Rick Owens Fall/Winter RTW 2013 Presentation

Rick Owens is a creator and destroyer, a courageous explorer of parallel worlds, a mapper of interstices, a maker of mutating motifs and a bona fide originator of awe-inspiring fashion. His delicious dark spirit was once again on display at the bunker-like Salle Marcel Cerdan, where he showcased his impressive aptitude for bang-up avant-garde artistry.

Implementing his familiar flair for tribalism, he pushed boundaries without being too over the top (despite mentioning that his motif was the “morbid intersection of love and death mixed with Japanese basket weaving”). Indeed he struck a brilliant balance between simple elegance and hefty conceptualism with oriental influences and lots of knotting, layering and extreme volume plays at work. Dresses cut from pony-skin, suede and silk-wool grazed the floor and were complemented by handsome kimono-sleeved tops and audacious gofuku-inspired coats/hoodies with bifurcating zippers and inventive toggles and décor.

Owens offset his formalistic approach by exploring structure and silhouette in imaginative, maniacal and magical ways. The designer stuck to his familiar black-and-white palette and quasi-apocalyptic undertones, often plying and weaving fabrics with a methodical sense of control and bold stylization. But he put grace and elegance before his usual brutalism or Frankensteinian outré. An eerie operatic vibe was evident from the start as models emerged through a nebulous billow with their hair in a berserk state of tease and sounds of Wagner’s “Schmerzen” (that’s Deutsch for “Torments”) reverberated through the room. The Owens cult was mesmerized.

Beneath this titillating hallucination, however, was a commitment to technicality, proportion, artistry and unbridled beauty: arcing knit cables and linear weaves, fistulas branching out of Eastern-inspired pieces, scaled stitching, exaggerated lace, and Art Nouveau references fed into Owens’ interpretation of oriental design. “I’ve been on an aestheticist roll,” said the designer backstage. “I’ve been doing these Art Nouveau waves, Klimt-esque robes, Klimt hair. I love the total capitulation to beauty. It was a delight to channel those themes into my fall aesthetic.”

We love Rick Owens!