At his men’s show in June, Rick Owens’s models took a full dip in the Palais de Tokyo’s fountain. Today being early October, with the leaves changing in the trees alongside the Seine, his female models were merely asked to climb down a set of metal bleachers and wade through the knee-high water. As they made their way toward us, with Grace Slick wailing about love on the soundtrack— “Don’t you want somebody… don’t you need somebody…”—black contacts that covered not just irises and pupils, but also the whites of their eyes, came into focus.
For one of my neighbors, the models evoked refugees making a water crossing; for a different seatmate, they conjured “another world coming,” like aliens. Those black contacts and the careful way the models managed the stairs and the fountain in Owens’s lucite-heel platform boots certainly made them look intent on something.
That fits. Describing the sheer layers of draped dresses with geometric seams bisecting the torso, Owens said, “the clothes are delicate and pretty, but there’s a steeliness to the prettiness… During uncomfortable times in history, tenacity is paramount.”
Owens has always had a knack for synthesizing the current moment with a soundbite, but tenacity also came up in the context of his career retrospective, “Temple of Love,” which opened at the Palais Galliera across the street the evening of his men’s show. Joining Azzedine Alaïa and Martin Margiela as the only other living designer to be honored by the museum (Alaïa has since passed) is a kind of canonization, and it didn’t come easy. Talent, luck, and determination were all part of the picture, Owens said.
This collection had all the hallmarks of the designer’s uniform, developed over the course of three decades: muted colors, willowy 1930s-inflected shapes, odd exaggerations of the shoulders, sculptural draping, and platforms that extended the silhouette to near impossible proportions. The spiky, fringy leather capes were the work of the young London-based designer Straytukay; and the print, a rarity at an Owens show, which he used for long dresses in black or ivory with matching bombers, was a copy of the designer’s star chart that his father once did for him.
Reminiscing about his dad, Owens recalled that he was fond of saying, “Richard, I’m just very concerned that you never learned how to take any responsibility.” His mother’s words of warning about idleness also had an impact. “Now, though, they have to cut me some slack,” he laughed. “But I’m not retiring.” Never, Rick, never.
