Like all of us, when Rick Owens catches a flight he is obliged to transit through airport retail. This does not sit right with him. He said: “We are herded through that gauntlet of a very specific beauty and aspiration: of a certain kind of sexuality, a certain kind of face shape, a certain kind of body shape—and it’s unattainable.”
For Owens this experience epitomizes contemporary mass luxury and what he observes as an intolerance of difference that is the result of its function to sell a dream of sameness—a standard. “I call that standard ‘airport beauty.’ And I oppose it. And when I wear my platform boots as I go through the airport it is to oppose airport beauty. This is my resistance.”
Not unlike laughing at a bully, deploying absurdity is one of the most potent ways to subvert enforced conformity. Which leads us to why Owens opened his house in Paris for his menswear show this morning. “That standard is dishonest… but this is a fully resolved Rick Owens experience. It can’t get any more honest or authentic than this. And that was my basic urge this season: to be sincere.” He added: “I’m trying to participate in and contribute to all alternative beauties: to bombastic beauty, sometimes, but also kind and soft beauty.”
The collection was entitled Porterville, after the California town in which he was raised. “Bleak,” is how he describes it. “I remember it for its intolerance—although the intolerance I experienced was mild, obviously, compared to any intolerance that we’re seeing today.” By contrast this house—which Michele Lamy secured when she and Owens moved to Paris just over two decades ago—is a sanctuary. And today Owens threw open its doors because, he said, “I want to be a haven. A force of anti-intolerance.”
This house was reputedly once an office of Francois Mitterand’s Socialist Party (before it went bankrupt). Owens honored creative collectivism today by inviting multiple collaborators to share his platform(s). The fantastically insectoid inflatable rubber boots that puckered and popped as the models walked in them were by London based designer Straytukay (which is also his handle). Owens said he saw another Londoner, Leo Prothman, posting his take on Rick’s Kiss boots—the airport beauty shoe—and asked him to add them to today’s collection. Challenging to manufacture but fantastic to watch were the jackets and pants made by rubber couturier Matisse Di Maggio. The family of Owens models—which was given one of the most encouragingly and empathetically intelligent pre-show briefings by casting director Angus Munro that I can ever remember witnessing—were this time joined by the Russian trans artist (and exile) Gena Marvin.
As well containing absurdist subversions of the conventional, Owens’s collection was also a form of personal insulation against the bitchy and the banal. The almost ecclesiastically spiked shoulders of his duvet jackets, the airbag embrace of his balled body wrappings, and the beastly toughness of his fluffed jumpsuits and capes both projected and protected character. There seemed to be a story about the archetypes of adolescence narrated through the proposal then distortion of the totemic perfecto. There was also an unusual appearance for his Geobasket sneaker that further hinted at the audience Owens was maybe most keenly thinking of: everyone who is currently stuck in their own Porterville.
Outside Owens’s window a crowd was forming for the next of what the venue’s reduced size demanded was a multiple-performance show. The statue they gathered under was of Justice.
