PFW: Rick Owens' improvised ceremony and fashion sculpture

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Mar 4, 2017

Practically every model wore headgear at Rick Owens this season: wire-framed black triangles like some Greek Orthodox priest, small draped tents or faintly diabolical hoods.
 

It was all worn over the most sculpted collection in today’s fashion: down jackets ballooning off the body like huge root vegetables or neoprene jackets inverted and left hanging off the torso like a John Chamberlain car crash sculpture.
 
“I wanted to get even more abstract and ridiculous, just closing myself off and making sculptures. Clothes for an impoverished ceremony,” said Owens in a backstage where the focus was on power women. Designers Vera Wang and Donna Karan mugged for photos with Owens; singer Alicia Keys practically bent her knee in homage to Rick. Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones) towered over even the leggiest of models helping awestruck fans take selfies.

Much of Owens’ recent work has been pure fashion sculpture, this season to the point of abstraction. Using a color palette of burnt pink, muddy brown and faded khaki he wrapped his cast in curling garments and twisted capes, albeit anchoring them with his signature sneaker-meets-leggings footwear. His ideas are often outlandish, but Owens is one of the designers whose rich imagination guarantees that Paris will always be the most important fashion capital of all. Because Owens represents that sector in fashion where the clothes pass over into artistic statements.
 

“I want to wear all your collection the next time I play piano,” smiled Keys, who was introduced to Owens by Wang, in Paris to receive the Legion of Honor on Tuesday.
 
“Bravo, so creative, amazing,” said an impressed Wang, who then posed with Karan on either side of the designer.
 
Speaking philosophically, Owens said: “I have been thinking of how you handle decline, change and turbulence in our world. I am thinking about the cycles of the world and how civilizations rise up and then collapse. You do have to protest but also pick yourself up, dust yourself off and carry on. So, I am thinking of the glitter of civilization, not the glitter of protest. And how communities band together to share values and action. And I thought what is more ceremonial than hats?”