リック・オウエンズのクチュールの心境

A while ago, Rick Owens told me something awful. He had been asked to become one of the rotating cast of guest designers invited to create an haute couture collection by the house of Jean Paul Gaultier, but due to various timing snafus he wasn’t able to participate in the project. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, in the cold dead of night: what could that Rick Owens haute couture show have looked like? I wonder if it would’ve looked something like his Spring/Summer 2027 collection.

The hairstylist Duffy, who works on Owens’ shows, commented that he is the last couturier. Owens, of course, works in ready-to-wear: his business is healthy, his clothes well produced, but en masse. Well, mass-ish. But what Duffy says is true in meaning: couture’s a state of mind, and Owens indeed has a single-mindedness to his approach that allies him to fashion’s great names of recent and distant past – Alix Grès, Balenciaga, Vionnet, Charles James. All were relentless in their pursuit of the perfection of a personal style. 

Ditto Owens. His style, versus theirs, is a raggedy, chewed-up, dog-eared thing, expected when applied to his beloved shredded denim and hyper-washed leather, but this time applied to a spectrum of couture-tinged clothing, grand evening dresses and gossamer gowns. There, duchesse doublé satin is recycled from webbing strapping used for industrial shipping, while actual silk is woven so thickly it resembles Formica and cut into great hulks of clothing with a statuesque presence. Owens called this show Stone, and the clothes were often monumental, slip raw-edged column dresses and wiggle skirts with an angular bustle jutting out like a pterodactyl’s maw. Some had knotted collars like wings splayed across the clavicles. All had a majestic beauty – “Sumptuous, and industrially austere,” said Owens.

Yet he also has a lighter side – Owens is a big softie at heart, his apparently dystopian world actually underpinned with an inherent positivity, a fundamental sense of good. Happy endings, like the appropriately priapic fountains that began to gush halfway through the show. Owens’ lighter side came out in the weights of the fabrics, billowingly airborne as his models descended a sharply angled ramp at the Palais de Tokyo. Those were part of the truly thrilling aspect in this show, of a designer at the top of their game pushing their own well-established aesthetic to a different place. In a sense, that places Owens beyond those aforementioned couturiers, who stuck, by and large, in their own established lane. But Owens is constantly turning new tricks.

Example: the crystal-crusted boots, as if Owens’ army had rampaged through a tacky jewellery shop, the remnants clinging to their calves and platform soles. Another: the notion of Rick Owens doing lingerie – one oddly synced, for this resolute fashion outsider, into the mood of undressing that’s rapidly defining the season as a whole. The idea of Owens doing Ann Summers-style underpinnings is, frankly, slightly terrifying. In practice, it proved sublime. Airy peignoir-style dresses in smoggy shapes puffing like so much vape smoke around his models’ bodies. One was a slither of black chiffon, another bristled with tiny ribbons, a third a cascade of pleated transparency, the final a column of macro-scale Fortuny-pleats made of inch-thick satin bands mounted on tulle, with slivers of flesh flashing through. 

Those were all extraordinary, exceptional and unexpected – as were the finale dresses, of Gonzo-esque tufted tulle on elastic, like bare-boned négligées but also weirdly alive, coiling about the body like serpents or witches’ stars. Owens compared them to the connective tissues that link the bones – which isn’t really what you normally hear when talking about fluffy underpinnings. Then again, nothing about what Owens does is normal. That is his resonant and exceptional power.

A while ago, Rick Owens told me something awful. He had been asked to become one of the rotating cast of guest designers invited to create an haute couture collection by the house of Jean Paul Gaultier, but due to various timing snafus he wasn’t able to participate in the project. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, in the cold dead of night: what could that Rick Owens haute couture show have looked like? I wonder if it would’ve looked something like his Spring/Summer 2027 collection.

The hairstylist Duffy, who works on Owens’ shows, commented that he is the last couturier. Owens, of course, works in ready-to-wear: his business is healthy, his clothes well produced, but en masse. Well, mass-ish. But what Duffy says is true in meaning: couture’s a state of mind, and Owens indeed has a single-mindedness to his approach that allies him to fashion’s great names of recent and distant past – Alix Grès, Balenciaga, Vionnet, Charles James. All were relentless in their pursuit of the perfection of a personal style. 

Ditto Owens. His style, versus theirs, is a raggedy, chewed-up, dog-eared thing, expected when applied to his beloved shredded denim and hyper-washed leather, but this time applied to a spectrum of couture-tinged clothing, grand evening dresses and gossamer gowns. There, duchesse doublé satin is recycled from webbing strapping used for industrial shipping, while actual silk is woven so thickly it resembles Formica and cut into great hulks of clothing with a statuesque presence. Owens called this show Stone, and the clothes were often monumental, slip raw-edged column dresses and wiggle skirts with an angular bustle jutting out like a pterodactyl’s maw. Some had knotted collars like wings splayed across the clavicles. All had a majestic beauty – “Sumptuous, and industrially austere,” said Owens.

Yet he also has a lighter side – Owens is a big softie at heart, his apparently dystopian world actually underpinned with an inherent positivity, a fundamental sense of good. Happy endings, like the appropriately priapic fountains that began to gush halfway through the show. Owens’ lighter side came out in the weights of the fabrics, billowingly airborne as his models descended a sharply angled ramp at the Palais de Tokyo. Those were part of the truly thrilling aspect in this show, of a designer at the top of their game pushing their own well-established aesthetic to a different place. In a sense, that places Owens beyond those aforementioned couturiers, who stuck, by and large, in their own established lane. But Owens is constantly turning new tricks.

Example: the crystal-crusted boots, as if Owens’ army had rampaged through a tacky jewellery shop, the remnants clinging to their calves and platform soles. Another: the notion of Rick Owens doing lingerie – one oddly synced, for this resolute fashion outsider, into the mood of undressing that’s rapidly defining the season as a whole. The idea of Owens doing Ann Summers-style underpinnings is, frankly, slightly terrifying. In practice, it proved sublime. Airy peignoir-style dresses in smoggy shapes puffing like so much vape smoke around his models’ bodies. One was a slither of black chiffon, another bristled with tiny ribbons, a third a cascade of pleated transparency, the final a column of macro-scale Fortuny-pleats made of inch-thick satin bands mounted on tulle, with slivers of flesh flashing through. 

Those were all extraordinary, exceptional and unexpected – as were the finale dresses, of Gonzo-esque tufted tulle on elastic, like bare-boned négligées but also weirdly alive, coiling about the body like serpents or witches’ stars. Owens compared them to the connective tissues that link the bones – which isn’t really what you normally hear when talking about fluffy underpinnings. Then again, nothing about what Owens does is normal. That is his resonant and exceptional power.