From Rick Owens: “This women’s collection is named “Temple”, as was the men’s collection shown in June, coinciding with the opening of my retrospective, titled “Temple” of Love at the Musée Palais Galliera right across the street. A retrospective summons up thoughts of tenacity, peaking and decline, and I relished leaning into that.
As I wrote in my men’s notes:
‘This exhibition tracks the pursuit of glamour and sleaze that I was looking for on Hollywood Boulevard, and eventually, improbably, ended up displaying in a Paris museum. I have always thought of what I do as a fascination with the denseness of European aesthetic sophistication seen through a filter of American bluntness.’
Glamour and bluntness are provided in haphazardly whipped up skirts and dresses draped in sturdy industrial GRS-certified nylon. These skirts and dresses are also executed in recycled nylon tulle embroidered with sequins manipulated by Matisse Di Maggio, rubber fetish mistress of Paris. Panels are dipped in latex before each individual sequin is positioned by hand. After drying, the panels are cleaned, brushed, and polished multiple times to achieve the final crusty look.
This industrial yet airy nylon is also cut into micro cropped trenches that can be worn with or without long matching vests to create a two-piece trench coat. They are mixed and matched with leather dracu-collared micro-biker jackets with weeping leather fringed sleeves, or cotton candy flight jackets.
Heavyweight leathers crafted by London designer Straytukay are veg-tanned in Santa Croce sull’Arno, Tuscany, and slashed, fringed, spiked, and handwoven to move, sway, and breathe.
Underneath, bodies are layered in architecturally seamed sheer layers, suggesting nudity but completely suppressing it at the same time. Geometric lines trace the body like rigid and controlled veining.
Last season’s shoulders have been reduced to hardened shiny metallic sculptures that support drooping globs of GOTS-certified silk chiffon, or open and sweeping tank dresses that reveal bras — the result of our collaboration with Livy, a Parisian label specializing in exquisitely artisanal lingerie.
I have also done a collaboration with Suicide, the New York punk band that pioneered the use of minimalist electronic instrumentation during the 1970s. Vocalist Alan Vega and musician Martin Rev’s raw, disturbing sound mirrored their destroyed and deconstructed leathers, which we have translated here into heavy hides tanned and produced in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan.
Industrial recycled nylon, rubber, heavy leather, metal shoulders.
Steely tenacity.
Tough clothes for tough times.
In the immortal words of Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane:
When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
Don’t you want somebody to love
Don’t you want somebody to love
Wouldn’t you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love”
Photos: Owenscorp / Courtesy of Rick Owens
Casting: Angus Munro (AMC Casting)
Styling: Tyrone Dylan Susman
Hair: Duffy (Streeters)
Makeup: MAC Cosmetics and Daniel Sallstrom (MA World Group)
Production: La Mode en Images
www.rickowens.eu
@rickowensonline
Highlights from the Collection
