Rick Owens. menswear Spring 2025 - Paris Fashion Week

 

If you have read my reviews of Rick Owens shows during the Pandemic, which were held at Lido beach,Venice, and post the Pandemic, when he and his wife Michèle Lamy arrived back to Paris, you would note that the once Los Angeles resident, had inscribed his apocalyptic oracles, or the Doomsday Witches, with an offering that was paradoxically a warning, not to be too overconfident.  As these dark times, have just begun, the pandemic was the First part, may there be also a Second, and Third act of calamity.  Hence the models adoring stygian contact lenses, absorbing all light into their void eyes.  Owens collections to date have been no less than a visionary horror show, yet as a reviewer of over a decade of Owens's show pieces, the contrarian aspects of his cult like fixtures have revealed elements of pacification, maybe the need for a structural identity. 

Which, even in Doom, holds an appeal.  The spiritual foundation of reverence, that is found in most theocratic religions.  Tombs, and brooding structures, from the Egyptian pyramids, to the ancient Greek and Roman cities, all pay homage to the omnipotence, as mere mortals.  Owens, after using his and Lamy's home in Paris for his Fall menswear, and Ready-to-Wear 2024 collections, for his Spring 2025 array, has returned to his beloved Palais de Tokyo.  A 1937 monolith, designed in classic Art Deco style, which very much conjures that post World War One romanticism within its Temple like presence.

Owens has explored this historic template in countless runway shows over his Parsian based tenure, as one of the last of standing independent fashion designers.  To which his playing around with timelines, more so his Los Angeles roots, where in 2020 I wrote an article for a London Fashion magazine, documenting Owens rise to fame from L.A.'s Hollywood Boulevard in the mid to late 1990s to his first show at New York Fashion week in 2002.  Subsequently for his 2025 menswear collection, he has titled his styles as HOLLYWOOD, in referencing not only his own ascent from the Boulevard, but also the imprint that Hollywood, in all its grandeur, has on the psyche.  That being the immortality of the movie star.  

And for this projection, he has gathered an ensemble of 200 'actors', to fulfill a duplication of looks, repeated within a simulacrum of movie extras, immortalized as some grandiose lost production of a bygone era.   Dressed in dulled whites, emulating a spiritual possession.  Despite this, the collection held a dark overture.  Owens also offered 15 minutes of fame to this mostly cast of 200 hopefuls, some already fortunate enough to be used as his muses, others drawn out of Fashion Design schools to walk the walk.  

One has to admire Owens knack at reworking his own timeline, which holds a unique disposition to the freedom that he has, in reflection of his own signature label.  That not many designers  have the luxury to do so in an incorporated fashion world, let alone if they make into an industry that is saturated with too many hopefuls.  Much like the Los Angeles boulevard of broken dreams, and although I was not born in L.A., the famed city's impact on global popular culture is undeniable.  And this is why I wrote a story in 2021 called "Oracles Mysterium", which was based in L.A., centered around the importance of the past, that it should be put to rest.  And to release the relentless spirits.  As it seems, when one grows older, there is a tendency to disturb what does not want to be disturbed.  Metaphor or not, this maybe why we are attaching continued suffering onto the living.  Time to let go.

___

(A.Glass 2024)