Rick Owens. Spring 2023 - Paris Fashion Week.

(Images:  Rick Owens 2022)

Rick Owens at times holds a contrarian and in someway obscure complexion when revealing his latest collections, despite the fact he has built a lasting impression amongst a lot of people who follow Owens as one of the last true independent fashion designers left.  It can leave one feeling perplexed at his sentiment.  Whilst it's hard to track ambiguity, despite setting down a template that is of his own design, which is the Rick Owens signature label.  The clues lie in his early years, when Owens begun to prepare the groundwork for his label as the once L.A. resident, manifesting his amphiboly into what we see today.   

And it is an important history lesson of Owens's backstory, when the evolving early 2000s avant-garde styles on the runways fizzed out between 2015 and 2018, replaced by the modernist designer looks which became more of a trend with its street wear and sports company collaborations.  Owens has remained stalwart to the styles that he devised in the late 1990s, revealed at New York Fashion week in 2002.  Twenty years later, his resounding configurations that center round the dark gothic inclinations, maybe ringing true in its doomsday ethos, noted in my 2020 and 2021 reviews of Owens post-Lido, Venice shows, as his end-of-the-world oracles and their foretelling that calamity is all but settling in for us all.  May well be that needed metaphor, to which we may accept as a proclivity that the end is in fact sexy.  Why fear it?

And maybe it will be that illusive counterculture, which will be fearless and enduring in our demise, not as reckless consumers, but rather living life aware that doomsday is nigh.  However, it is hard to visually guess the theme of Owens latest collection, but it follows on from the Spring 2023 men's styles, with a mix of light, dark and the esoteric, with its airiness of tulle and sheer looks, influenced by his interest in Egyptology.   Returning to the Paris's Palais De Tokyo, within its Art Deco foundation to which Owens could be piecing together is own take on the occult, drawing in, very much like the Hermetic Order of the late 1800s, by utilizing Egyptian mythology as an occultist guide.   Also noted is Owens, for the first time, crafting couture styled ballroom dresses, seen in lustful red and stygian black. Is this a prelude to Owens attempting a couture collection late in his career?   

Owens Spring 2023 array is less harsh than previous collections of the last two years, yet it feels more ethereal, spiritual and accepting. 

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(A.Glass 2022)