from the chiasmus archive: Rick Owens Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear. Paris Fashion Week. Posted September 29th, 2017

(Images Rick Owens 2017.)

“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” Epictetus

“Life is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself. Time is the dispersion of intensiveness. The Futurist can live a thousand years in one pœm. He can compress every æsthetic principle in one line.  The mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.” Mina Loy ‘Aphorisms on Futurism'”

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Such is the stoics, fertility and futurism in all it’s hope represented by Rick Owens Ready-to-Wear Spring 2018 collection.  A master truly knows the seasons, therefore adapts and portrays it’s sentiments.  This is Owens embracing the renewed, the positive.  Of course the dark should not be feared, it is, from all retrospect what we are, where we come from and what we will ultimately have to accept – which is the Stygian embrace.  That is the abyss, the void.  And it is darkness and it must be faced.  Alone.  But, light and the light-bearer is the manifestation of the self.  When an artist can show and present what illumination is, they represent the mastery of understanding the mind.

Reworked and pushed fabrics that become new and dynamic shapes, has always been a strong and definite fixture for Rick Owens runway shows.  Interlaced with layered cut styles, which is to manipulate and redesign form.  To know how it is fitted, to set the precedence of aesthetics.  That is the new.  Undiscovered and distinctive.   A mostly achromatic affair of white and black and the neutrality of grays and browns with striking greens.  As the the ruler of the underworld,  in Egyptian mythology, Osiris was seen with a green face, the symbol of rebirth.

This is a rejection of suffering, not a masochistic resignation that some reviewers have described.  As it is not of so called mother earth, but rather, the human defiance against the predicaments imposed on us from the Universe.  As it does not care about the fraught human condition.  Our sorrow is self manifested, the power is in the realization that rebellion is all we have, if Rick Owens wife Michèle Lamy, from the soundtrack of the runway show, is laughing.  It is, by it’s pure definition the most powerful effect against all our adversaries. 

“Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them–and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon–laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution–these can lift at a colossal humbug,–push it a little– crowd it a little–weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.”
“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

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(A.Glass 2017)