Rick Owens: ‘I Want to Be the Kenneth Anger of Fashion’

PARIS — In an industry riven by chaos and confusion, with last year’s musical chairs seemingly revving up for round two, predictability starts to look like a cardinal virtue. Not that Rick Owens is anything like stuck in his ways, it’s just that he can be relied on season after season to produce provocative re-evaluations of his own designs that also reliably challenge the orthodoxies of the world in which we all work and play. And the notes he writes for all his shows are equally dependable sources of boundless joy. I especially like the way he fetishises the production processes for his fabrics. This was how he described the “industrial austerity” of his opening looks on Thursday: “I had found a heavy industrial nylon webbing strap used for transporting shipping crates, and I asked one of my Como-based providers to turn it into a textile, resulting in a heavy double-duchesse, cut into slabs of rigid fabric crossed with girdered lines.” Owens turned the the fabric, Kevlar-like in its substance, into sculptural gowns. He called them “sumptuous,” and, believe it or not, they were. Pure alchemy.

He said he was feeling “girly” to explain why his women’s collection had a more purely feminine spirit than usual. Billowing gowns were pintucked front and back. Cropped playsuits sprouted angelic wings at the shoulders. Owens reconfigured his signature KISS boots in lattices of crystal, though many of the models wore heeled sandals, a surprising concession to “normal” footwear. And their eyes were ringed in delicate, ultra-long lashes, like sea anemones.

His Rick-iest move was a dozen outfits he called “frothy negligées,” appropriately boudoir shades of tulle turned into octopoid tentacles that encased the body and quite literally put a spring in the models’ steps as they walked. They were based on “tensegrity,” a concept developed by design and philosophy multi-hyphenate Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s. Owens accompanied them with exquisite boleros composed of “millefoglie,” thousands of circles of recycled tulle layered like leaves of pastry, mounted on a cotton poplin base and sculpted on the body (45 hours to make each of these beauties, claimed Owens’s notes). The allure of this combination was not of this earth, made even more so by its elevation on Owens’s boots. (I was thinking of Space Mountain at Disneyland where no one under three feet can ride the attraction. Backstage at Rick Owens has a seven foot minimum. Abandon hope all ye shorties who enter this land of the giants.)

Owens named his collection Stone, for the things that people in glass houses love to throw, for the stoicism of standing firm in the face of such individuals, and for the stone that was rolled away from Christ’s tomb at his resurrection. Don’t fret, Rick hasn’t come to Jesus. “The metaphor meant more about self-sacrifice to me and that ties in with stoicism and restraint. I’ve always liked that fashion can be so much about display and ostentation, but any time I can bring up a little bit of modesty and restraint and dignity and elegance, I try and do that.” Then, with the acute self-awareness that informs even his most sublime flights of fancy, he added, “It’s tricky, obviously, to talk about restraint and modesty when I’m selling such expensive clothes.”

I’d never question his seriousness of purpose. You don’t build an empire on irony. But that same sense of self also hones Rick’s appreciation of camp. The graphic leitmotif of his new collection was the pentagram, the witchy talisman of would-be wizards and death metalheads. “It is a mission to talk about intolerance in this super judgy world, and that’s what the pentagrams are about,” he explained. “They just automatically irritate conservatives. They’re a camp response to judgmental criticism.”

“I want to be the Kenneth Anger of fashion,” he continued. “Maybe I already am. I love the campiness.” For further reading on the subject, I can recommend “Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation.” Next season, there might even be a test.