We were drenched. Drenched in sweat, like almost everyone in Europe. And further drenched by the spray that flew off the four lines of water jetting up into the hard blue sky alongside Rick Owens’s suspended metal runway. The runway ran over the pool in the Palais de Tokyo, and the fountains fittingly formed a sort of triumphal arch. Today Owens once again delivered a show of intuitive fashion foresight and perspicacity.
As Dior did yesterday, Owens had read the doom-laden weather reports and brought his show forward to the morning. Even then, the light and heat were remorseless: we were handed umbrellas and iced water to fend off their effects. Backstage, Owens said he worried about presenting “black clothes and heavy techno” at 10 in the morning. The music was an exclusive remix of “Girl in Bed” by Sissy Misfit, an Istanbul artist whose trans-techno world Owens said he has long gravitated towards. From it, he extracted and repeated what he called the “most doomy and dramatic” loops.
When faced with doom we become rigid with tension. In this collection Owens worked to apply his dark harmony to tension’s grip. The collection’s most explicit structural metaphor came in the tensegrity chaps, hand-built by Straytukay in foam and latex. They looked like vaguely insectoid exoskeletons. Owens explained pre-show that the idea came through Buckminster Fuller’s term for systems in which isolated components under compression are held within networks of continuous tension. He connected it to the body and widened the point to the mind: “We feel like an architecture of tensions: it holds us together.” This encapsulated the collection.
Training was one coping strategy, articulated in his first collaborative designs with Adidas since 2013-2017. The new shoes shown here included a loose ankle gaiter-sock and a runner with a squidgily engorged sole. The design, he said, was conceived as an accessible, high-performance technical running shoe, made through Adidas’s expertise instead of being falsely flagged as Owens’s. “I’m not a runner. Cardio was never a big thing for me. I’m naturally kind of skinny, so I was able to get away with a high metabolism. Plus, I don’t offer a high-performance running shoe because that’s not my skill set,” he said. The same applied to the Adidas Climacool technology used in inflated jackets and shorts with interior fans, first shown in Paris by Anrealage a few seasons ago and originally developed from cooling systems worn by Japanese workers in extreme heat. The fans inflated the Adidas looks into vaguely unsettling mid-apocalyptic Michelin men.
Owens said: “A lot of things that happen in Concordia, I’m thinking, ‘This is too art school, this is too fashion school, this is ridiculous.’ But then I have to remind myself: in this context, it’s worth pursuing. Sometimes they seem too ridiculous, but once they are all set in place, I’m glad I had the fortitude to push on something so ridiculous.”
He added: “You have to make this a credible thing—although not maybe a credible garment—but there needs to be an idea there that suits the rest of the collection, and that suits the sense of values that I am proposing that you think about when you buy one pair of my black shorts.”
Owens added that he has come to think of his life as an athletic discipline: training, diet, guarding his energy, and assigning “specific blocks of time” for peak performance. When he was younger, his focus was on endurance: sewing through the night and making it to UPS in the morning before the shipping deadline. Trim jogging suits came in technical poly-cotton jersey, then shifted into leather, flesh tones and nude girdle fabric knitted from recycled nylon in Germany and dyed and finished in Lombardy. Exercise gear became enmeshed with fetish gear, framing the body as both pleasure machine and workhorse.
Asserting authority was another element. Removable leather epaulettes perched on coats and jackets made of silk-cotton poplin from Como, as well as strong-shouldered tailoring in compact silk crepe. Even when ostensibly under command, tension produced distortion. Cabans were bloated in recycled-polyester duchesse. Sheer tank tops were crafted in hand-piped latex by Paris rubber mistress Matisse Di Maggio. Latex capes came from Florence Druart of Torture Garden Latex in London.
Water from the fountains rivuleted down that latex as their wearers walked the finale of this pleasurably intense and high-performance Rick Owens show. The rest of us sweated through it.