After a few seasons of audience-free, yet still spellbinding shows on a desolate stretch of Lido beach in Venice, Rick Owens was conflicted about how to return to the Paris runway: a modest, restrained presentation, or the usual bombast?
The question was answered from the first bone-juddering thud of austere techno, and the disco smoke that burst skyward and filled the parvis of the Palais de Tokyo complex.
Owens’ wife, Michele Lamy, slowly walked out first, her chin jutting up and the protuberances on her leather skirt jutting sideways, while two black-clad figures on the edge of the roof reached into trash bags and tossed what looked like dark confetti. (It was actually jasmine leaves Owens collected on the terrace of his Lido apartment.)
Welcome back, bombast!
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“We had to have a little. That’s the great thing about fog — it’s big, cheap and dumb, and it’s not wasteful,” Owens said. “In summer, when it looked like things would be opening up and people would be going back to partying and everything, that made me a little uncomfortable. And Fogachine [the name of the collection] is mocking that hunger a little bit.”
There was nothing easy or mocking about the clothes, which the designer challenged himself to make “as Rick Owens as possible.”
“We are supposed to represent excellence,” he mused ahead of the show. “I’ve got to make things that people can really appreciate, that are really pretty, really special and uniquely mine that supposedly no one else could come up with.”
Mission accomplished. Protruding, alien shoulders made a reappearance, as did fishtail gowns and dramatic cloaks, but in new, alluring guises.
Filmy gazar capes drifted from shoulders like cigarette smoke, while chiffon bomber jackets in gorgeous dégradés echoed the cloud-like shapes spewing from the fog machines. Among surprises were the sexy, draped jersey gowns with peekaboos of flesh here and there, and the mouthwatering color combinations for cobweb knits, like chartreuse and pink.
Owens might be wary of hedonism, but he’s a master at delivering thrills of the fashion kind.