From the chiasmus archive: RIck Owens. RTW Fall 2021. Posted, May 24th 2021.
Rick Owens as the last of the major Avant-garde designers, has always danced on the edge of oblivion, as far his unique persona and the aptitude of risqué fashion designs. Starting off his career late as a designer in 2002 when he was 41, Owens rise to fame has been one of tenacity, skill and street adeptness. With a viral pandemic wreaking havoc across the world and the societal chaos that it has inflicted, to which its forte, despite it being an unconscious entity that borrows life and ends up, paradoxically, killing it, is to reshape civilizations. It could be argued, sociological in a theorized manner, that all our angst, frustrations and mentally vexed behavior in the shadow of this pandemic may not been as severe, when we should have seen this coming – and the futile attempts by governmental and economic systems in their desperation to return back to the old normal, the familiarity of yesterday, is causing more problems than not. Maybe a significant adjustment to society is needed to be made and this virus, without any reasoning, is doing it for us, yet the lesson, so far, hasn’t yet to be learned.
Owens, now four seasons in for his 2021 collections, has refrained from showing in Paris for the first time since he had Michele Lamy moved their from Los Angeles in 2003. Instead he has showcased the last three collections on the beach and surrounding areas of Lido, Venice where he is currently based, in a self imposed lockdown away from France which is now the European epicenter of Covid-19. With an overall theme emanating from Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice, Owens with his small team in tow and the many muses that he uses for his shows, has scaled down the whole operation, due to Covid-19, from a crowd orientated runway to its more intimate affair, to which he has described these shows on the famous Venice beach as a “private ceremony”. And this ceremonial aspect of its crack of doom presentation is a correct description, there is the continued focus of cultish religious overtures that Owens over the many years has revealed at Fashion Weeks, in which he has be able to maintain as a sharped point of aesthetics. An avant-garde appeal to the end-of-days and the fraught nature of human beings in dealing with calamity, and it is Owens ensembles that are styled to offer an acceptance of the darkness, rather than its denial. Could Aldous Huxley be right? “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” So, it is probably better to reign in hell. Whilst looking the part. Would you not agree?
For his Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear collection, Owens has stepped up even more intensely into the trumpet of calamity, leaving off from the superbly defined apocalyptic Spring 2021 collection. He has set forth laying down the template for a further exploration into styles, that represent the beginning of the end, yet in its defying humanist poise. Yes, the human race is a fuck up more times than not, but we can still shine when we want to, as light bearers in the abyss. Owens’s sect of modern day witches may offer an answer. The unstructured puffer jackets, drapey wraparound inspired styled long skirts which are reminiscent to his earlier styles, body suits over tights that hold 1970s and early 1980s futurism imprints, set within a 21st Century dystopian fascination. For that desire of a future that never was, it is Owens playing around with gothic and by-gone disco attires, whilst tracing his own take on occultist styles. Extreme warrior like shoulder pads are seen throughout, which is also Owens experimentation of the human body as an architectural concept, building upon the biological from a structured template which holds a posthumanist inclination. But, it is the powerful sexuality of the feminine that emanates more than not from this collection. Protective knee high boots, skin tight leggings and pants, sleek and contoured all the while the models are adorned with facial masks to protect themm from the virus.
Owens latest collection maintains the tough, gritty occultism with its sexy vanguard, but also beneath the raw energy is the subtle that these enchantresses of the end offer to us all.
(A.Glass. March 5th 2021)
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