Scoop! Rick Owens occasionally wears colors other than black.
“I have this jacket in white,” he said ahead of his open-air show on Thursday, a smattering of raindrops falling on the Frankenstein shoulders of his black, tailored topper, which tapered down toward his droopy black shorts and black platform boots. “I also have this jacket in a black-and white-pattern that I wear when I’m being reckless.”
He grinned one of his wry grins — and dropped a real bombshell: Sometime this summer, you might see him in Venice rocking an ensemble in a “grayish amethyst,” shoes included.
But for his spring 2024 collection, Owens stuck with black, what his press notes called a “formal, restrained, albeit admittedly drama queen” color.
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A designer who always reads the room carefully, Owens steered clear of frivolity and “overly conspicuous status consumption” and plied a “grim, determined elegance.”
During a preview, he said he wanted something formal, strict, beautiful and elevated. And in sticking with black, he could “put all of the energy into the fabrics and construction.” The former were sumptuous, and the latter inventive, yielding another badass Owens collection with a dark, otherworldly elegance.
He opened the show with his radical flared pants with very high, cinched waists, giving an appearance of endless legs not seen since the modeling heydays of Nadja Auermann. Over these, Owens created small tops in silk or leather tightly wrapped around the shoulders and chest.
The audience viewed these elongated, almost alien silhouettes through colored smoke that exploded from metal rigs plopped in the reflecting pool in the parvis of the Palais de Tokyo, Owens’ go-to venue in June. In lieu of the forecast rain, bits of ash drifted down over audience members who were downwind.
Then the volumes starting growing, first with strange little smoke-stack protrusions on shoulders, then widening out to the linebacker proportions Owens has pioneered, here in featherlight, mille-feuille constructions.
The show climaxed with billowing shirts, tunics, parkas and robes in a lustrous habotai silk, more commonly used for linings. Many models wore radical boots that resembled pneumatic walking braces.
Grim? Perhaps a little. But these clothes also brimmed with grandeur.