The epic human splendor of last season at Rick Owens gave way this time round for a collection whose aperture was more focused, pragmatic, and autobiographical. It picked up Owens’s story after he and Michèle Lamy departed Los Angeles for Paris in 2003 in order to begin distributing and producing the collections out of Europe. This involved—and still does—regular trips to design and refine in Concordia, Veneto. “Italy is where I create,” as Owens once said.
During his first 15 years in Concordia, Owens wrote in today’s release, he slept either on a couch in the factory itself “to immerse myself in the rhythm of an industrial production schedule that I was new to” or in a nearby hotel “in a no frills serial killer room.” During all those years Owens lived out of a suitcase. Today he said that a recent project to customize a carry-on trolley with Rimowa brought those times to mind. “It’s about the appeal of when you’re living with very little, of elimination and asceticism. Of not having to rely on stuff.”
So in a way then this was Owens’s take on his essentials: do-it-all looks that allowed you to pack light and be fleet-of-foot (even in platforms). And while the aesthetic sometimes eclipsed the ascetic, most especially via the aura-like boots and skirts fashioned in chain linked leather panels by the designer Victor Clavelly and the ergonomically irregular tops cut from shiny segmented frills of rubber by Matisse Di Maggio, it duly delivered plenty to pack. Melton wool coats in black wool, veg-tanned leather, or especially lovely, vaguely Beuys blanket-ish, kemp-blended felted wool featured Owens’s dramatized ‘Dracucollars’ but were otherwise deeply expedient pieces. So too were the similarly vampiric blousons in coated poplin and more waxed leather.
Owens’s platforms were reconfigured for work this season in a model named the Factory. This featured rounded soles with non-slip finishes for extra stability. Cropped shearling sweaters and coats in black were cut up to the base of the ribcage, while double-faced wool caftans in cream were cut down to the knee. Skimpy wide-leg shorts were (sometimes) made secure with thermal long johns of a type Owens only became an evangelical fan of after moving from California to Europe. “At the beginning the winters were difficult. And I don’t wear underwear, so thermals really changed the story. It was a real discovery.” Pants included cuts in brown suede and more typically Owens-ish denim slathered with a flakey wax finish, or spliced with jagged isosceles panels of coated leather, all boot cut.
Said Owens: “It’s about ‘how can I get rid of stuff and make the stuff that I really need as special as possible?’ And that is a good exercise when thinking about making clothes in the world the way it is today.” It was also a good exercise in showing clothes which, once acquired, you’d wish never to be parted from.
