Rick Owens did his backstage interview with WWD on a chilly terrace overlooking the Eiffel Tower, so he shrugged on one of his cropped leather bombers, and paused before zipping to show off that it was lined in the same sumptuous leather.
“Every time I put this on — the deliciousness,” he remarked. “People talk about luxury. And I mean, that is something that I find very luxurious.”
He noted there were wool jackets with leather linings in his fantastic fall show, which will be remembered for the scented fog that enveloped the runway venue; the intense-yet-oddly-soothing electronic soundtrack by Ryoji Ikeda, and the designer’s subliminal, yet pointed commentary on law enforcement and other current affairs.
But first, a few more words about the incredible materials Owens employs, which for fall ranged from buttery deerskin chamois to Kevlar, one of the strongest synthetics ever invented, first used commercially as a replacement for steel in racing tires.
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The American designer pens his own show notes and dedicates about two-thirds of them to enumerating his fabrics, which devotees know are exceptional and integral to his fierce, industrial-tinged clothes.
For fall, Owens went to town with thick, hand-crafted felt, washed alpaca, boiled wool, industrial canvas and shaggy shearlings, experimenting with jutting capelets seemingly modeled after paper boats, Cousin Itt-like macramé masks, and shaggy tufts of hair spilling from clothes here and there.
Interspersed were some of the sleekest, coolest outerwear you’ll probably see this season. He reprised his Dracu-collars on boxy black car coats, and also cut overcoats loose, whether in fluffy, brushed alpaca or slightly padded gray nylon. As a foil were slender, purposely creased lab coats in drab colors like dust.
The stiff leather coats had a sinister edge with their jutting back vents and harness-like clasps, expressing the military undercurrent.
Owens did not apologize for the theme, though the epaulettes he initially had added to biker jackets and overshirts gave him pause.
“And then I thought, ‘Oh, well, that’s all the more reason that I should just lean into it,'” he said. “I was thinking of police enforcement. It’s something that we just cannot avoid in the world around us right now. So I thought, ‘What does one do with fear or concerns like that?’ You make fun of it. You mock your oppressors.”
Cue police boots that are “exaggerated and grotesque, as we know enforcement can be,” Owens said. (As an additional thumb in the eye, these came not only in “butch black” but also “mincy mauve.”)
He ended up nixing the epaulettes, finding them “a little bit too ham-fisted. What I fetishized instead were throat latches on the collars that created a more abstract military kind of stance.”
But he made no apologies for the fog, which connoted mystery and danger. “It’s a very theatrical gesture, but it’s also very dumb. It’s very rock concert,” he said. “I just personally love fog.”
It may have irked photographers, but it did not obscure the incredible cutting, storytelling and non-stop fashion thrills.