Rick Owens. Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear. Paris Fashion Week.

After four seasons presenting at the famous Lido di Venezia, Rick Owens’s home away from home, where he and his small creative team were holed up away from the Covid-19 epicenters of 2020 and 2021 which were Paris and London, both hit equally hard, to which it has since, somewhat, abated due to the massive vaccination programs that took place at the start of 2021. One must hold a degree of cynicism that is of course in relation to the hording of vaccines that the wealthier Northern Hemisphere countries embarked on in a vain effort to open for Summer 2021, at the expense of a mutated virus that emerged from India; a poorer country. So, alas Owens has returned to his home in Paris with his wife Michèle Lamy, leaving off from the final Lido di Venezia show as a signet to his creative direction that was the Men’s Spring 2022 collection, shown on Lido beach in all of its glory. Please refer to Rick Owens. Menswear Spring 2022 for my full review. Yet, the doomy and apocalyptic aspects of the presentations, more so the oracle like aspects, particularly from the women’s collections, offered an insight to the once L.A. resident thought process throughout the severity of this societal change. Hence these residual fears and apprehension of what will be next and it is Owens’s oracles and spiritual masters, although they may not have complete answers, seemly stride through the calamity and doom in an acceptance of it all. 

As opposed to Owens’s Men’s Spring collection, his latest array is, as mentioned, in tune with its oracle fixture, is more layered and heavily styled, continuing on with the protective encasement of female looks that were reflected from Owens Lido, Venice shows. There is, within his paradoxical inclinations, the stripped down and bare eros as a defining aesthetic of the feminine occultist. Allowing his wife Michèle Lamy to open the show, with her dramatic eyeliner and Moroccan Amazigh inspired ‘el ayach’ (lucky charm) vertical line atop of Lamy’s forehead, Owens’s return to his stalwart backdrop of the Palais de Tokyo, as noted in prior shows within its Art Deco resonance offers that continued mysticism, to which his latest collection with 47 pieces in total reinserts perfectly a complementary resonance. 

Contouring thigh high strapped platform boots, sleek and sheer styles revealing the amorous. Owens has projected a demiurgic feminine in all of its carnal appeal, by far the most sexually focused collection to date, although Owens did reveal for his Men’s collection, that there was more of a liberating aspect to the Spring 2022 styles. A celebration of the Tantric, a weaved coition that moves beyond the confines of gender. Yet, as this collection does hold a more tantalizing aspect, while implementing heavier styles, there is also delicate layering and tweaking of fabrics that were born of a 1990s Rick Owens ‘Los Angeles’, before he and Lamy moved to Paris in 2003. A subtle homage to his earlier realizations which set the benchmark for the Owens template, while incorporating, two decades later, the plethora of seasonal collections since his debut show at New York Fashion week in 2002.  

A truly masterful collection by the Avant-garde virtuoso.