Editor’s Note: In honor of Vogue Runway’s 10th anniversary, our writers are penning odes to the most memorable spring 2016 shows. New today: Rick Owens’s Cyclops collection.
First thing that morning Clare Waight Keller delivered one of her coolest Chloé collections ever: pretty-grungy-boho-flou. At lunchtime, horrendously late as usual, Sebastien Meunier dropped a pretty strong one for Ann Demeulemeester. Mid-afternoon there was a super-fun A.F. Vandevorst show that ended with the masked models being chauffeured away on Harleys. Plus, it was a sunny autumn day in Paris: All in all, 360 degrees of beautiful.
However by far the most beautiful single episode of my Thursday, October 1, 2015, began at around 6:30 p.m. in the inky gloom of the Palais de Tokyo basement, where we’d wended our way down the endless spiral staircase to Rick Owens’s spring 2016 show. I wasn’t reviewing, but just there to watch, tucked lazily into seat I-b-16 behind Maya Singer.
Reading Singer’s review now reads like a perfect contemporaneous written snapshot. As she reported, this show was periodically punctuated by an “incredible sight,” the 12-or-so looks in which there were two models, or: “a woman, dressed by Owens, carrying another woman down the long length of the runway.”
I can’t recall the extent to which we were hushed by the sight of what Singer finely called “human freight” in human-borne transit: nor can I dredge up any memory of the music that hers and every other review mentioned. Yet I do remember the visceral visual WTF-ness of contemplating Owens’s harnessed gymnasts, tethered together in sculptural human knots tied to variously telegraph pregnancy, friendship, and very literal mutual buttressing. As Singer pointed out, this was no paternalistic and exclusionary gesture towards “strong women,” but instead an admiring depiction of female strength: a portrait of the emotional beauty inherent in sisterhood. “Women supporting women,” as Owens’s all-caps notes put it. He continued: “A world of women I know little about and can only attempt to amuse in my own small way.”
This show epitomized the elementally emotional volatility that Owens’s fashion shows can generate, a volatility that exists I think thanks to the weird distance between the fierceness of his facade, the tenderness of his intention, and the thoughtfulness of his authorship. Both tough and graceful, it was a gorgeous and deeply poetic show.
