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Whatever Rick Owens plays is traditionally what everyone will be humming for the rest of the show season. For days after he played Zebra Katz’ Ima Read for autumn/winter 12, it was a case of fashion glee club in Paris, with everyone giving their best rendition, so it should be interesting to hear the dramatic chords to Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder interpreted around the shows this week. “It’s been one of my favourite pieces for over twenty years, and it was such a pleasure to be able to use it in the show. It hadn’t occurred to me for a long time,” Rick told i-D backstage. For a designer, who’s used the newest, most contemporary soundtracks for the past many seasons, taking the classical route seemed like a huge departure – and its effect was magnificent. Scored with the forceful mid-19th century violins of Wagner, Owens’ trademark gloom was given an epic sense of grandeur, which was only fuelled by the massive veil of white smoke, which made up the catwalk’s backdrop, and the demi-couture-like intricacy of his collection. “I thought everyone needed a little bit of a romantic break from me. I’m sure it was getting tedious schlepping out here to this bunker all the time,” Rick quipped from the backstage area of the Palais omnisport de Paris Bercy. “I’ve been on an Art Nouveau wave recently, and I liked the Japonism element of it,” he said, describing the oversized stitching, which appeared throughout the collection. “But also I was thinking of embellishment, I was thinking of confection, and I wanted to do something almost kind of brutalist. To me it’s lace. It’s like exaggerated lace, but when it’s blown up like this it’s so deliberate and so calculated and so bold, and I like doing that to lace.” Paraded fiercely in succession and styled with fiery, tightly curled hair and some amazing not fingerless but fingertip-less black leather gloves, the weaving had an almost fetishised air to it, which was only intensified by Wagner’s severe notes. “I get that a little bit,” Rick said. “But actually the inspiration was almost the opposite. It was Japanese basket weaving, and what could be more benign than that? But, you know, people like bondage, so…”
Text: Anders Christian Madsen
Photography: Mitchell Sams
