Rick Owens. Spring ready-to-Wear 2025 - Paris Fashion Week.

With the structural backdrop, once again, being Rick Owens stalwart Palais de Tokyo monolith stage, a building constructed in 1937 and designed in its classic Art Deco style.  As noted with my Spring 2025 menswear review, that the temple impression of Owens immortalization through the seemingly longevity of structure, seems to be now imprinted onto the once Los Angeles resident psyche.  And for all the Fashion Weeks over the years held in September, Owens has mostly staged his runway presentations within the Palais de Tokyo's outdoor tomb like setting.  And it nearly didn't occur, due to the persistent rain.  Alas, with a break in the weather Owens 'Babylonic' Hollywood grandeur was able to take place.  

In all of its similarity to Owens showpiece in June of this year, as a grand production with its running theme which occurred from his pandemic 2020 collections at Libo beach, Venice, that being of an apocalyptic vision.  Revealed as Owens's fog inspired smoke machine effects, that the late Russian, American poet Joseph Brodsky, once said about Venice's 'nebbia' or haze, "...The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city.  The fog is thick, blinding, and immobile...".  Brodksy equated the nebbia as a time for self reflection, of writing and creativity.  The pandemic in a lot of ways offered that, without consciously doing so, instead there was the unnecessary anguish that time stood stand still and freedom of movement had been restricted, gaining itself as a chorus of fearful conspiracy theories.  Being over structured, with overconfidence is disastrous for a society, particularly when a cataclysmic event does hit us.  We do not cope.  Instead, we have all sped up post-pandemic into a frantic stupor, straight into inflation, the Far Right of politics and genocidal wars.  A human curse, by our own folly.  No one else is to blame

What was also evident with Owens post-pandemic shows and his return to Paris in 2022, was the Oracles of Doom, with those void eyes of the Sybils, viewed as all black contact lenses.  And for his Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear collection, in contrast to the positive glimpses seen with the previous showing, although there was a doomsday undertow seen throughout.  Owens Oracles of Doom have returned or at least as disciples, in their funeral esque procession of his 'everyday people' models.  Apparently recruited from current fashion design students, his own employees and other hopefuls, with barely a 5,11" model amongst them.  With no apparent reason why, any more or less than Owens decreeing that the collection showcased different body shapes and sizes while offering a variety to Owens's Spring 2025 stylizations.  But, one does miss Owens's graceful necromancers, and their conjuring mystique.  However, as noted with the First 'Hollywood' collection, these en masse of everyday people moving in their slow resolve around the Palais de Tokyo grounds, could be seen as an overwhelming spectacle for the viewer.  

Yet, Owens's dark Hollywood exposé in its ceremonial offering, and his many disciples, to herald in Doomsday, is all but fitting for our current times.  And Doomsday as a metaphor for change, and acceptance that calamity, in either form, from nature to human bêtise, holds a purity.  Such is the stygian embrace.  That maybe it is time for change, with over Two decades of conservatism, and governing rigidness which is now leaning towards Fascism.  Be it, that we are our own light bearers within the void.  The darkness is not to be feared. 

And at that edge of this abyss, may there be a glimmer, for a new tomorrow. 

___

(A.Glass 2024)