Rick Owens gets real. Those aren’t words you expect to put together—not if you know Owens’s work. His runway shows tend to be Cecil B. DeMille-sized spectacles featuring smoke machines and handmaidens dropping flower petals on the audience from way up on the roof of the Palais de Tokyo, with deeply imaginative, otherworldly clothes to match.
We’ve seen our fair share of confetti at the European shows this season, but Owens had a different instinct. “After those last shows that were so exaggerated—which were fun and I think super valid, and what I want to see in the world—I thought I can take a minute to remind people that I mean it,” he said. “It’s a constant, trying to keep that balance: of shock and wonder, but you can’t let people dismiss you as just being out of the question.”
Owens said the impulse to get down to basics came to him after collaborating with Rimowa on a suitcase (now sold-out, of course) with a bronzed exterior and a leather lined interior. A prosaic origin story, maybe—the Iggy Pop song that played on the soundtrack was “Mass Production”—but an honest one. Owens can’t be immune to the challenges facing other luxury brands, and like anyone else, he wants to sell the things he makes.
The crowd was full of Owens true believers, like always: a guy with face paint like Immortan Joe’s War Boys; a couple more who looked like they took their makeup tips from Gene Simmons; Chappell Roan channeling an AI butterfly. They might’ve been surprised by the straight-world bombers, zip-front jackets with peplum hems, stand-up collared coats, and easy belted styles in what looked like gray flannel. But not as surprised as others in the audience, who had always judged Owens’s designs as too out-there to consider, but suddenly found themselves wanting some Rick in their lives, the “dracucollars” notwithstanding.
Here is a good place to mention that Owens’s basics are not really basics at all. The leather bombers are lined in leather, not silk twill or nylon, like the bomber you’ve probably got at home. Ditto the chaps, which were worn over shorts constructed from laser-cut leather fringes woven together like chainmail. These were made in tandem with the Parisian designer Victor Clavelly, who also contributed dresses made with the same technique, one part animal, the other part avatar.
The exaggerations and extravagances Owens is famous for were woven in, too. Hoodies, the most prosaic of all garments, were made from thin strips of natural rubber placed on the bias that rippled like gills as the models moved down the runway. As for the black contacts they all wore? “They’re my equivalent of red lipstick,” Owens explained. “They remind me of those cartoon creatures that, when they fall in love their eyes get really big. There’s this vulnerability and this sense of ‘my soul is opening to you.’” The contacts may be a tough sell, but otherwise this was a collection of real-life keepers almost sure to widen the Rick Owens net.