Rick Owens. Fall 2023 Ready-to-Wear - Paris Fashion Week.

(Images:  Rick Owens 2023)

Akin to Rick Owens men's Fall 2023 collection, Owens has adorned a more aggressive and warlike fixture to his Fall 2023 collection/s, moving away from his Lido beach 'Oracles'.  As discussed in my previous reviews of 2020 and 2021, over that period, Owens did tune an aggressive take onto his trumpet-of-doom collections, whilst keeping the stylizations balanced within that intuition of the feminine and her esoterica knowledge of how to deal with calamity, as opposed to the masculine.  Who as we all know now, ended up, to which Owens commented on for his Fall 2021 collection, storming Congress in Washington looking for a scapegoat after Trump's social media frenzy in early 2021.  And unfortunately like his men's 2023 collection, he has washed over his latest women's styles with the said blunt and direct arrays.  Portrayed equally the same confronting aesthetics seen with both the majority of the male and female models wearing their stygian contact lenses, which blocks out any emotional cues.

So, Owens's Fall Ready-to-Wear 2023 collection to date have lost a lot of its sheen and glamour under his gothic banner, despite some of the outfits relating to Owens continued interest in the darker side of the 1970's discothèque, with silver, gold and fluorescent colored dresses and jackets.  The overall styles presented have been dulled down, stripped back into a more rawer decree, with their deeper earthy colors and rustic overtures.  Utilizing black traditionally as the base to Owens's signature label, he has tweaked those blackened tones to reflect, in its difficulty since black absorbs light, the insulated shimmer of his glam styles.   The collection feels like it's in conflict with itself.

Owens does indeed work best in his flirtation with the apocalypse, to be more attuned to its balance of devising the reality of our current global situation.  Seen in the many collections on and before 2021, the dire reality humanity is facing after the 2020 pandemic, that like so many times in history, has very much changed society for the worst.   We didn't come out wiser, nor have we coped with any learnt resilience, and this can be seen with the state of the world three years after the 2020 viral outbreak.  A new cold war, inflation, social discord and severe climate changes.   And it appears Owens's Fall 2023 collection is reflecting the general affliction facing us all.  Therefore it is not an impartial collection, as noted with the models and their black contact lenses, it feels more like a lopsided horror show.  Combatively masculine, brusque and belligerent.

I preferred Owens's sibyls, as they sit between order and chaos.  The wise and intuitive, who are not afraid of the end.  Rather than be consumed by it, they control it.  

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(A.Glass 2023)