Rick Owens. Menswear Fall 2021. (reviewed: A.Glass May 29th 2021)

Rick Owens has continued on from his very personal and dramatic Spring 2021 Ready-to-Wear collection that was revealed in October 2020 via Lido, near Venice and its celebrated foreshore.   It was, like all runways shows at the moment, an ad continuum of adjustments that is in lieu of the many waves and variant strains of COVID-19 moving back and forth throughout Europe.  Hence the lockdowns could stay in place maybe into the Northern Hemisphere summer, with the key pharmaceuticals companies late last year, prior to their stock price surges, who have the more effective vaccinations, promised big on their delivery timetables, have all now fallen short on their expectations.  With millions of people throughout the world eager to get vaccinated, more so their government inoculation programs.   The stage 2 of the bungling of the pandemic is all but a certainty, so digital fashion shows and what we once knew of fashion weeks have all be sidelined indefinitely. 

And it is Owens who has reshaped his past stalwart dystopian stylizations into a more reality conscious array, which of course would make sense, his October RTW collection was unforgiving, raw and in-your-face.  Yet, it was also some of the most well crafted styles to late from the niche designer.  An austere of beauty reflected in its tumultuous inspired designs, Owens has proven that he has been able to excel within the calamity of the world, showcasing his Fall 2021 Menswear collection with its notched up intensity.   Once again, the no-guests show was held outside from Paris in Venice, Italy at the Santa Maria della Vittoria also known as the Tempio Votivo, designed by Giuseppe Torres a classic example of Gothic Revival architecture of the 1800s and Art Nouveau, even though construction took place in the 1920s at the peak of Art Deco,  Tempio Votivo was created to honor the dead of World War One.   Owens holding the digitally recorded show in the grounds of a war memorial looming behind, offers a glimpse of what the global turmoil has had on the designer, describing that the last four years of Trumpanism, which has now ended, saying that he felt that the “… the dark element has not disappeared.”   I would agree, it was in place before Trump he just filled in the gaps, the discord, sociologically within America it has been growing for years.   To which Owens has experimented, for his Fall collection, the theme of male aggression. The ultimate question is:  Are we at war? 

Owens has tried to answer this with his masculine charged array, rather, even though it has political overtures, it feels, to me, more cult like – possible even doomsday cultist.   In niche aesthetics while absorbing elements of popular culture in real time, the so called rioters that stormed Congress prior to President Biden’s inauguration, were actually, despite their ragtag appearances, well organized and structured.  So the deep fear of an seething framework of extreme right wing dissenters throughout America, could be more widespread than initially thought.   Owens referring to the “Moral War”  as “Horrifying”, yet is was a shame, before it got to what it now has become, was not properly intellectualized from the start.  All the while reactionaries have fed of reactionaries.

Fur lined knee high boots, dark brooding open coats and blazers, revealing bare chested and muscular torsos.  Exaggerated shoulder pads and asymmetrical styled avant garde inspired cropped puffer and bomber jacket’s, beanies and the Covid-19 inspired mask wearing.  The femininity that sometimes can been seen via Owens’s mens collections is non existent here, very much a male only affair, yet, paradoxically this collection has also has crossed over to his Spring 2021 women’s collection.  Both complementing each other within their multivalent, yet bluntness of styles with Owens masterful eye for tailoring and his unique take on reworking oversizing and fits.  

And as the poet John Milton once said, “The mind is a universe and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”