Rick Owens is not the kind of fashion designer who needs to take exotic inspiration trips: a one-block stroll down to the Basilica of Saint Clotilde will suffice.
“I’m not a religious person. I just go because it’s a beautiful old building in Paris. It is an extension of my living room, almost,” he said backstage before his spring show, pointing at one of his stone-colored column dresses and disclosing its origin. “That is in one of the old, grimy, dark paintings in that basilica that I see almost twice a week.”
Minus the black contact lenses and fearsome platform Taconaska boots, natch.
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Many stone-colored column dresses — some rigid and splayed on the steel grating, others in gossamer fabrics that caught the wind — made their way slowly down a sloping runway erected over the reflecting pool at the Palais de Tokyo. They were regal — in that dystopian, industrial-strength way that belongs to Owens — and sometimes topped with very chic car coats in double duchesse.
“When I looked at them, I was thinking, ‘Oh, stoicism — that kind of dignity that I’m always thinking about,” he mused.
One slim gown came in black tulle with a spiky, grid-like surface that the designer christened “brutalist lace.” Sometimes fabric jutted out in dramatic points along the collarbone, or as a geometric bustle on long denim skirts.
The clothes became more tough-minded as the show progressed, including sulfur-dyed denim worked into vaguely futuristic tunics and flaring pants, or rugged little rompers.
Underneath some of the dresses, feet were wrapped, somewhat crudely, in thick ropes of crystal. “I thought, what could be more perverse coming from me before than pretty, sparkly shoes,” he shrugged.
You have to admire Owens’ penchant for experimentation — and self-deprecation. He gleefully acknowledged that his tensegrity constructions, which he first included in his men’s show last June, are “ridiculous.”
But while those cage-like pants were composed of leather and rubber wrapped around aluminum bars, Owens used frothy tulle threaded onto elastic cords for the women’s version, which covered the entire body.
“So they kind of became negligees to me,” he said, confessing that he tried them on, and found sitting not to be a problem.
“I was fine. The elastic just moves everything around, and then when you get up, it all snaps back into place,” he said. “It’s kind of a great thing.”
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