The fog equipment at Rick Owens had been pumping the scent of his new collaboration with Aesop into his exhibit room at the Palais de Tokyo. Versions also carried thuribles, modern day mechanized variations of the censers that monks use to dispense incense in church. Owens was a Catholic faculty boy. In a pre-show interview, he talked about his upbringing: “thinking and talking about morality in university all working day and studying Cecil B. DeMille’s 1930s Artwork Deco black-and-white interpretation of the bible,” by night time. “That’s what fashioned me,” he claimed with a chortle. “I’m so clear.”
Owens was soon after anything a bit more solemn next his January men’s demonstrate, whose lamp helmets and zip-all-the-way-to-the-hairline hoods seem intense a month-and-a-50 % later on amidst the onset of war. He quoted from his press release: “During times of heartbreak, elegance can be just one of the ways to retain religion.” Swapping the anarchic for the elegiac, the acid bass artist Eprom was out also, and in his place Owens selected Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Someone extra professional about music than me explained that Mahler composed it following a hemorrhage practically killed him. The symphony also soundtracks Loss of life in Venice.
There’s a link there. Owens spent the pandemic in Venice, which isn’t significantly from his Italian factory. But examining and conveying his motives here is a small beside the point. This was a attractiveness of a Rick Owens selection, starting off with a comprehensive enhance of night attire, including a couple of Oscars pink carpet contenders in “dusty sequins,” draped with evocative asymmetry from the shoulders and that includes collapsing volumes at the again or all around the hips.
Cropped and shrunken jackets and lean and languid bias-minimize skirts caught a bit of the Old Hollywood glamour also witnessed at Saint Laurent this week, but these weren’t in Cecil B. DeMille’s black-and-white. Owens merged peach and apricot, and a total spectrum of oranges. The yellow and aqua blue pairings inevitably conjured visions of the Ukrainian flag.
In a period of solid outerwear, couple parts can rival Owens’s for audacity. There were puffer jackets whose sleeves extended to the floor, cover jackets that curled all-around the torso like nautilus shells, and “Theda Bara” parkas with goat fur trim that seem like industrial hits in the producing. “I’ve been hearing persons staying apologetic for presenting trend suitable now,” Owens said. “We’re an business that has to support a whole lot of people, there is no purpose to make an justification for that. We are people who specific the greatest that aesthetics has to present. And that’s of terrific social and cultural benefit.” He will not get any arguments from this corner.