Rick Owens

Seeing three XXL tulle dresses cascading down the Palais De Tokyo’s courtyard staircase during a Rick Owens show felt surreal. The king of dark fashion gone princess-y? But then, this was a quite natural step for a designer who like no else revisited the Old Hollywood glamour in his recent offerings. And to be truly honest, these tulle dresses had nothing to do with the ones we see on Giambattista Valli or Molly Goddard’s runways. Owens leaves no 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? In general, the designer’s use of materials this season was 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 country Owens loves lately. 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 another novel development.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

The Rick Owens spring-summer 2023 show gave armageddon vibes. 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 the guests, 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.” Those words bring glimpse of hope especially in 2022, with war happening in Ukraine and Supreme Court’s outrageous overturning of Roe v. Wade. 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. 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, 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.