidence. Lang’s antiauthoritarian masterpiece depicts a grim underworld peopled by mistreated workers, i.e. the migrant farmers and other undocumented immigrants who do the hard labor that keeps America’s upper classes fed. But take the political gloss out of the story and this was still one of the most captivating collections of the week—if not the season. Who else has magicked a vocabulary, from the exaggerated shoulders of jackets to the tabard skirts to the strange protrusions jutting from pelvises, as sui generis as Owens has?Marine Serre, Christelle Kocher, Kerby Jean-Raymond, and the Vaquera kids were in the crowd today. They caught a real beauty. Owens worked his glam sculptural silhouettes in hot pink, gold, ruby red, and an iridescent chain mail. The collection felt lit from within. And there were honest-to-goodness gowns—surely a first here—in cotton plissé with side panniers. In Disney fairy tales good conquers evil.
Owens is too sophisticated a thinker to believe in absolutes, but, damn, he makes a fabulous princess dress.
26 September 2019
“My Mexican-ness is very abstract,” said Rick Owens shortly before presenting this show. TitledTecuatlafter his maternal grandmother’s maiden name—Owens’s mother hails from Puebla and is of Mixtec heritage—this collection was the first time he has used his work as a lens through which to explore his south-of-the-border roots.As he said at the top, however, Owens’s relationship with those roots is abstract—and that abstraction was reflected in the collection. One prosaic reason for this is he only revisited his mother’s homeland this year, for the first time in 30. Another is that—just as in the last-season cycle of awesome Larry LeGaspi shows—his themes are, ultimately, just one of the raw materials in a creative clay that is every season shaped by his design and in his own image.This is why the several tons of damp clay taken from the L.A. studio of British artist Thomas Houseago—who has a statue currently installed in the center of the Palais de Tokyo courtyard as part of his “Almost Human” show at the Musee de l’Art Moderne—made for such a fitting addition to this show’s mise-en-scène. Houseago, Owens reported, had been on set to oversee the installation of the clay and even ended up creating a small sculpture (one that Owens fully intended to pinch, fire, and add to his collection).Houseago was just one in a chorus of creative voices that harmonized around this collection. Although there were some very overtly personal and Mexican touches, such as sequins reflecting China Poblana festival wear and the Aztec Eagle logo of the United Farm Workers’ association, for whose Mexican migrant pickers Owens’s father often worked as a translator in the California courts (these garments and a piece of jewelry will be sold to benefit the UFW), he said he was very careful to avoid the folkloric side of Mexican culture. Instead, he said, he had become fascinated with the effect of Mexican culture on the work of Josef and Anni Albers, the subject of a recent-ish show at the Guggenheim. Owens expounded: “I loved that combination of modernism with something so ancient. Looking at the drawings they made that were inspired by the sites was the Mexico angle I wanted.”With the exception of some Perspex-heeled platforms and rough tire-sole cowskin sandals that caused much trepidation as the models descended steps while keeping their eyes fixed on the pit, it was also a collection abrim with highly wearable pieces.
Personally I loved the cotton jackets in black and white set with austere, angled grids of ribbon and lacing, which was sometimes reflected in a riot of lacing on a Veja collab sneaker and looped into the fabric of some loose wool track pants. The sequins incorporated one-color oversize tailoring and looked pleasingly sleazy, while metallic-finished outerwear boasted a brutal industrial shimmer. In collaboration with Champion, Owens primitivized its cotton jersey via transformation into togas and loincloths. Zippered jumpsuits, some half-worn to optimize ab exposure, looked toughly utilitarian, while short-hemmed tailored jackets in white snakeskin over low-neck loose T-shirts and white sequined zippered pants appeared twistedly slick—especially when teamed with a pompadour. According to Josef Albers, “in art, tradition is to create, not to revive,” and in this highly artful collection we saw an outstanding expression of the tradition in clothing created by Owens.
20 June 2019
“I felt like I needed some grim, determined glamour.” Rick Owens has been dwelling on decline and devastation for seasons now, and audaciously so. No one does post-apocalypse chic quite like him. But for Fall 2019, he was after something different.It started at his men’s show last month, when he referenced Larry LeGaspi, a guy who designed costumes for Labelle, Kiss, Grace Jones, and Divine. Up until then, LeGaspi had been more or less an invisible designer, responsible for much, but getting little, if any, credit. In January, he didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Thanks to Owens’s work, now he does, and a book too, penned by the designer with the blessing and assistance of LeGapsi’s widow and daughter and due out from Rizzoli in August.“It’s how I got through the ’70s—that kind of sensational flamboyance,” Owens said backstage today, wearing platform Kiss boots. LeGaspi was up to taboo-busting, gender-bending, high camp, ultra-glam stuff, and as a small-town kid from California, Owens was dazzled. Fast-forward 40-odd years and he sees a similar kind of transgressiveness in the young people experimenting with prosthetics and body modification on Instagram. He hired one of them, 18-year-old Salvia (@salvjiia, NSFW, but definitely worth a look), to consult on the show makeup.Also contributing in absentia: the much celebrated American couturier Charles James, the subject ofanothernew book, for which Owens wrote the introduction; and Mariano Fortuny, the Spanish-born, Italy-based designer who was famous for pleats and prints. It’s the prints that factor here; Owens knows the Fortuny factory people from Venice, where he lives part time.Now that the opening credits are taken care of, a little about the clothes, which were inventive and daring and, considering Owens’s recent preoccupations with outlandish volumes and otherworldly silhouettes, wearable in the extreme. He opened with tailoring: streamlined jackets and coats with sculpted shoulders. The first model wore her blazer over layered bodysuits, the top layer traced with studs at the crotch—a reference, Owens explained, to LeGaspi’s codpieces for the band Kiss. Like the looks that followed, it was very leggy: sexy, but not coy. Owens can’t abide coy. (Don’t get him started on miniskirts, which are all about vulnerability and coyness, and drive him crazy.
) Fabulous silver-dipped ponyhair jackets constructed with the seams exposed—shoulders almost like wings—conjured images of Kiss in their concert regalia, too.The second half of the show was focused on evening. Thick swaths of Fortuny-printed jersey spun asymmetrically around the torso à la James, only his grand ball skirts were missing in favor of hip-slung wraps trailing floor-scraping trains. Bias-cut blood red columns were more covered-up, but no less sexy considering the gestural, figure-hugging way Owens draped them. The red dresses seemed like they could be nodding in the direction of the red gown LeGaspi’s wife, Val, wore to their sole appearance at the Costume Institute’s Met Gala in 1979. Fascinatingly, Owens said that James and LeGaspi shared models. “There was a crossover. Totally different worlds, but they appreciated each other.”On the designer continuum, Owens’s legacy will be right up there alongside that of James; there will be museum retrospectives. But who can resist that subversive streak?
28 February 2019
This was Glam Rick. Or, as Owens put it, a collection about “the glory of lust and vice.” That sounds hot to trot—all cares thrown to the wind—but there was a cautionary, matured, reflective note, too: how to enjoy excess yet remain balanced.This was also a collection of two designers. For several years now, Owens has been working on a book dedicated to Larry LeGaspi, which will be published by Rizzoli just about the same time that this collection drops in October. Given that Owens is soon to become a published author on the subject, it’s best you hear about LeGaspi straight from the horse’s mouth.“For me, as a teenager growing up in Porterville, California, what Larry LeGaspi did was a huge thing—the way he infiltrated middle America with this subversive sensibility. He started out kind of inventing LaBelle’s look [around 1973]. Then Kiss took LaBelle’s look. He did stuff for Kiss [1974–1978] and then Grace Jones, Divine . . . So at the very beginning, he created that silver and black sleazy ’70s thing, to my eyes a combination of Art Deco and campy sci-fi. In fact, I found out later he was into the same sci-fi I was—the 1930s film ofThe Shape of Things to Come, which kind of defined whatThe Jetsonsdid later. And Larry LeGaspi took it, too. . . . He comes in and takes that and somehow, he connects with soul culture—black soul culture and music—with LaBelle. So that combination is already kind of a surprise, and then, with Kiss, he takes it into mainstream America, high school kids. And Kiss turns it into commedia dell’arte, kabuki, Greek tragedy masks . . . they add sex, lust, and vice. So all of this stuff coming together was very important to this kid in Porterville.”If LeGaspi showed the way, today Owens showed the destination. The platforms—of course—either in sandals or rubber-gusseted boots, were drawn from the Kiss aesthetic of feminized demonstrative testosterone. The incredible round-shouldered napa shearlings—just so sexy on either men or women or in-betweens or neither/nors—the oily tight black jeans under baby skin–soft knit cotton tank tops, the hard-shouldered and quadruple-pocketed slim-cut overcoats, the knit shorts and bag hardware featuring Kiss lightning bolts, and the wool-out patched bombers near the end were all urgently attractive, demonstratively different, compellingly kinky pieces.
17 January 2019
This Rick Owens show has been in the works for months. He never could’ve known that in Washington, D.C., today Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would be providing testimony against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whom she alleges sexually assaulted her in high school. It was coincidence surely. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to make connections between the pyre in the center of the Palais de Tokyo, witches being burned at the stake, and the trial of Kavanaugh’s accuser.Owens is an intuitive designer. He has an eerily awesome way of interpreting and underscoring the issues of our times. Last September, he put on a show that seemed to be about the refugee crisis. Finally, nearly a year after it began, Owens gave fashion its first knock-down, drag-out MeToo collection.Not that he used that term. In fact, in his program notes Owens referred to the Tower of Babel and Tatlin’s Tower, a design by the early-20th-century Russian architect Vladimir Tatlin for a monument that was never built. Make of those references what you will. Owens’s coven of inconvenient women wore tops made from dirty American flags or bikinis and denim shorts twisted and torqued beyond recognition, with long narrow boxes wedged into the waistbands. Who knows what was in those containers? The suggestion was menacing.Flanged collars, peeling shoulders, and exuberant cuffs turned jackets into impenetrable carapaces. Like the metal scaffolding of the headpieces and arm cuffs that qualified as jewelry here, those jackets looked designed to ward off predators. Owens’s laser-cut and paneled cloaks conjured goddesses and super-heroines. Sometimes the models even carried torches. Other elements were weaponized in different ways. Minidresses aswirl with silk fringe, for example, looked unreconstructedly sexy. All of this was as sui generous as it gets, including his new Birkenstock sandals and boots.Owens is the last independent man standing among Paris’s major designers. A new wave of consolidation has seen Puig buy Dries Van Noten and Ermenegildo Zegna invest in Thom Browne. Let’s hope Owens stays independent and weird. And here’s to Dr. Blasey Ford and inconvenient women everywhere.
27 September 2018
The wide-angle view of this Rick Owens show was spectacular. His models walked through billowing dyed smoke—very acrid smelling—in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo. The smoke, said Owens preshow, was designed to help “it feel a little bit like a riot or Burning Man. It adds a sense of play and recklessness. I want to be reckless and dangerous. I want to die a used-up wreck.”Rick’s no wreck yet: Through the fumes, this collection was notable for its grimily sci-fi coats and gowns coated in “Brutalist sequins” (panels of painted canvas), plus its closing garments—wearable tents—which were inspired by the Russian Constructivist designs Owens had been considering as he built the collection. “They’re nylon parkas,” said the designer, “and they are going to be shipped as nylon parkas, with the poles separately. So you can build them if you want to. But what you are going to see on the hanger is a nice, soft nylon parka—the poles represent what this parka can be. That’s the idea of hope; that is what the poles represent in a way.”Just because they are so unusual to see at an Owens show, a very brief section of striped garments really snagged your eye. A silky black jacket came attached at the left sleeve to a silky panel of oily red and white stripes; it fluttered against the smoke like a dramatically shot American flag. There were a lot of tough-looking denim skirts with irregular hems and side-harness pockets (these looked pretty good below a slim tailored black jacket), plus wide poppered black pants aplenty. Many of the pieces came stitched with vectors, and the looks near the beginning came with metal linear structures (smaller equivalents of the tent parkas).So why the Constructivist theme? Well, the collection was titled Babel, as in Tower of, which had made Owens think of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-built tower, commissioned by Lenin to mark the Bolshevik ascendancy in Russia. “It’s such a symbol of hope, and there is something so compelling about how it looks. A Constructivist tower is about control, and the Tower of Babel is about confusion: everybody splitting up and too much information, too.”So this was a collection about control versus confusion?“That’s the story I’m tellingeveryseason,” Owens replied. “That’s my story, and that’s the story of humanity: trying to fix ourselves, always trying to fix ourselves.” As Owens spoke we got a close-up view of the models.
Many of them were wearing sandals by Birkenstock, with whom Owens is collaborating on a line. The stylists were hard at work ensuring their toes were in tip-top condition (always a prime consideration with Birks). When I noted that it was interesting that he was delving into themes of darkness and chaos in such sensibly centered footwear, Owens said: “I’m talking about control and collapse and chaos and everything, but in my personal life I’m looking for a balance between responsibility, well-being—and extreme hedonism. And I think there is a way of balancing that out. Responsibility doesn’t mean you’re uptight, and hedonism doesn’t mean you’re evil. The Birkenstock adds this nice placid, serene feeling of well-being and liberalism. It’s like taking muesli with your Ecstasy.”
21 June 2018
Rick Owens wanted to go where few designers have been willing to this season: into the thorny territory of the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements. Who else could wrap and twist a couple of pilled wool blankets into a lumpy dress and call it seduction? Owens has always been a provocateur, wrestling with the big issues—everything from the insidious conventions of beauty to the inevitability of climate change.Here, he used conventional, even old-fashioned trappings of femininity—bustles and panniers—to address the sensitive issues at hand. “They’re sophisticated gestures because they border on the ridiculous,” Owens began. “I appreciate that kind of wit, and I’ve kind of missed it. [Fashion] has become kind of straightforward and status-based.” As it sounds, this was a heady, conceptual enterprise, but it was also one that, in its own weird way, generated heat. All those bare legs above running shoes conveyed a confident physicality. Owens used “poor” materials—he cited Arte Povera as an inspiration—to create exuberant, extravagant shapes. Those pilled blankets (fine camel hair, actually) were stuffed with goose down–like swaddling. Below the models’ unnaturally thickened torsos, they wore even more bulbous messenger bags and fanny packs. These a very clever journalist friend likened to pouf skirts. “Rick does Lacroix!” How fabulously unlikely an affiliation—fashion’s prince of darkness meetsle roiof ’80s excess. Yet how accurate. It’s been almost that long since the kind of voluptuousness Owens was trying to create was truly in fashion. In this sense, he’s smack dab in the center of the Fall fashion conversation; many of his peers are thinking about the ’80s, only much, much more literally.Which brings up another point: For all the couture methods in play here, there was no shortage of superb commerciality, from the fine cashmere running shorts for gym bunnies like Owens to the panoply of coats, some with Arte Povera patches on the shoulders trailing loose strings and others trimmed in a very Lacroix-ish shade of satiny turquoise.
1 March 2018
The lights were so turned up and the “terror techno” so pumped up that many in the audience wore slight fixed winces during this unrelenting Rick Owens show. The collection was titled “Sisyphus” after the murderous Corinthian king whose Zeus-bestowed punishment made him a byword for repeated acts of apparently endless futility.For Owens, “Sisyphean” might well define granting post-show interviews with “douche” editors who haven’t fully read his show notes—hey, come on, it was a very busy schedule today!—but there was a more fundamental frustration at play, too. As he explained: “I think we’re entering this period of conservatism and creative smallness. And that’s me being very judgmental, but it’s frustrating. I’ve had a lot of resistance in things that I’ve wanted to do creatively—technical resistance—and it kind of discourages you from trying to create things. But then I think, ‘Why do I think that my stuff is so worth telling that I have to force it?’ And then that makes me think of aggression: How much does it take to really be a designer; to insist that you be listened to?”That self-interrogation is part of the process that makes Owens the most authoritatively distinct designer at work today. Under that light so bright it seemed to leak behind your eyes into your brain and the techno—a remix of “Energize.exe” by DJ Speedlap—he was insisting upon our full attention.Many of the looks appeared to have been torn off the body, unstitched, and then reassembled. Roughened hems lined the sides of many of the cross-body chaps, dresses, and tunics that were often arranged to reveal the flesh below and sometimes held in place by chains. Extravagantly oversize laminated parkas, padded, enveloping cloak-y habits, plus wide slouchy pants with waves of break at the ankle were all unmistakeable in their provenance. There was an almost incongruous high-revered notch lapeled coat story that ran through the collection; their full skirts and sometimes laminated or painted detailing only half obscured the careful disorder beneath them.For footwear, there was a back and forth between a big zipped Romper Stomper boot which in brown came with a bulging semi-transparent sole and a sneaker that at first looked prosaic. Only when you really gave them some eye did you observe the fronds of hollow plastic tufting that shimmered in the light, and which was used in greater abundance on a ruched, almost frostbitten green sweater near the close.
Of that sneaker, called the Georunner, he said: “I wanted them to be really generic and like almost Kmart, the shoes. Because I’m a little tired of bombastic sneakers. It’s funny how sneakers became the male corsage of this contemporary culture.”One strongly attractive fabric was a softly felted-looking dark olive material that Owens said was based upon a long-cherished Berber blanket. He added: “I’m trying to do as many exclusive fabrics that we develop ourselves, with people that we’ve known from the beginning. I’m trying to make all of the collection exclusive: making things as profoundly mine as possible. If I could water the cotton with my tears, then I would!”He was (almost) joking. For Rick Owens, the product is the struggle and vice versa: He might as well just get used to rolling that boulder.
18 January 2018
In the face of climate catastrophes, nuclear annihilation, and assorted other sociopolitical affronts, Rick Owens is going to make what he damn well pleases. Creation is an act of resistance (to crib a relevant line from Alessandro Michele). “I have romanticized discomfort as much as I can,” Owens said backstage. In his notes he explained, “I feel I need to propose experimental grace and form as a gesture of turning away from threat. Not really as escapism, but as rejection.”The designer had taken us to the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo, the site of his monumental menswear show in July. The set this time was scaled down, but not his vision. On each bench seat was a plastic rain poncho, and the PRs advised against leaving them there. No other designer is as comfortable making his crowd uncomfortable, but almost everyone played along. At the start of the show, jets blew steam from the surface of the pool in the center of the audience. As it crescendoed, fountains blasted 30 feet in the air, and Owens’s wife, Michèle Lamy, who’s recently formed a band called Lavascar, cackled wildly on the loudspeakers.Being a thinking man, Owens has been much concerned about the state of the world, our ravaged natural resources especially. So it was hard not to see the finale models as climate refugees, with their fanny packs swaddled like so much emotional baggage underneath piles of humble clothes, and Lamy on the soundtrack as Mother Earth, laughing maniacally as if to say: Humans, you reap what you sow. Backstage Owens offered a different interpretation. “It’s a show about hope,” he said. And as for those closing looks, he didn’t see refugees but confections. “They look like meringues to me.”To be sure, there was beauty of a sui generis kind here: in the fine, grid-like bugle beading on the torso of shifts; in the trio of all-white looks cobbled from humble-looking T-shirts stretched gracefully across the shoulders; and in the vibrant, living green of one of the show’s asymmetrically draped dresses, its swaddled midriff evoking nothing so much as a marsupial pouch. (Symbols of fertility bookended the day; Chloé’s Natacha Ramsay-Levi created amulets from fecund female torsos.)Like Owens’s Spring men’s collection, this show was called Dirt, which, coupled with the spouting fountain, offered another reading of those strange show-ending looks that were less like clothes and more like moving sculpture. They’re not refugees or meringues; they’re seeds.
Hopeful, life-giving seeds. Maybe Owens has been reading up on matriarchal feminism? Maybe not. “Crude American brutalist” though he may be, he’s too subtle to put it in any specific terms, but what a kick it is to parse it all out and wonder.
28 September 2017
At the very end of this epic, epic show (a banger of a show, monumental, the show of the season) Rick Owens appeared to take his bow. He was far, far away from the photographers and audience, high, high, high above the Palais de Tokyo’s courtyard at the top of a triple-twist, scaffold-fixed, gantry runway he had built for his models to slowly descend. He looked minuscule, a lean, long-haired dot in the sky.In his notes Owens said, “My recent absorption in Land Art—architecture unleashed—is about the human need to try to find order in wilderness . . . maybe as a futile attempt to put a mark on it as a stab at immortality.” The monumental work of Andy Goldsworthy, James Turrell, et al. is absolutely a parable for humankind’s valiant but ultimately bound-to-fail imperative to leave a mark that outlasts it. Yet a far better one is probably the work of a fashion designer, whose work is the artistic equivalent of the luna moth. However bombastic and attention-seeking the setting, the product’s life span is the blink of an eye. For a designer with genuine artistic impulses such as Owens, that must be an interesting bone to gnaw on.The models took around two minutes each to slowly walk the gantries and staircases that eventually led them to a runway across the low stone pool of the courtyard, down some more stairs again, then backstage. They started out as dots in the distance, like Owens at the end, then slowly loomed up in front of you. At first the clothes were raw and artfully primitive—some shorts (man in his natural state, but not quite) then eight or so looks of technical caveman wear in dull whites and earthy neutrals, all affixed with gauze or pleather modular pods, some accessorized by lumpy bags with oversize survivalist paracord strapping.Then, evolution. Menswear’s big bang. The pant! Owens’s—at least at first—were prettily tapered with a comely cinch at the waist, worn below torn tank tops that soon evolved into dark fitted shirting. Then we rushed forward again, into a long and fascinating interrogation of the tailored jacket. Why the jacket? Well, as Owens said in those notes, “I’ve focused on the suit jacket as respectful uniform, as a symbol of civilization, as elegant luggage, as personal aspiration architecture.” To this eye Owens’s tailoring looked like a subversion of all the comfortable, enabling masculine strictures the suit jacket represents—the notion of professionalism defining identity, but suppressing it too.
In rough, tough utilitarian mostly black fabrics, they came either delicately shrunken or blown up, always over pants that funneled ever wider down the ankle and were meant to drag “luxuriantly” on the ground. The jackets were cut with pockets big enough to fit a sandwich: “One of my personal criteria,” Owens said (as ifhe eats carbs). Around these were sprinkled triple-layer tank tops, each pulled apart to create a sense of looking into and through the garment to the man underneath. The shoes were sneakers with laces held by scattered D-rings, hiker-style, and big badass tractor soles that made you fear for the models as they descended those stairways from above (one slipped, but recovered in time before tumbling).There aren’t many—or in my experience, any—fashion shows that make you think for a second about existentialism and our place in the world and all that big stuff that drives you crazy. That’s not what fashion shows are for, after all. This was the exception. That monumental set, sadly uncommunicated in runway images, was perhaps the most significant catalyst for this. (Owens said it was inspired by “Vladimir Tatlin’s tower set to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” but it was also reminiscent of Escher’sRelativity.)Yet the collection—entitled Dirt—was an in-cloth reinforcement of that so-well observed truth that “Golden lads and girls all must/ As chimney-sweepers come to dust.” All our fancy raiments count not a jot in the end, and if you get too big for your boots—even boots as big as Owens’s—you’ll only end up disappointed. This was a huge show about humility.
22 June 2017
First let’s dispense with the headgear. Rick Owens stretched sweatshirts and tees across wire frames perched on models’ heads, improvising different shapes: crowns, veils, and mitres, he said backstage. They conjured all sorts of references for Owens’s crowd: ancient, medieval, the animal kingdom, Mr. Snuffleupagus. After a solid year of pessimism and protest, of doom and gloom about, among other things, climate change, Owens explained that he was “tired of being a downer.” His mind apparently drifted to ceremonies—rituals being the glue that holds societies together. Which led him to royal ceremonies . . .Which led him to draping very grand looks indeed. Tunics with vestigial appendages, shirts with extra-long sleeves that reached to the knees, upside-down sweaters, puffed down boleros, and tabards that swished between running-shoe-boot hybrids that were the most normal things on the runway. As strange as all that sounds, and believe me, it was strange, it was also confidently, artfully done, in an attractive earthy palette—olive and bottle green, white, tan, black, slate gray, and dusty rose with a nylon sheen. With pieces layered one on top of each other, coupled with the hats, the looks conjured visions of queens, high priestesses, witches, even. If ever there was a moment to summon the coven, it’s definitely now.For the lay person, this could look like fearsome stuff. And maybe not even his witchiest clients are likely to wear his Fall collection as he put it together here. For them, the takeaways will likely be the earthy colors and the designer’s clever ideas about sleeping-bag dressing. A quilted down cape in bottle green was straight-up cool, and the wrapped and twisted swaddling shapes will have a trickle-down appeal. The puffer jacket will still be going strong next Fall, thanks to him. Many watchers saw a lighter, more easy-going Owens in this show. I’m not so sure. What I am convinced of: He’s Paris’s master of ceremonies.
2 March 2017
Immediately pre-show, his jaw set with concentration, Rick Owens was insinuating a long, down-filled two-panel tendril of silky pink synthetic within the bulbously twisted, rich saffron pillowing already being worn by the model in front of him. “You know, I wanted it to be voluptuous and flamboyant,” he said, “but then I look at it: It definitely is about strapping yourself in for a bumpy ride.”Do we need to say what ride that is? Owens didn’t waste his breath. Instead he flitted away to tweak and pluck and refine the details of a collection that mixed extreme sculptural form, soft and fluffy like beaten egg white, with a harder undercurrent. Once out walking the models came and went hither and thither, irregularly—they had rehearsed three times so presumably this was on purpose—and thus it was difficult to be sure that there was a planned arc for the order of the looks. This view started with a suite of leather jackets, richly treated to look rough, with zippered lateral pouches for storage, and buffering, too big to count as pockets. Below these were Owens’s favored wide kick-y pants, the Madchester silhouette, with quadruple (maybe quintuple) welt round-toe shoes with a protruding shelf-let at the heel. Then suit jackets, one olive, one dusky lilac, with extended knit arms in different colors worn over wide pants with extreme folding protrusions running from left hem to right thigh. Coats in horizontal patchworks of glossed leather and wide-weave linen, slightly frayed, featured, too. Then the airbags were activated, bursting forth from the Owens dashboard first as constricted monochrome entwining at the shoulder and later saffron, orange, gray, and lilac flourishing all down the torso.The colors were softer, many of the pieces certainly, too. Owens said that he’d initially planned this collection, entitled Glitter, to be the first in a positively-flavored suite of shows. He said: “I wanted to kind of get away from the doom. My last few seasons have been about doom: How do you negotiate things, and things changing, and handling that gracefully. But . . . this cycle ends up being a continuation of the other cycle.” He added: “Maybe it’s because clothes fundamentally are about fear and threats. It’s basically always been about armor: putting on the best face you can.”
19 January 2017
If you saw darkness in the image of the whirlpool onRick Owens’s lenticular invite, you were rightandwrong. In keeping with the last couple of seasons, Owens said he has human decline on his mind, but he’s not as fatalistic as that concept might suggest. Backstage he was talking about positivity and joy. “What if the whirlpool is just a portal, instead of a finality?” he asked.Descending the spiral staircase of the Palais de Tokyo in the half-dark is its own kind of portal, and Owens’s new collection was dependably transporting. Like last season, he was interested in draping. Not your standard kind of draping, bien sûr. Here, linen tulle swathed the hips, that was normal enough; but buckram cloth, a material used in book binding, spanned the shoulders, conjuring a football player’s pads, and horsehair wrapped around the torso in eccentric volumes like a futuristic, high-tech life jacket. When Owens wasn’t draping, he was sending models out in tailored vests worn askew with heads poking out of armholes and the garments jutting off to the side.It was odd and off-kilter yet bewitching. Credit for that goes partly to Nina Simone on the soundtrack (his notes said Owens listens to her every day), and partly to the robust-by-Owens’s-standards color palette, which included a plummy lavender, an acid yellow, and an old-fashioned shade of mauve. The evening looks at the end were fairly sensational: exuberantly swagged and draped long dresses topped by those worn-sideways vests, a spiral of fur planted below the neckline. Owens worked with Maison Lemarié, the Paris plumassier he collaborated with back when he was at Revillon, to create a trio of cloaks made from ostrich feathers knotted together end to end. They were fabulous. We’re with Owens. We’re on the side of joy.
29 September 2016
The ever-implacable fashion industry is churning with change, which some hypothesize as its savior, and others as its demise. In fact, given how that chimes with the black/white, right/wrong politics dominating contemporary culture, maybe it’s symptomatic of the times in which we live. And perhaps that is whyRick Owensis rejecting it. He is a contrarian. “I don't have to do anything I don't want to,” Owens once told me, face inscrutable. “I could just burn the whole fucking place down."Owens was talking, specifically, about his business operation, but it’s not difficult to imagine him razing fashion as a whole. That’s sometimes what it feels like watching Rick Owens’s shows, which are always remarkable. More and more, he distances himself from the rest of the industry by the rare quality that his clothes look entirely, frequently uncompromisingly new. New can mean alien, so barely do they adhere to the tenets of garment history. “They do look like something that isn’t finished,” Owens scoffed, sardonically, in his West Coast drawl, of his Spring 2017 collection. They did. But is that such a bad thing? A work in progress is better than no work at all.That illuminated Owens’s offering, which bore some relation to fabric freely thrown around a mannequin, randomly captured, and suspended in motion. Owens cited the fine drapery of Madame Grès to describe swags of fabric hurling their way around the body. It was a rare direct fashion reference, although look hard, and you can see echoes of Grès, Charles James, and Madeleine Vionnet in Owens’s oeuvre. I’m talking specifically about his menswear there. See what I mean about new?Owens is the only one who would assert his clothes look incomplete. For the rest of us, the unity of Owens’ vision is one of its most arresting qualities - the entirety of the Owenscorp universe. Owens himself has compared its all-encompassing nature to the lifestyle philosophy espoused Ralph Lauren. But for Spring, Owens was preoccupied by his own mistakes - the wrong right, or the right wrong, as he put it. What that lead to were garments that thrashed their way around the body, wide-cut trousers pooling, sleeves dripping off wrists, until a silhouette emerged. It was firm—gazar and duchesse satin don’t make for light wearing—high-waisted and wide-legged, sometimes emphasized by swags and globules of fabric, like eviscerated entrails. It felt different. Exciting.
Owens grounded that Grès reference by comparing the twisted and pleated fabrics to muscle and tendon, like a medical diagram sketched in jersey by the great couturière. This was, simply, a redesigning not of clothes, but of the human body. That’s par for the course for Owens.Owens related the change in fashion not to cataclysmic, seismic quakes, but to evolution: slow, deliberate, ultimately for the better, and much much deeper. It’s the way you envisage his clothing transforming, season after season, perpetuating the species of Owens rather than just painting its facade every six months. The silhouette shifts, and our perceptions change. What Owens does is most persuasive, most extraordinary, in menswear. Maybe that’s because what Owens is doing is audacious, at the very best of times. Today, it often feels like the worst of times, when the landscape of contemporary masculine attire is dominated by banality. It’s simple Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. Owens—and cockroaches—will be around long after fashion’s perhaps inevitable apocalypse. It’s difficult to think of any designer who will revel in the creative possibilities of that to a greater extent.
23 June 2016
2015 was the hottest year on record. The future of the planet is on the ballot in the U.S., where the denial of climate science is practically built into the Republican platform. And if you believe Elizabeth Kolbert—and by the way, you probably should: Her bookThe Sixth Extinctionwon the Pulitzer for General Non-Fiction last year—we’re in the midst of a man-made mass extinction. Are you worried?Rick Owensis. Backstage today at his show, which he named Mastodon, Owens spoke of his uneasiness about environmental change. “Mastodons don’t exist anymore, as we won’t,” he said. “Maybe there’s an acceptance level we should look for.”If Owens sounds reconciled to the coming environmental catastrophe, it could be because he’s been processing his dread. His response to anxiety, he explained, is to go into the studio and drape. Here, the shapes started out relatively simply: His pod-like dresses came with tubal appendages at the hem that made top and bottom look like a mirror of each other. Salvador Dalí’sSwans Reflecting Elephantswas posted to Owens’s social media channels earlier, and if you went looking for it, you could see allusions to the mastodon’s mighty legs in the so-big-they're-swimming-in-them jumpsuits. As the show progressed, the materials got heavier—it’s not easy draping pony skin and leather—and the silhouettes became more elaborate and flamboyant. By the end, the puffer gowns had their own chrysalis-like attachments. For curling up in when the party’s over? If the end is nigh, Owens’s cocoons could make it all go down a little easier.There’s poetry in the apocalypse, but acceptance of its imminence is not a prerequisite for appreciating Owens as a designer, nor for admiring this show. Indeed, he seemed determined to keep it light, infusing the collection with more color—sweet ones like pink and pistachio green—than he has in recent memory, and using a brushed and fuzzed-out knit mohair for strapless undulating dresses that, as billed beforehand, looked like they were evaporating. “Our molecules mixing with the world’s molecules mixing with molecules throughout all eternity,” he riffed. “We’re all one with the universe.” We literally are stardust. While it lasts, might as well wear one of Owens’s fabulous velvet capes.
3 March 2016
Dinosaurs and tar pits, evolution, art nouveau, and the primordial ooze.Rick Owenscreates clothes that look like no one else’s because he sublimates into his designs themes that other designers wouldn’t—perhaps couldn’t—touch. For Fall, Owens recounted that his partner Michèle Lamy had begun keeping bees on the rooftop of the Brutalist concrete mausoleum they call home; he thought it was an instinctive response to environmental change. 2015 was the hottest year since records began. Those kind of facts got Owens thinking “about the ecological anxiety we are all feeling. What is the worst possible scenario?”Total and utter annihilation, of course. Going the way of the dinosaurs—which is why the collection was called Mastodon and featured a parade of truly Jurassic parkas. And suits, and bombers, and the dresses-for-dudes that Owens somehow makes look viable. Postapocalyptic isn’t exactly uncharted territory for Owens; his battered and tattered clothes and whey-faced models tend to evoke the notion of not only teetering on the brink, but hurtling headfirst into the abyss. And yet, even for him, the suppurating sheepskin garments seeping around his models’ bodies, like magma melting and melding body parts together, were disquieting. I’ve heard of “fluid” clothing before, but this was something else entirely, in shades of black, chalk white, American tan, and corpse gray. There was lots of shearling. It had the thick, spongy texture you’d imagine of flayed flesh.Fluidity was a theme Owens ran with, clothing pooling and bubbling around the torso, trickling around the legs. “I want to say I vomited this out,” mused Owens backstage, before allowing that most people react unfavorably to that verb. Particularly when they’re wearing it; a series of garments were graphically splattered with bleach. Sometimes, the ooze surrendered a real garment, like a heffalumping, glutinous mass of mohair in an intestinal puce from which a strictly tailored sportswear hood emerged, near perfectly formed, to define the garment as a coat. The contrast was telling: It’s tough to chart evolution (or devolution) if you’ve nothing to compare it with. So the other story today was of tailored volume, of couture control, inspired by the historical volume-pumpers of panniers and bustles. “Pageantry with cloth,” was Owens’s term, explaining the cargo pockets that plumped out his silhouettes. “How do I do volume in a men’s collection? Volume in a way that could pass.
” His cargo pockets were huge, his hemlines wide, topped with skinny jackets either elongated or cropped, in both senses emphasizing the voluminous pant.Owens is the best analyst of his own clothing, which is rare among fashion designers, a bunch who are generally reticent to put their work into words. It would be tough, without Owens as tour guide, to navigate prehistory and climate change, and wind up at a barfy bunch of coats. Nevetheless, it makes perfect sense. It also isn’t the whole story. The most telling notion on display here, under those liquifying layers, was of timeliness—of Owens’s clothing relating to a wider geological picture, a reaction to the time in which they were created. I couldn’t help but think of the bustle, and Victorian prurience: The lifting of the death penalty for “buggery” in England in 1861 near-coincided with the bustle’s inflation; Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895 came shortly after the second (and last) revival of the style.Today, Owens’s clothes were, on the one hand, violent—they looked disemboweled, prolapsed, eviscerated. But there was also something protective about the sloppy down-jackets wrestling about the body, the sheepskins fused together as if protecting your flank. “Hope for the best,” Owens shrugged. “But prepare for the worst.” Sage advice.
21 January 2016
In a recent interview, actressCarey Mulligancomplained about the fact that the characters she plays are often described as “strong women.” That label, she said, makes it seem as though strength in a woman is the exception, not the norm. And it rubs her the wrong way. It’s not uncommon to experience a similar frisson backstage at a fashion show, when a designer says that his (or her) collection pays tribute to “strong women”—the message is always well meant, but by setting up strength as a quality found only in a particular type of woman, it demeans the fairer sex as a whole. At his latest show,Rick Owensput paid to that way of thinking. Owens’ latest coup de théâtre wasn’t a tribute to strong women; it was a tribute to female strength. That’s a major distinction.Chanteuse Eska, who performed last year with Owens’s wife, Michèle Lamy, at the Meltdown Festival in London, presided over this evening’s proceedings, singing the theme song from the filmExodus. As she sang, models exited in new Rick Owens looks—some of which, like the sleeveless dusters and crinkled anoraks, registered as atypically accessible silhouettes, while others, such as the short dresses collaged from canvas and leather, reiterated Owens’s signature sculptularity in a new, almost dreamlike tone. Periodically, thedéfiléwas interrupted by an incredible sight: a woman, dressed by Owens, carrying another woman down the long length of the runway. Their bodies were yoked together; sometimes the women being carried hung upside down, legs slung over their partners’ shoulders. Other women were strapped on like backpacks.Speaking before the show, Owens said he’d been thinking—wondering, really—about the ways women nurture others, metaphorically taking on another human being’s weight. That inquiry was communicated forcefully by the show’s staging. The carrying women, with their human freight, also suggested the physical labors of pregnancy—an undercurrent amplified by the Owens silhouettes featuring distended volumes that were almost carbuncular. When the last model crossed the catwalk, wearing a short dress and one of those terrifically commercial crinkled anoraks, she looked sublimely unburdened—until you noted the straps crisscrossing the jacket in back. Even the most sylph-like, seemingly footloose and fancy-free woman is prepared, at any moment, to shoulder a weight. That, at any rate, appeared to be Owens’s message in making those load-bearing straps his show’s closing image.
All women are strong. Even the ones who don’t know it yet.
1 October 2015
Rick Owens claimed he was fixated on the M-65 field jacket in his Spring 2016 collection for men. Its ambiguity mesmerized him: how something that embodied the dignity of a military uniform should also become the garb of antiwar protestors. "The M-65 represents heroism but questions it at the same time," Owens mused before his show today. But if he was mesmerized, he was also likely a little confused. The substantial combat boots can't have helped. "I don't really like military references," he said. "I don't like to comment on current events."Ironically, one of his models had no such reservations, choosing Owens' catwalk to make an incomprehensible statement about the German chancellor. While it makes sense that one would use the forums one has easy access to in order to communicate one's message, it would certainly make even more sense to get the message straight before so doing. It was a shame, however, that the subsequent furor overshadowed a collection where—more irony—Owens was doing his level best to introduce "frivolity and sparkle." "I've worked so hard on establishing a gray, soft, Joseph Beuys cocoon," he said, "and now I see that around me so much, I have to lighten things up, step it up for the competition.""Lighten" is a relative term for Rick Owens. After years of skirting his love of the late Steven Parrino's art, he surrendered to his influence here, duplicating Parrino's crumpled, slashed canvases with a finale of his own sculpted volumes. They were more consciously "arty" than anything Owens has ever showed, but they were oddly beautiful (or beautifully odd). And their shiny, textured surface defined the essence of the collection: the crackled sheen of a sleeveless leather coat, the ivory glaze on another, the alien translucence of transparent leather pieces. (They looked like latex.)At some point in the show, the potential utility of a Rick Owens outfit asserted itself. Was that a marsupial pouch, or just a swoop of fabric across an elongated tee/tunic? Or just frivolity?
25 June 2015
After a $4.4 million restoration, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House recently reopened to the public just under the Hollywood sign in Barnsdall Art Park. Rick Owens all but blushes to admit he knew nothing about the place while he was growing up in California, but now he's playing catch-up, and Wright's Mayan-influenced architecture has prompted him to get in touch with his own Mexican roots. Models walked with gold- and silver-foiled faces in his show today, Mayan masks made flesh.That was only one of the special effects that made this presentation so winning. Owens' men's show poked the bear with frontal nudity: That's not the sort of thing you can do twice. Instead, Owens relied on sequins and frills for shock effect this time round. Of course, that is shocking only if your image of the designer is as the master of starkly avant-garde monumentalism. Something of that was still there in the substantial draping that defined the collection, but the sequins and "frills" of fur took Owens' clothes somewhere new. Or maybe old. His love of old Hollywood has always infused his collections with a subtle—and often overlooked—glamour, like a limpid Steichen photograph of a silent movie star. Here, though, sequined sparkle and crystalline geometry (possibly Mayan-influenced) were inescapable as they combined to leaven the weight of the draping.Owens has a particular soft spot for dusty biblical epics. Why, the very morning of his show, he was watching Cecil B. DeMille'sSign of the Cross,a 1932 spectacular that featured the sequence, scandalous at the time, of Claudette Colbert bathing in "ass' milk" (actually powdered milk that went bad so fast the smell made the actress ill). Know such details, and Owens' unique aesthetic falls into place. But those floor-sweeping lengths, gathering dust like a prophet's robes, were converted to aprons here, allowing for a leggy ease. And the lightness and glitter were practically glam rock by his definition. The last looks, paved with gold sequins, trailing gold fringes, were the most uplifting outfits Owens has ever shown. Given that he is the one designer who can legitimately utter the word "transcendence" without sounding like a pretentious prat, it was exhilarating to see his word made cloth.
5 March 2015
"I built the company on me pissing in my mouth." Rick Owens was thinking back to the sculpture that scandalized Pitti Uomo years ago. Then he pondered the "puerility" of the full-frontal display in his men's show today. "It's a little bit of juvenile transgression," he mused. "Boys with their dicks out is such a simple, primal, childish gesture." So why would he bother with such? Well, maybe Owens has tired of the better place he's been aspiring to for the many seasons in which he's been climbing that big old fashion mountain. "Let's not forget a bit of cheerful depravity," he declared with appropriate cheer.So then he turns around and shows one of his best menswear collections in recent memory. We should all be so depraved.Owens called his collection Sphinx. True, it was somewhat enigmatic that he would choose to place a porthole over the groin of some of his models, but he did say he was inspired by an old French movie set in a submarine. And the grace—or not—under pressure of men in close quarters was his launchpad. Peacoats were as straightforward as anything Owens has ever offered, except they were cut from Berber blankets, and one of them had a couture-ish cape back, and another was infected with submarine rust, emblematic of the inevitability of decay, a notion that will rivet Owens till doomsday. A cable-knit sailor sweater was stretched into a full-length situation that embodied the perverse male glamour that is the designer's stock-in-trade. Then the silhouettes became more chaotic: long in front, cut high in back (reminiscent of that scene inThe[original]Parent Trapwhen the Hayley Mills twins snip the back out of Joanna Barnes' dress—and who's to say that this isn't in Rick's encyclopedia of arcane references?). Some were even scooped high enough in the front that the audience was gifted with that surprising full-frontal eyeful."Puerility" aside, there was much here to love: those peacoats and parkas and studded leather tunics, and hooded coats with funnel quilting that were as Charles James as anything we're going to see south of Charles James. A reminder that Owens roams into wild country when he creates. And beauty is there.
22 January 2015
While Rick Owens was working on his new collection, he was compulsively listening to Marlene Dietrich's version of "Baubles, Bangles and Beads," a show tune that has been nailed by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Eydie Gorme. The innate effervescence of that song versus Dietrich's somewhat less spry delivery made for the contrast that defined Owens' latest designs. The Ballets Russes, the early 20th century's most spectacular rejection of the cultural status quo, was his starting point. Owens gave his own spin to a dancer's tulle. The brutalist tutu? Get used to it.Wondering what would happen if one of his own personal heroes, the Bauhaus concretist Marcel Breuer, created clothes out of tulle, Owens made a collection that paradoxically married lightness to architectural weight. The resulting silhouette was something new for him: a strict smock shape that allowed for flares of tulle on either side, like a suppressed tutu. Owens thought of them as frills, and if frilliness was a new notion for him, so too were the textures of the smocks, crimped and honeycombed. Eventually they exploded into floating parachute wings in the back. Pale gold and khaki, baby blue and pink: The color palette was new as well. Hell, even the veryideaof a color palette for a Rick Owens collection was radical. And there was overt decoration, in the form of serpentine embroideries, and a finale of looks adorned with sculptural funnels of fabric.It all added up to a new mood of lyricism, a feeling compounded by the soundtrack of classical music: Mid-century Polish composer Wojciech Kilar was a distinct departure from Owens' usual visceral electronic noise. Still, he anchored his models to earth with clogs that clacked noisily around the catwalk. That single discordant note was a salutary reminder that Rick Owens will never go gently into that good night.
25 September 2014
Rick Owens named his collection Faun, afterL'Après-Midi d'un Faune,Nijinsky's scandalous debut for the Ballets Russes in 1912, which is widely considered to be the birth of modern dance. It wasn't hard to see why Owens was inspired. The paganism of Nijinsky's performance versus the sophistication and artifice of high culture is the kind of contrast the designer thrives on in his own work. "How to keep a balance is the challenge," he said this morning.The evolution of Owens' work has been very clear of late: focusing inward, from the step teams two seasons ago, to his own team last Fall, to one longtime member of that team this Spring. Benoit B. was having a difficult time until Owens' wife, Michèle, took him under her wing. He drew for her to show his gratitude, and those drawings became the heart of this collection, embroidered on canvas tunics in an extravagantly graphic way that was new for Owens.But the soul was Nijinsky's faun, chasing his nymph, losing her, then masturbating on the scarf she drops. Small wonder Belle Epoque Paris was horrified. The trailing scarf was a recurring motif. Owens compared the cross-body straps from which jackets were slung to garlands. The diaper-like constructs (a not entirely successful revision of shorts) could dress the urban faun. And the Adidas Springblades had the fleetness of woodland feet. The varied palette—also new for the designer—was a faded version of the colors Léon Bakst used in his designs for the Ballets Russes.To complete his ideal vision of the coming together of some of his modernist heroes, Owens made a double-breasted coat that he imagined would have been worn by interior designer—and Owens fave—Jean-Michel Frank. "I like to think he was in the audience watching Nijinsky hump that scarf," he wrote in his show notes. If there was something oddly romantic about such a pipe dream, it dovetailed neatly with the emotional undertow of this collection.
25 June 2014
Starting with his last men's show, Rick Owens resolved to move away from the theatrical presentations that had come to dominate Rickworld. A change of heart brought a change of venue. Psychodrama surrendered to intimacy. The setting sun gilded the Eiffel Tower through the huge windows of the Théâtre National de Chaillot today while the extended Owens "family" walked in a collection of clothes as simple and—Lord, save us—sweet as the designer has ever shown.It was too banal to define the collection as commercial. Way beyond that, it was about connection. Rick's "relatives" were the women who have played a part in his life over the years—as friends, as employees, as models. Many of them now have their own families. Owens underlined a sense of continuity by having them walk more than once in the show wearing the same outfit. Confusing for the audience, until they grasped that this was arealcircle ofreallives.The night before the show, Owens sent a reassuring message to his models, something along the lines of, "Try and enjoy the serene benevolence of presenting a story of love." As he said today, "I'm getting all New Agey in my own, abstract, do-it-yourself way." Maybe that's why the soundtrack was a muted variant on the abrasive thud that usually propels an Owens show forward. But the shift in sensibility also shaped the clothes as a benevolent embrace—cocooning capes; quilting; soft, plush fabrics; poncho tops; and those comfy onesies that cropped up in the men's collection. It's an extraordinary turn of events to think of a Rick Owens show promoting family values, but here they were: love, protection, communication. And, overall: the tribe, the shared sense of unity that has been integral to the Owens ethos over the years.It was that tribal idea that added spine to the show. Every tribe has warriors. Here, they wore croc-printed shifts, motocross leather pants, and armlets like superpower bracelets. Kirsten Owen's headgear might have been an air-conditioning duct…or a high priestess' ceremonial topper. It was a peculiar vision of matriarchy, but it illuminated the future world that the great-grandchildren of the Owens family will populate.
26 February 2014
"Moody" was a magnificent slice of sound recorded in 1981 by ESG, three sisters from the South Bronx. Rick Owens had the song running around in his head when he was thinking about Fall 2014 for men, so that's what he called his collection. The men he was thinking of were moody cops, emblems of the authority that he—and millions like him—rejected in their testosterone-raddled youths. "Suddenly you're 50 and you're the authority," Owens said, with what would have been rue in anyone else. Authority can have connotations of dominance and submission. Which is how the art of Tom of Finland came to insinuate itself in today's collection, with the boots, belt buckles, and holsters of Tom's overripe macho men in uniform abstracted into the details of the clothes.Those abstractions were much less obvious than the flak vests in duchesse satin that appeared later in the show, but their (implied) presence seemed perversely appropriate to a collection which, in Owens' telling, was heavy with symbolism: The black leather of brutal authority was, for example, balanced by the cashmere head wraps that symbolized benevolent nuns. They seemed to parallel some kind of internal struggle for the designer. "I'm talking myself out of punishing myself for not being perfect," he said. So in effect he is both dominator and dominated.In the clothes, at least, there was less sense of schism. The collection's primary building block was a hybrid of a shift and a onesie in leather. The zip that ringed the backside undoubtedly offers convenience to anyone who is caught short, but it left the alarming impression of an overgrown fetishist's Babygro. Sometimes it was separated into a tunic and shorts, over big boots-cum-waders. Innuendo aside, it was actually a strong, sleek look, even sophisticated when Owens added heavy silk wraps in that Hollywood-couture way that is part of his lexicon. The wimple supplied a hint of the spiritual nomad.But Owens has already been to that mountaintop. Today he was talking about "the need for some kind of graceful transition" between where he's been and where he's going. After a series of stunning, assaultive presentations in the Bercy arena in the east of Paris, he has moved west to show at the Palais de Chaillot. "Those shows had become so theatrical that the clothes were overshadowed and I didn't want to get stuck there." Meaning, presumably, that this is a return to a time when it's the clothes that will be speaking loudest.
They definitely did that today. The trick was in understanding what they were saying.
15 January 2014
Rick Owens thinks of himself as the classic American in Paris, mesmerized by the culture that surrounds him. So he wanted to give something back with his new collection, something from his world. But there was no way that Parisians—or anyone anywhere, for that matter—could be prepared for what Rick gave today.For inspiration, he looked to stepping, which evolved in African-American colleges as a hybrid of step dancing, cheerleading, and military drill. (Choreographers Lauretta Malloy Noble and her daughter LeeAnet added other elements—Zulu dancing, for instance—to customize the designer's presentation.) For the past five months, Owens and his people worked with stepping teams from four sororities—Washington Divas, Soul Steppers, The Momentums, The Zetas—to produce a performance that was as spectacularly synchronized and spotlit as a Busby Berkeley celluloid set piece from the golden age of Hollywood.Forty dancers—features set in a scowl steppers call "grit face," intended to intimidate the competition—pounded the catwalk in outfits that transfigured Owens' signature wrapped, draped tropes. These women needed to move. The clothes were adjusted accordingly—hiked, laced, slit, zipped—to allow maximum motion. It was a revelation to see Owens' clothes so transformed: immediate electricity rather than the monumental serenity that has pervaded his womenswear of late. If he's always wanted to create clothes that were, as he said, "a cross of elegance and roughness," this was the time and place he made that happen. In his hands, the notion of extreme sportswear became something as gorgeously unlikely as the NBA in Vionnet. And that was some kind of vision.More than that, it was bliss to experience Rick's joyous assault on fashion orthodoxy. "We're rejecting conventional beauty, creating our own beauty," he said. He's acutely aware of the accusations of cultishness that are leveled against his clothes, but all those body types today added up to as inclusive a catwalk vision of womanhood as we're ever likely to see. Such a gentle notion, and yet it struck home with a sledgehammer force. Sure, the breathtaking presentation counted for a lot, but it got its overwhelmingly timely weight from the culture of denial and exclusion that is currently eroding American politics.
25 September 2013
When Rick Owens first encountered Estonian hardcore band Winny Puhh, he claims he felt "an instant jolt of recognition." Scary, sleazy, over the top: They had it all for Owens. "And Estonian is such an alien language that when it's shrieked at you by a guy in a wolf mask, it becomes major."Owens' show today was called Vicious, like the song by Lou Reed. (Reed, incidentally, put Shazam on the designer's iPhone. Nowthere'sa connection.) The lyric runs on, "You hit me with a flower." That was the spirit Owens wanted—"cheerful viciousness, viciousness with humor. I felt like doing something ludicrous and fun." Cue Winny Puhh: one screaming Saruman, three well-muscled werewolves in wrestling singlets thrashing the life out of traditional instruments (an electrified lute?), and two drummers suspended vertically on a spinning platform, defying gravity, not to mention reason. Last season's soundtrack was Wagner, but this was Sturm und Drang of an entirely different nature. At show's end, when the werewolves were whisked skyward on wires to revolve lifelessly above the crowd, the performance reached a sacrificial, ritualistic pinnacle that surely thrilled Owens to his dark, pagan core as much as it left his audience stumbling into the daylight in awhat tha?daze.The clothes? They were a blur, deliberately so—if the models had walked any faster they'd have been running. Urgent movement and fierce athleticism were the driving forces of the collection. Long-sleeve tees, close to the body, zipped even closer, over shorts…sheer diagonals, perforations, and mesh tanks revealing the flesh beneath…leather tanks flying away into long fringe, fringed leather belts…everything moving. The solid athletic footwear worked equally well for flight or fight. Rick's retailers were loving those.The savage hardcore sound complemented a collection that felt like Owens revisiting the mythical mosh pit of his L.A. days, maybe reclaiming the culture that shaped him in the same way that Raf Simons did last night. "No," Owens countered before the show. "Not reclaiming,duplicating.I worshipped that period, but I always felt excluded, not good enough. This is my revenge…myviciousrevenge. I was always a fan, but I was never this great.Thisis what I wanted to be."
26 June 2013
Given the primal, tribal intensity of a Rick Owens show, the designer himself can sound remarkably offhand about what it is that he does. "I'm known for three things," he said today. "The big coat, the big boots, the big T-shirt." And so he gave them to his public. But if that was all he did, the story would stop here. Of course it didn't, and those "three things" were just components—albeit key ones—in a collection that took Owens somewhere new."Battle-scarred heroism" was Owens' theme. The models stepped out into the Salle Marcel Cerdan, a brutal concrete bunker, through clouds of steam, their faces bleached clean, their hair frizzed into huge dandelion heads. Wagner's "Schmerzen" ("Torments") soared on the soundtrack. It has been referred to as "a morbidly erotic song that joins love and death in passionate embrace." But if this so far reads like a spiral into apocalypse (which is, in fact, a journey Owens has not been averse to in the past), that was not at all the case today.Instead, the designer showed some of the most appealingly direct and simply beautiful pieces he has ever offered. The weightiness of his theme was leavened by his revision of his three signal pieces. The coats often had the big-sleeved volume of kimonos, the boots had needle heels instead of Frankenstein-soled chunk, and the T-shirts were sportily layered in mid-thigh tunics, some with asymmetric, bauble-trimmed tails. That decorative touch, rare for Owens, blew up in the collection's major motifs: Japanese-influenced knotting and grids of lacing. Realizing his predilection for the outré might incline his audience toward bondage scenarios, Owens quickly pointed out that it was actually traditional basket-weaving techniques he was referencing. He used them to knot a yoke of black ponyskin to a skirt of white suede in one spectacular jacket. White basket weave also strikingly hemmed a black kimono jacket. There were, however, plenty of simpler pieces to love, like the white-laced coat-dress and the abbreviated duffel.Fixed on his notion of heroic grace under pressure, Owens insisted that how you respond to adversity is a gauge of your character. That sounded like the kind of conviction that is based on personal experience. He agreed. "It's what I hope to be," he said. Still, you felt the grace, not the pressure, in the collection Owens showed today.
27 February 2013
Swagger might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the Rick Owens man, but swagger was what the designer had in mind with his new collection. He started with the swing of an A-line silhouette, added an oversize sleeve (a very military device to make the arms look powerful, according to the designer), and anchored the look with honking great boots to create a plinthlike solidity. Plinth was, after all, the name of the show. But never forget, as Owens reminded us, what big feet mean in a man. From plinth to swagger…And, swagger being a young man's game, there was necessarily a more youthful, more accessible vibe around this collection. "Boy Chantilly," Owens called the hair, which was teased into extravagance. He compared it to ethereal dandelion puffs. The way he belted his jackets high also had a boyish quality. You could almost imagine an after-school martial arts class. Same with the abstract fichus in which Owens wrapped shoulders. They were like swaddling.All this is hardly to suggest that Owens was infantilizing the man he has relentlessly elevated over the past few seasons. As far as he is concerned, what he is offering the world is, in his own words, "an American's idea of French sophistication and finesse and chic." The back-to-front collars today were, he said, a clear instance of a poetic flourish that Owens would consider to be French. Quite how the French might feel about such a gesture is debatable, but there was no doubt that, all swagger aside, this new collection exposed a more vulnerable side to the designer.
16 January 2013
The backdrop for Rick Owens' presentation today was a wall of falling foam that turned into a floor of spreading suds. It involved the same technology that is used in Ibiza's notorious foam parties, except here the effect was quite different. Owens himself called it "a little bit hallucinogenic." It was like the sensation you get when you're above the clouds, looking down. Maybe that's why the parade of pale, gilded looks the designer offered had a celestial tinge. Well, not all of them. Elongated, shiny pieces caped in black lacquered python felt like serpentine intrusions into Owens' Eden above the clouds.There aren't many designers who could provoke you to contemplate Original Sin, but the intensity of Owens' commitment to what he does is such that the Biggest Ideas attach themselves easily to his work. It appeals to the spiritandthe flesh. Today, for example, there was a new sheerness and softness in the extraordinary fabrics, a shimmering, papery delicacy in the way they enveloped or cocooned the body. "How can I project kindness through clothes?" Owens asked himself. Like his last menswear collection, this one was called Island, and the designer was imagining a retreat, a "safe spot," a place of peace and serenity. The liquid palette—tones of sand, pearl, ivory, and silver—reflected such a place. So did the textures, including pieces alive with threads of silk.Free-associating on factors that contributed to the collection, Owens mentioned Gustav Klimt as an inspiration, not just for the gold but also for the linear decoration, such as it was, which emphasized the cap-sleeved line of the clothes. He also referred in passing to the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky'sThe Rite of Spring. It wasn't so long ago that Owens' Gothic vision was darkly Wagnerian. If the drama of his shows continues to be operatic in scale, he has at least let the sunshine in. But never forget that the snake still circles.
26 September 2012
Last season Rick Owens called his collection "Mountain," heights to scale in search of self. This season it was "Island," but, contrary to the old existential formula, Owens was insisting that every man is an island, with his own rules and morality. That sounded like a formula for anarchy, an idea theoldRick might have relished. Instead, today's collection—younger, fresher, upbeat—underlined the fact that the new Rick crossed into the light some time ago. The air was clearly invigorating on that mountaintop.Owens' distinct, outsider vocabulary is now a fashion lingua franca. That much was clear from the variants on black— skirt, skort, suit, whatever—with which he opened the show. But when he went white, with sheer jackets in nylon or what looked like handkerchief linen, he proved how much more there is to say. That lightness was the dominant mood of the show, even on the shimmering robes, the hieratic look that remains the designer's most challenging proposition. And with the lightness, there was a new trimness, in the blousons and in the linear style of leather-patched sleeveless tops.When Owens talked about the linear, rectangular pattern on a parka (it looked a little like the reflective tape on a fireman's coat), he compared it to a tuning fork, something simultaneously practical and magical. But he also acknowledged that his fascination with lines reflected a certain rigidity in himself that his wife, Michelle, saved him from. "She's lyrical chaos," Owens waxed. "Without her, I'd be so rigid, I'd be a stick." In tribute, he borrowed her jangling bracelets and clippety-clop clogs to accessorize his models. And he may have launched her on a career in cabaret. That was Michelle's voice on the soundtrack, intoning, à la Dietrich, a poem by her favorite Langston Hughes over Matthew Stone's pulsing electronic sound storm. So here's a surprising new angle on the career of fashion's rebel angel: All along, it's been a love story.
27 June 2012
An audience with Rick Owens could leave you feeling like a seal who's been thrown a bucket of red herrings. Before his show today, he was relating his new collection to brutalism, the architectural movement that gave the world a wealth of anonymously squat concrete skyscrapers. Backstage, the models in filleted ski masks were a glimmer of what he might possibly mean, even if Owens clarified that the masks were, for him, "a brutalist veil," and, to counteract the harsher implications of a Lecter-like face hugger, he'd insisted on classically beautiful makeup: a pale face, a red lip. The soundtrack for the show, on the other hand, was Zebra Katz's savagely minimal "Ima Read." That at least had an unambiguously brutalist vibe. So did the set, with bars of fire blazing like a sacrificial pyre while the models walked.And then, against all that, Owens had to go and unload the most lyrical, un-brutal collection he's ever shown, in an act of fierce self-contradiction that underscored his assertion that the story slowly "emerges" each season for him. In other words, even he isn't quite sure what it is he's just done.There is certainly enough in Owens' work to suggest that he is unwittingly channeling something deep and meaningful. He is, however, clued in enough to provide a clear context. He's a Hollywood baby, for instance, so if there were freaky glimmers of Fred Astaire in his men's show in January, here there were refractions of Marlene Dietrich in her Jean Louis-gowned cabaret appearances (and how unlikely is it that the very same reference popped up with Marios Schwab in London).It was actually the pilled-chiffon dresses that were most suggestive of Dietrich's "naked" gowns to Owens himself, which was maybe an ellipse too far. If he's not sure about what he does, how can we be? Still, when Owens reeled off Dietrich's assets—"control, beauty, discipline"—they were all consummately expressed in his collection, never more so than in the serenely elegant gowns partnered with cropped lantern-sleeve leather jackets. Those same jackets also appeared with huge, capelike shearling collars.Duly enchanted, it was easy to move on to Owens' explorations of new graphic possibilities: blanket checks, patchworked furs, color-blocking (although the colors were a panoply of monotones).
Discussing the architectural influences on his latest collection, Owens mentioned that he'd progressed from last season's Marcel Breuer ("soft" brutalism) to Frank Lloyd Wright, the most organic of architects. So it was Wright's elementalism that ultimately shaped Owens' Fall. All those soft, round, flowing volumes were the very opposite of brutalism's angles. Thank God Rick Owens is a stranger to himself.
29 February 2012
Rick Owens has mountains on his mind. He named today's show after them. And next week, Giorgio Pace Projects is launchingMagic Mountain, an exhibition of his furniture, in St. Moritz. A mountain makes an ideal Owens metaphor: aspiration, inspiration (you climb it 'cause it's there), one step closer to heaven. There's more. Mountains are sport, so there was an aerodynamic quality in a snow white shirt, with a collar that swooped back over the shoulder as if borne on a downhill wind. Maybe it was the thin mountain air that inspired the fragile aqua of another shirt. The stripes on small shearling jackets looked ski-ish. The white jersey pants they were paired with could also have been vintage skiwear at a pinch. And the final trio of padded, quilted coat, parka, and vest were clearly so down-filled as to resist the chill winds of Everest itself.If the abstract sportiness was a new mood for Owens, so was the Steerpike silhouette that matched high-waisted, baggy-crotched pants to cropped, high-waisted jackets with narrow sleeves that seemed to stretch the arms. There was something young andstreetabout the result, as opposed to the grand, ceremonial volumes that Owens specializes in. Of course,theywere here too, in the form of the skirts that have become a signature item. The designer confessed to bemusement at the photos from Pitti Uomo of the peacocks that populate Tommy Ton's pictures, with their clashing colors and swathes of exotic stuff and sartorial details for days. "I always want onelessbutton," Owens said. "But here I am with my black dress." And he laughed, appreciating the extremity of the notion. In the context of mountains, his skirts had a shamanic flair. Tibet, maybe. But it's another spiritual center that has really captured Owens' imagination. "My dream job? Head gardener at the Vatican," he said. "I could wear a robe all day." From his lips to the Pope's ears.
18 January 2012
Rick Owens called the wall of light that framed his catwalk "a gateway to heaven." Typically provocative. When his models passed through that wall, it looked like they'd just encountered the world's biggest bug zapper. "Electrocuted martyrs," Owens dubbed them.The first models in their virginal smocks might indeed have been sacrifices to some divine eminence, though the religious subtext is something the indubitably carnal Owens would probably dodge. Still, the elevated spiritual connotations are something that have been creeping into his work for a while now. They were obvious here in his take on the couture influence that has insinuated itself into ready-to-wear this season. Never mind everyone else's mid-century; Owens pond-skipped back to mid-millennium, the Renaissance moment when popes were presented like big game, their heads mounted on a neutral, big-shouldered backdrop, chastely closed to the throat. As a statement about individuality, it was hard to challenge, even if Owens' models were too callow to convey the depth of his conviction. It would be amazing to see this idea carried through on multifaceted humanity.That's the best thing about Owens. You can totally go there with him on Big Ideas. He's more than an aesthetic; he's an ethos. Which is why he has so many acolytes in fashion. Here, for instance, he was challenging the notion of what he called "horny dressing." Miniskirts? Owens hates them. He insisted he was offering the opposite of sex—"stately elegance," he called it. In this collection, it was manifest in a fishtail gown with one single seam running down its front; in slender columns ("pillar skirts" in Owens-speak) topped by pure-couture sack-backed smocks; in metallic Art Deco patchwork of the finale. And then there was the way the fabric of a dress was quietly gathered at the breastbone. Guess what? That's kind of hot.
28 September 2011
Preppy? Yes, preppy! That was Rick Owens' rationale for the seersucker that made a guest appearance in his latest collection. He claims he likes to test himself with exercises in the very opposite of everything he stands for, much like his skewed salute some years back to the fanny-packed American tourist. A more germane reference for the clothes he showed today was legendary couturier Cristobal Balenciaga, whose sculpted volumes are often echoed in Owens' own dramatic drapes. Using fabrics as true to couture as raw silk and shantung, Owens created his own version of the classic three-piece suit—jacket, top, and skirt—except he added a fourth layer, a tuniclike piece. "I just invented the four-piece suit," he crowed after the show.Owens' skirt was scarcely Balenciaga's sleek pencil or bell shape. Instead, it was a floor-length, apronlike wrap that defined the collection as much as the many variations of jacket that provided the top half. Add the monastic tonsure of some of the models and the combination had a priestly air. There were also floor-length tank dresses that evoked students in the seminary of a parallel universe. The backdrop—huge panels of bright white light—and the soundtrack (a crescendo-ing electronic throb) also suggested spiritual aspirations. Making such an interpretation more possible was Owens' own fascination with the idea of transcendence. Balenciaga believed such a state could be achieved by glorying God through devotion to his craft. Owens is rather too pagan for that, plus he was talking about the power of rationalism today. Still, it's hard not to look at his collections and see someone who is obsessively steering his craft in such a unique and deeply personal direction that it amounts to a spiritual quest. The lean, clean lines of his new collection read like road maps.
22 June 2011
It may have been his best collection yet—it was undoubtedly his most elegant. With today's show, Rick Owens scaled new heights in his pursuit of purity. It was a master class in balance and proportion, perfectly colored to match, in complementary layers of taupe, gray, brown, ivory, and black. From the moment Daphne Groeneveld walked out onto the runway in elbow-length gloves and a floor-length skirt, her head wrapped, a cape thrown back over her shoulders, the show was a vision of the kind of glamour that sparked Owens' interest in fashion in the first place. True, the hoods, snoods, and capes harked back to the sisters who've populated the designer's catwalk in the past, but here the holiest of orders came from Hollywood on high. One model in a mink cape might have been headed to the Warner Bros. lot. And Owens referenced Charles James, the fabulous but flawed American couturier whose career he once dreamed of emulating, with jackets and coats whose padded sleeves looked like angels' wings.They were the one significant example of volume in a collection where Owens wanted as narrow a silhouette as possible. So the shapes that are his usual signature were pared away. This loaned a new precision to his work, which made it easier to appreciate his cut and proportion. With typical aw-shucks modesty, he insisted his key look wasn't much more than a wrap skirt with a T-shirt and sweater thrown on top—the kind of casual, slightly grungy look he himself does so well. The merest glance at—let alone touch of—the clothes put paid to that idea.Still, Owens might have been reminding us that his success is entirely on his own terms. As overwhelmingly chic as the collection looked, it was still recognizably Rick: Its building block was, after all, a pair of shorts with a crotch so dropped they might as well have been a skirt. Under a long knit tunic and a shorter jacket, they certainly looked like one.
2 March 2011
"Service, duty, devotion… we don't hear those words enough."Rick Owenswas musing on the state of mind that shaped his new collection. While thinking about a man who would go the extra mile to protect and provide for his family, the designer's imagination roamed everywhere, from the slaves who built the pyramids in ancient Egypt all the way over to the ceremonial service enacted by the pope and his priests. And, bizarre though it sounds, as soon as he said it, you could see it in the clothes. That short kiltlike skirt? Isn't that what the workers are wearing in Egyptian tomb paintings? The cowls, robes, and streaming sashes that closed the show, meanwhile, had a monkish mien. But those sashes also evoked the deconstructed obi of a samurai, and the crisscross metalwork that adorned a black felt tunic looked a little like a bandolier. The black leather skirt worn over pants was the latest variant of an Owens signature, but in another time it might have been the uniform of Scottish soldiers at the battle of Culloden. In other words, there will always be something of the warrior in the Owens man. And that's a result of the tribal sensibility he himself has fostered with his clothes.Today's soundtrack was Felix's house classic "Don't You Want Me" distilled into pounding marching music for an army of models whose extreme youth, unusual for the designer, made one wonder if his thoughts about the concept of service and sacrifice had set him brooding on the Children's Crusade, one of the most tragic examples of devotion to an ideal in the annals of Western history.You just know that Rick Owens is one of the very few fashion designers you can go to primal places like that with. But if there's always something primal about his shows, there is nothing primitive about his clothes. Fall 2011's jackets and coats were spectacular exercises in cut, from the slightly cutaway blazer that opened the show, to the closing flurry of coats. The duffel coats in black or white leather that clasped with two fiercesome metal toggles were the sort of stand-alone pieces that might seduce a man who wouldn't be caught dead in Rick's dresses. "A guy wearing a dress is such a functional thing," he insisted. "Easy as a flannel shirt. Extreme and practical at the same time." From his lips to your ears....
19 January 2011
"I started with abandon. Now I'm more interested in control," Rick Owens said, contemplating his new collection. That, in a nutshell, is the passage from youth to maturity. Still, as you age, you realize complete control is an impossibility, and yet you pursue it anyway, which inspires the melancholy of futility. How many fashion designers can you attachthatweight to? That feeling surely explains the mysterious tug of a Rick Owens collection, and it's the magic element that will always give him the edge on his many imitators. This time, the evolution—abandon to control—was crystal clear. Where once his clothes were languid and drapey, now Owens favored a rigid, almost austere structure. Reemploying the silk cotton canvas from his recent men's collection, he cut shapes that stiffly framed the body, with collars that extended skyward. Skirts were extreme, either in volume or length, fishtails trailing in perverse defiance of common sense. But then Owens offered a group of mid-thigh styles, fabric folded to form a split tuniclike kilt—it was as commercial as anything he's ever done, especially when paired with pearly-toned leather jackets.The dominant principle of the collection was aerodynamicism. It was implicit in the makeup and the hair; combs of bone rose from Luigi Murenu's chignons like alien tiaras—or antennae. But there were also cutaway leather tops and strapless columns that fell away in wings of fabric. Owens had seen the Picasso show at Gagosian in London this summer and been taken by the cardboard cutouts of white doves. That's the kind of subtle transmutation that makes his collections so haunting. And, because every detail is more thoughtful here than at many design houses, the soundtrack—Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink," a piece of electronica whose innate lyricism has been mutated but never matched by multiple remixers—seemed significant. A hard, mutant lyricism is part of the unique appeal of Rick Owens.
29 September 2010
"Monastic couture" was Rick Owens' own label for his new collection, and the monochrome severity of the show was a step away from the romance of Fall. Or maybe it was a different kind of romance: The designer was so enthralled by his fabrics for Spring that he felt like stripping everything away and letting the cloth speak for itself. Long coats with a single button were lapel-less (though he also showed them with a small lapel and short sleeves); tops streamed away to an asymmetrical point, emphasizing their aerodynamic quality.But the clothes scarcely had spring in their step. It was a coat-heavy show, a point reinforced by staging that suggested a wintry storm, with clouds swirling across the catwalk and wind machines blasting the front row. And while his leather pieces are usually washed and softened to limpness, Owens this time opted for skins with what he called "architectural weight," patching them into jackets that looked as solid as breastplates.A group of white cotton coats worn with white wimples evoked penitents, or perhaps Joan of Arc, pure of heart and on her way to the stake. "I like that idealism," Owens mused. "There's something poignant about people who devote themselves to a cause. I'm not there yet." Ah, but y'are, Rick, y'are.
23 June 2010
With their swept-back hair and swept-up eye makeup, Rick Owens' infeasibly attenuated tribe of women were an uncompromising vision of female power. Who were they, with their long, zigzag-patterned legs; asymmetric warrior wraps; bared arms; and intense hip-accentuated forward gait? "A sect of nuns," he said. "Glamorous nuns, with inner discipline."That's Owens on a concept level, the one he believes in as a way of life, rather than a passing seasonal whim. The amazing thing, though, is that what might read as an insider tract, intelligible only to the initiated, is actually a wide-open book for a far broader fashion church. Look more closely, and Owens' way of showing is really a methodical demonstration of a jacket collection that comes in so many permutations that it can appeal to hard-core goths, working urbanites of all ages, and women with plenty of money to lavish on fur. As an outerwear specialist, he has an answer to puffers (down-filled wraps), biker jackets (slick to the ribs, and zippered up one side), hoodies (conceptual versions with geometric horn appliqués), and fur vests (kangaroo at the less expensive end, full-length mink at the ultra).Beneath all this there were dippy, asymmetrical jersey skirts bunched into layered folds in front and a well-thought-out display of accessories: gloves encircled with fur tufts, wedge boots (most directionally in tan leather), and, on each look, those zigzag tights-cum-leggings. Ignore the apparent weirdness of Owens' point of view, and this could be seen as another of fashion's methodically commercial one-look collections, strategized to spotlight the house top-sellers as well as the best of them.
3 March 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
21 January 2010
Rick Owens, the author of a silver lamé tissue dress drifting transparently into a billow at the back? Or a series of pearly gray duchesse satin coats that resembled abstract versions of classic Cristobal Balenciaga? For a designer who's so often categorized as walking on the dark side, it was a conscious breakthrough. "I lightened up," he said. "I've always insisted on a certain monochromatic vision, but I was toying with pretty this time. Something on the way to sumptuous."We are not, of course, talking about a night-to-day abandonment of principles. Owens' aesthetic choices were as true to himself as ever, though on the runway (to begin with, at least) his conceptual direction seemed hard to fathom. The silhouettes—divided into asymmetric, geometrically angled biker jackets; stiff, papery apron tunics; and a narrow tabard of fabric that kept whipping between the models' legs—seemed awkward, almost as if the designer were trying to distract from the fact that the sweeping coats he was showing were edging toward a conventional, nearly couturelike grandeur.As cultish and extreme as Owens' runway styling can seem, though, it's always been an open secret that his pieces appeal to a broad church. Aside from the bodysuits, sheer one-shoulder tops, and jersey harness affairs, there were flow-y black wide-legged jumpsuits and tailored jackets with an upward flange on the shoulder that could be a chic addition to many a grown-up woman's wardrobe. And when he finally worked up to the silver lamé dress—and its close relations in white and liquid copper—any sense of difficulty and puzzlement completely evaporated. "Pretty," as Owens put it, doesn't really do them justice. They were beautiful.
30 September 2009
"It started off dark," mused Rick Owens, as he laconically considered the lightness that overtook him while designing Fall. "But then…they blossomed into swans." Of course, it was as otherworldly a flock as ever, but the strange beauty of Owens' collection came across in a triumphal way that has rarely read so well on his runway. Often the intricately evolved layerings that go into his work are hidden by being sunk in black. This time, after eight solid monochrome looks, all that suddenly changed. With a shift into icy blue, pearly gray, palest beige, and silver—from his mink-and-goat fur beanies down to the baggy wedge boots—all the genius of Owens' vision came to light.Every look was constructed around a high-necked, raised-shoulder jacket, wrapped at the throat and falling away into various asymmetries beneath. Under that came two or three more layers of tunics or skirts (it was impossible to tell which) over leggings, and boots constructed from soft leather like some sort of Boccioni futurist sculpture. Sounds weird? Not at all to initiates of the beauty of Owens' leather jackets, and the utilitarian cool of practically every component he works in. In reality, what wearers know by heart is that the scary-chic of a Rick Owens runway look actually dismantles to fit an extraordinarily broad spectrum of shapes, lives, and ages. It's made him a huge influence on young girls and a resource for grown sophisticates alike: an American design hero whose time has come.
4 March 2009
The sensation of filing past the black-lipped, pale-skinned gatekeepers at Rick Owens' show is akin to that of gaining entry to a sect gathering. You sit down, a whoosh of dry ice fills the room, and there they are on the runway, Owens' bewimpled women in black, or, as he named them this time, the "Priestesses of Longing."Somehow the vaporous ritualism of the beginning of Owens' show seemed to link up with the primitivism (cave people, tribalism, that sort of thing) that's emerging from the fashion ether this season. Still, it's not an idea to get too spooked by: As strange as the headgear and trash bag wrapped footwear may be on his runway, the clothes call to a far wider following than the members of a mere insider cult.That may not be particularly obvious from the nude-paneled, back-baring halters and floppy all-in-ones that came at the start. But Owens' real secret is the fact that among the twists, turns, cutouts, and asymmetries of his (mainly) black bias-cut design, there's so much that's so wearable. With this collection, he filtered an almost old-school couture elegance into the mix: a jacket knotted into the torso, a high-waisted A-line coat, chic trumpet-leg pants, sleeves cut with jutting fins in the upper arm, and something that looked like a cross between a bandanna knot and a couture bow as closures.
27 September 2008
Those who came looking for the light-handed couture of Spring were in for a surprise. The couture workmanship was still there, but as for the light—well, Owens hasn't retreated back to his proverbial crypt, but his models did look like they had swaggered through the apocalypse. An engaging sight it was, too. Their uniform consisted of a mink cap, a glorified cashmere sweat suit of layered tees and long shorts in olive drab or black, and leather or shearling legwarmers that laced at the back of the knee and belled out unzipped above towering wedge boots.Having established that base, Owens zeroed in on the outerwear that he so loves to embellish. "I lifted so directly from Lee Bontecou that I'm telling everybody," he said backstage, referencing the American sculptor best known for her menacing fabric and steel constructions of the sixties. Indeed, some of the coats had funnels, à la Bontecou, that protruded several inches above the shoulders like wings and circled around the torso to drape from the hips. These might prove challenging even for Owens' most avant-garde devotees, but there were other pieces that will only broaden his appeal: Take the divine, weightless-looking minks that tied dramatically at the neck to drape in soft folds down the torso, or the edgier peplum styles in (Bontecou again) patchworks of cashmere, metallic leather, and faded denim. These will surely find an eager audience at the Paris transplant's first New York outpost, a Tribeca store at Hudson and Dominick that's scheduled to open this summer.
23 February 2008
"I indulged myself so much in furry cavemen last season, I thought it'd be fun to go crisp," said Rick Owens backstage. Dropping Fall's much-praised shaggy shearlings and flowy skirts, he worked instead in sharp, clean skins—eel, snake, or ostrich—and sculptural gazar. Usually Owens likes to cocoon the body in trailing bits of jersey or washed leather, but here he focused on manipulating, almost distorting, the female silhouette—"the grand gesture," he called it.Dresses came with high, funneling necks and bodies that twisted around the torso to create pouchlike pockets, a soft fold at the upper back revealing a flash of female skin. The best came in solid black or white; less successful were the ones in graphic stripes that zigzagged back and forth and around the dresses—there was nowhere for the eye to settle, and all those beautiful drapes went unappreciated. Geometric, almost kimono-esque jackets and podlike vests, worn over tunics and dhoti pants, looked easier to carry off, though it wouldn't have hurt to see a proper pair of trousers (i.e., ones that didn't droop southward toward the knees). This wasn't Owens' strongest effort—it was more of a lark, if we read him right backstage—but then again, no one should begrudge him the right to go out on a limb.
29 September 2007
"I was looking at the work of the French cartoonist Sens, who did caricatures lampooning Poiret women as insects," said Rick Owens backstage before his show. That just might be the most meta inspiration of the season, given fashion's current fascination with the great couturier. It's certainly among the most unusual, and it produced one of Owens' most precise and accomplished shows yet. Paring back on the decorative confections of his last collection, the designer played with volume and texture to create what he called simple, primitive shapes. But if his skirt silhouette—a draped jersey design with the hint of a slit—remained unchanged from the first to the last of his 35 looks, there was nothing simple about the show's jackets and coats. Among them: shaggy mohair cocoons with stiff, rounded leather collars that arced away from the collarbones in a graceful ellipse; sleek sheared-mink vests with twin lapels falling to the same side; and other toppers with stand-up collars-cum-hoods and rounded backs that looked like a beetle's hard casing.The highlights, though, were undoubtedly the shearlings. With their nipped waists, exaggerated face-framing collars, and cutaway tails, they deftly walked the barbarism/sophistication line that Owens has made his calling card. You could complain that the show was singular in its focus on outerwear at the expense of all else, but with looks as smashing as Owens' shearlings, why bother?
24 February 2007
"Dad read me fantasy stories when I was a kid in the seventies, with Frank Frazetta's illustrations of mysterious, intergalatic regal queens being fought over. I was brought up on that—and Wagner," said Rick Owens. "So this is for Dad—he's here." Backstory revealed, Owens sent out his lightest and most ethereal collection to date, shown on the sidewalk outside his newly opened store in the Palais Royal. Pure-white organdy asymmetric jackets, crunched up around the neck and gathered into a peplum in back, were paired with complex handkerchief-point or draped skirts, striding leggily out on shaggy-chiffon, signature-Rick shoes.The lightness, together with rock-couturish flourishes like the spiky black ribbon-ties jutting from shoulder fastenings, turned this into a sit-up-and-take-notice sequel to Owens' more predictable journeys around his personal netherworld. Funnel hoods, pulled all the way over to veil faces, gave a semi-scary jolt, but that was only a problem until they were pushed back—then they were just a detail in an elegant, flyaway evening coat. Still, like other designers this season, Owens didn't have the bottom half of his collection resolved. His dresses were in the bias-cut groove he's worked forever—the aesthetic he calls "Scotch-taped Vionnet"—but, annoyingly, this time they were all sheer. A quick Google search of Frazetta (there's a museum in Pennsylvania) shows why: All of those lusty maidens were nude. Panties don't really solve that problem, so let's hope Owens has a few boring old slips in reserve to help out.
30 September 2006
Rick Owens cast a long shadow at Pitti Uomo in Florence, not least with an installation featuring a realistic wax sculpture of himself peeing. Other sections showcased his furniture and a career retrospective, which created a comprehensive context for the launch of his fall collection. Linking each endeavor was the idea of dust, a subject in keeping with Owens's vaguely postapocalyptic aesthetic. There were several looks that could have stepped straight off the set ofDune,though the polishedOld World elegance of much of the outerwear also suggested an embrace of the past. That could have a lot to do with the sterling work that Owens has been doing for the luxe label Revillon. Equally, it ties in with his fascination with extremes: A gorgeously tailored officer's coat, piped in white at collar and shoulders, was worn over the baggy-top-and-long-john look that is something of a signature for Owens—glamour and grunge in one outfit. The tone of the collection was set by a dialogue between military and sports influences. Voluminous drawstringed shorts worn over leggings could have done a skate punk or snowboarder proud, but once paired with a pristine white blouson, they became part of a uniform for new warriors of the wasteland.
13 April 2006
With all those layers of wool felt, cashmere, and fur blanketing the runways in New York and Milan, this is Rick Owens' moment. Few designers do dark quite like he does, and he played to his strengths for fall with such items as an extraordinary, apocalyptic black puffer coat that looked as if it were sewn from an inflated life raft. Who knows if it¿ll float, but it hugged the torso like a dream, its lapels rising almost to the chin then cutting away just above the waist to a tapered back.Owens worked less statement-making fabrics into similar body-framing shapes. Some of his best jackets came in silvery linen inset with shrunken vests of peachy-gold washed leather. Those orchid-petal lapels he did last season? They've blossomed into double-breasted jackets.The designer had stripped away some of his familiar goth affectations—notably, the models' ghostly white makeup—but he didn't stay away from that aforementioned dark side for long. It appeared in the form of felted wool boleros trimmed with ruffles of knit and worn over high-waist cropped pants, as well as in a series of almost minimal suits—the straight seams of which set them apart from his signature bias-cut fare. It also materialized in a trio of drapey black evening dresses. Slit down to there, the gowns' easy, billowing forms made a lovely counterpoint to the rigor of Owens' daywear.
25 February 2006
The artillery fire on Rick Owens' soundtrack was a bit misleading. Despite the powdery white faces, thick-soled boots, and fondness for a drab palette, his army of goth girls looked less militaristic and dour than in the past. And they were more on trend, especially in slender, bias-cut chiffon gowns with vaguely thirties silhouettes.The designer has developed a large cult following and a healthy retail business on the slimming power of his jackets, and his spring collection delivers plenty of them. Some were shown in his signature washed leather. A few had slashes in the back and were tied at the side, and still others displayed precision tailoring, elaborately pieced together from leather, silk, and pleated net and worn over another Owens' staple: the drapey tee.Trousers cut in too-sheer georgette exposed inner workings like seams, pocket linings, and zipper plackets. Full chiffon pants were pleated in a zigzag manner that created bulk and drew attention to the backside, hips, and thighs, areas that even his sylphlike fans would often rather downplay. And a few hobble skirts proved too restrictive for even the most nimble of his models. But those missteps couldn't distract from his masterful jackets and vests with lapels of buttercup patent leather, lizard, and shagreen that blossomed like flowers. When Owens stepped out of character, as he did with a sleeveless, long wrap dress made from eyelet (in gray, but still), he really dazzled.
1 October 2005
How many women are ready to join the Rick Owens crypt club of fashion? That's an interesting question. When his subterranean goddesses rise to the surface for his shows, they can make a pretty terrifying sight. Rick's rockin' wraiths dress head to toe in felted, pilled fabrics, trailing skinny skirts in shades of dirt, gray, and mouse, and stomping forward on intimidatingly solid stiletto-heel boots. Should they turn their deathly pale faces and beckon, instinct might tell you to run quickly in the opposite direction.But take a second look before you flee too fast. Even though Owens' total image is patently not for wimps, some of the individual components are brilliant—most obviously, the rough-hewn, bias cut shearlings and leather jackets that have been finding their way into so many women's wardrobes over the years. This season offered more irresistible pieces for the mainstream Rick collector, particularly the fierce cropped sheepskin gilets and boleros. Some of the sinuous skirts and flared pants in velvet would translate easily to life above ground, too. But taken as a whole? No. That's a place where only the brave—and the very strange—will ever go.
28 February 2005
Rick Owens, of all people, inspired by nuns? That, he said, was the thinking behind his spring collection, one that was clearly meant to prove he's capable of designing beyond his familiar (albeit very successful) traily, greigey layers of T-shirting and leather. The first jacket, with its winged effect springing from a puffy shoulder line, was presumably drawn from a mother superior's wimple. That was followed by shortie bloomers in heavy duchesse satin, carrying what looked like an extra skirt in front. Distantly related to a Cistercian robe? Maybe, but still utterly impossible to wear.Given the change-hungry, unsparingly critical Parisian arena, Owens is right to move his aesthetic along. But there's always risk in change, and his first experiments with heavier, more-luxe fabrics were puzzling. Things were much better when he kept them light. His new palette, which included shades of pink, white, burnt orange, and cinnamon worked quite beautifully—especially the slim, bias-cut, vaguely thirties georgette dresses, nipped and tucked here and there for a hip sort of asymmetry. The sheer white tulle-stuffed bomber, and the delicate fan-pleating he pieced into some of his jackets and skirts, also brought in a new, even romantic, feeling. His ragged-edged shorts, cut like slouchy men's trousers, felt right for the season. But when they were worn by skinny youths who staggered perversely around in six-inch platform boots with a lot of white chest and hairy leg on show? Lord, help us!
7 October 2004
It's becoming clear that Rick Owens will never deviate from his core look. That drapey, goth-gone-overground thing is just what he does, and no amount of outside pressure is ever going to make him add in, say, a fifties print frock or a pie-frill blouse for the sake of hitting a seasonal trend. Still, the progress of his familiar, heavy-sandaled horde is interesting to watch. The asymmetric, traily things they're wearing for fall—all dipped in a delicate palette of mushroom, mouse, palest lemon, and robin's-egg blue—are actually an undercover version of incredibly wearable luxe.Granted, to appreciate this we must first avert our eyes from the saggy-crotched, ribbed men's-underwear leggings: a definite boo-boo from any angle. Instead, for an appreciation of Rick's relevance, refer instead to his jackets. His signature washed-leather and boiled-cashmere compilations have now grown their own version of a peplum, which puts them coolly in line with some other current collections. Others, in curly-haired shearling or fur, are cut with a long scarflike attachment that gets draped and wrapped across the body in a generous cowl. Under these, it's all about layers, as always. The designer's cardigans, some knitted as finely as baby shawls, are flyaway additions to his basic long, skinny T-shirts.Owens' pieces are now collectibles that find their way into the wardrobes of many kinds of women the world over. In other words, he's running a real business here. All he needs to do now is cut the repetitions in his presentation, please.
5 March 2004
Funny how out-of-town designers get whipped into shape once they reach Paris. Rick Owens—he of the dark, Goth, crinkled layers—has discovered a new, lightened-up way of expressing his aesthetic now that he’s immersed himself in this city’s competitive fashion culture.Owens cited Frenchmen Rene Gruau and Jean-Paul Goude as the two main influences on his Spring collection. And, though it was hard to trace his new body-consciousness and use of color to either 1950’s fashion graphics or 1980’s photographic manipulation, there is a detectable change going on here. In place of unrelentingly dark floor-dragging shapes, there were short skirts with floating asymmetric trails and stretch-gauze tops wrapping the breast and torso. Even the designer’s familiar shades of gray were interrupted by surprising washes of pink, peach, coral, paprika, pistachio, and aqua.Not that Owens has abandoned the slouchy, raw-edged attitude—or the incredible washed leathers—so adored by his huge band of followers. It’s just that now he’s added hacked-off versions of 1930’s charmeuse skirts and ultra-refined whitewashed leather jackets, twisted into a tie and fastening at the neck, into his repertoire—not to mention high heels, slicked-back hair, and pink lipstick. Though he still needs to shape all that into a more concise runway statement, Owens is clearly taking this collection in the right direction.
9 October 2003
"Who doesn't want to come to Paris if they're a designer?" said Rick Owens. "It's the ultimate place." Right. Putting on a show in the City of Light exposes a designer to an international audience—and the competition's fiercest glare. Even though Owens has been building a following out of L.A. for years, this collection represented the official breakthrough onto the world stage for his strong but subtle goth aesthetic.Owens's supple, beat-up skins and fine layers of crinkled cr¿pe and knit have become cult items over the past couple of years, partly thanks to the way they mix with other clothes and pack so well. For fall, he showed gutsy updates on the asymmetric drapey layering, big, sloppy ribbed knits and distressed-leather looks that are coveted by his horde of traveling warrior women. His jackets—either small and narrow-sleeved or hefty and voluminous—were his star pieces, both done with the big collars that are showing up everywhere this season. A couple of dramatic post-apocalyptic parkas had a shaggy fringe of stuffing spilling from the edge, and a new body-fitting jacket was pieced together in zones of oyster and black pleated distressed satin. Alongside these, Owens recut his signature jacket—high in back, tapering to a point in front—in shearling.The collection's news came in the the washed-out baby blue and pink tones that cropped up among the familiar blacks and browns, as well as the thigh-high boots that marched out on flat soles. As a total look, though, nothing much in the Owens universe has changed. His stylistic niche happens to slot in somewhere near the Belgian sensibility; as a Paris debut, it held its own with credibility.
4 March 2003
It's hard to believe that Rick Owens lives in the same Los Angeles that people like Sheryl Crow inhabit. His distinctly Gothic vision would appear more at home in a nice damp, dark climate—like, say, Antwerp.Owens sometimes seems equally disconnected from the rest of the fashion community. Other designers may knuckle under, but rest assured a pencil skirt is never going to show up on his runway. And why should it? His talent is well established, and he has a loyal, bicoastal fan base happy to keep buying his soft wrapped jerseys, lightweight dresses and supple leathers.That said, the designer’s Spring show was virtually identical to fall, except that the colors and fabrics were lighter, and both the men’s and women’s collections were presented. There are no hard edges to Owens' pieces: tailored pants and jackets are deliberately abraded and roughed-up; body-hugging dresses and skirts are fashioned from swaths of bias-cut, gossamer-light jersey; and his famous leathers are washed and crumpled. In fact, despite their lugubrious styling, Owens' pieces are sexy, beautifully made and supremely comfortable. Maybe he really is from L.A., after all.
19 September 2002
Rick Owens' show was part of An American View, sponsored by STYLE.com andVogue.Los Angeles-based designer Rick Owens was supposed to make his New York debut with his Spring show, but cancelled after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today he presented a Fall collection entitled "Sparrow" that showed the technical skill and romantic-goth vision that's won him a loyal—and burgeoning—fan base. "We've carried him for the last five years, and our business just keeps growing," said Ed Burstell, vice president and general manager of Henri Bendel. "It's a cult; women love the way he fits the body."The mood of Owens' presentation was somber—a dark, raw space and a sound track of Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop—but the clothes were gently sexy and even cozy. Not one for color (despite his indigenous climate), Owens worked in grays, chalky white, black and taupe. Long clinging dresses were paired with fuzzy ankle-length sweater coats, while soft, baggy corduroy pants looked great with the distressed leather jackets the designer is known for. Judging by a black corduroy tuxedo jacket, Owens can do traditional tailoring, but his real love is innovative draping.Owens pays as much attention to the back of a garment as its front, creating fishtail trains and clever details, like an unexpected hood made from a swell of fabric. Most outfits were topped by a monkish balaclava helmet, emphasizing the elongated, flowing silhouette and lending a cultish, otherworldly air to the proceedings.
12 February 2002