Rick Owens: Dystopian dudes with hair extensions

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jan 16, 2020

Rarely has the singular vision of designer Rick Owens been quite so  particular. The Californian-born creator returned to his preferred Paris location on Thursday to unveil his latest menswear collection, as models towered above the audience inside the Palais de Tokyo.

 
Striding by like off-beat superheroes in five-inch heel Perspex heels, the cast, many of them two-meters tall anyway, grimaced unflinchingly. Dry iced covering the catwalk, industrial sounds snorting out of the speakers. The music was by Master Mike Q, culled from a performance Owens staged in the Pompidou Center in October.
 
Several of Rick’s couture crusaders appeared with humungous pagoda-shoulder coats, some in one-legged and one-armed pinstripe body-stockings, others in hulking blanket coats that the designer said were meant to mimic Le Corbusier’s Modular Man. Even if the collection did also have some instant hit mohair coats, this was way-out-there stuff.

Owensʼ preferred hues, at least when you go in his stores, are mat black or worn stone gray. This season he sent out eggshell blue, yellow snakeskin and muddy orange silk. Even more curiously, many of his gray cashmere knits and skinny transparent tops were worn under translucent vinyl coats.
 
˝There is a heavy dose of theatre in this collection,˝ explained the designer in his program notes, with considerable understatement.

 
Nearly all his cast had hair extensions worthy of a Kurosawa samurai classic, courtesy of stylist Duffy from Streeters, while many had darkened eye lens adding to the forbidding air. In a word, a dystopian dash from the single most influential designer American designer living today. And another reason by Paris is the world’s most significant fashion capital – both for women and men.