Although the promotional tour for “Dune: Part Two” feels endless, please keep it going so we can see Zendaya rock one of Rick Owens’ earthworm-like knit gowns, or one of his hooded robes worthy of an intergalactic empress.
The designer’s fall collection could easily slot into any stylish sci-fi movie, and on Thursday, the lineup stirred strong emotions with its otherworldly beauty and dignity.
Owens is marking 30 years in business in 2024 and, partly out of nostalgia, he reprised some of his early ideas when he first started making clothes on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. These included heavy felt capes that he described as “part superhero, part sarcophagus, part earthworm.”
Law Roach, are you hearing all this?
Back then, as at Thursday’s gripping and poignant show, Owens was thinking of aliens and concrete spaceships, “something otherworldly and eerie, yet elegant and modest at the same time,” he mused in a conversation before the display, held in his stately home and “working compound” on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, its Parisian grandeur somewhat neglected.
The backward glance was also a way for the American designer to underline that he has rarely swayed from his aesthetic ideals — Jugendstil, Brutalism and Art Deco — all represented here, with an unintended dollop of Brancusi in the padded leather boots and a laddered style, both reminiscent of works by the Romanian sculptor.
The 1927 film “Metropolis” has been a forever touchstone, too, and nurtured Owens’ unique strand of sci-fi couture, rendered mostly in humble colors like loden and dust brown, but also powdery plums, blues and mustard.
Much of the collection was knit, and Owens reprised some of the winning looks from his fall men’s show, including short, gourd-shaped puffers, sleek leather tunics and shaggy Chewbacca-esque outerwear.
Asked how his early alien superhero designs were received, Owens noted that he had a “strong rack” at Henri Bendel in New York City, one of his first wholesale clients.
To be sure, it raised eyebrows. Owens recalled that a friend of his remarked at the time that all his clothes were “the color of a dying bird.”
The designer took it as a compliment: “I thought that was very poetic and pretty.”
So, did his designs sell from the get-go?
“It kind of worked,” Owens said. “At the beginning, we didn’t sell a lot of felt capes, but we sold a lot of dying-bird chiffon.”
