Photo: Courtesy of Owenscorp
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.
But many other looks conveyed the freedom and the let-your-freak-flag-fly vibes Owens is so brilliant at producing. Looks that combined denim cutoffs that seemed dipped in tar, prodigious tulle stoles, and deflated inflatable boots by his frequent collaborator Straytukay. Or outfits that paired airy printed chiffon caftans and capes with miles-long trains with those same towering boots. Unraveling knit gowns made in collaboration with the Slovenian artisan Tanja Vidic blended ease and grandeur quite compellingly.
“I’ve always thought of my life’s mission as kind of balancing out oppressive discrimination and intolerance in the world by proposing a very cheerful perversity—that’s always been my thing,” Owens said. Rain or shine, he delivers on that promise.
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This was originally published on Vogue Runway.
