Rick Owens Ready-to-Wear Fall 2018. Paris Fashion Week

   (Images from Vogue.com  WWD.com.  All rights.  Used in promotion of the designer.)

Paris Ready-to-Wear Fall 2018 has also (unfortunately) showcased the dowdy and frumpy attire which has spilled over from the other fashion weeks.  With Milan’s mess incapable in diluting the poor styles and fits inherited from New York and London’s Fall 2018 shows.  Rick Owens ‘angry’ 2018 men’s collection (please refer to my review) still resonants as a subtle and blunt vanguard against the “conservatism”  (as quoted by Rick Owens) creeping into fashion and elsewhere within popular culture at this point in time.  Probably more of a confused digital based ‘idealism’ in its perspective flux than anything else.  Regardless, critique and study is still important as long as it is not dwelled upon.  Just written down and to move on.

As noted in the Saint Laurent RTW Fall 2018 show via Anthony Vaccarello, the high hemmed shorts and/or mini skirts may be a settling trend moving into Spring/Summer 2018 at some point.  These are seductive and alluring styles, which have their beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, however it was less of an 80s trend.  But, fashion design as a creative process instigated by a talented designer maybe able to fuse past ideas into an contemporary pose.  Rick Owens Ready-to-Wear Fall 2018 collection has attempted this by offering a collection inspired by the Arte Povera (poor art) art movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  While uniquely re-establishing the simplicity and raw beauty of natural fabric styles and perspectives, that is “Arte Povera”.  Owens has added the word “seduction” into the mix.  Thus setting the stage of what it is to be seductive as we pass through the last remnants of #tag conservatism.

Owens has created his version of the mini-skirts and high hemmed shorts, which is paradoxical for a designer that, over the years distance himself from the tighter and more obvious sexy feminine styles.  Intermixed with the puffy, draped concepts which has been paired in his previous male and female collections, also noted are the military style utility belts and over sized hip bags on some of the pieces.  There is an ironic take on Owens’s representation of seduction, very cleverly constructed ideas within his RTW Fall 2018 collection as narcissism is seduction of the self first.  In that respect women are masters of the art.

Rick Owens Ready-to-Wear Fall 2018 holds true to his stalwart color palette of browns, cream, yellow, grays, camel with the achromatic power of black and white.  Also noted are the ghostly apparitions spread through out the collection, this maybe the spectra of death.  Which has been a persistent theme, seen in previous Paris collections.