Rick Owens Dark Fashion Max Davis

You could say Rick Owens was reflecting the mood of glamour, which practically every designer has been talking about this season. Only, his poetic and otherworldly show set around the fountain of the monumental Palais de Tokyo courtyard – every invitee given a black Rick Owens rain poncho to shield from the force of its heaven-high water beams – wasn't about escapism, just about dealing with reality. "Yeah," he said backstage, "and the way you lot deal with it is dazzler and positive energy and joy - the contrary of discomfort." Ravishing alien creatures were gauzed in refined canvases twisted and curved around their bodies, his married woman Michèle Lamy putting on her best Vincent Toll snigger in the soul-piercing electro soundtrack composed past her new ring Lavascar.

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Owens called his drove "brutalist lace and confection and meringue". This was his blink of active optimism in a time when anybody else is closing their optics. "During periods of discomfort, what do nosotros think, that we're going to find a solution? Discomfort is function of the human condition. Discomfort is part of the cycle of life," he said. At that place was a haunting quality to the garments he showed. Equally protective every bit those big shapes were, there was something dishevelled about the way they wrapped effectually the sculpturally enhanced bodies of Owens'south models similar bandaged wounds. "Sometimes discomfort can exit of manus and we have to do something to suppress information technology a footling scrap, but it'southward never ever going to get abroad. So that's kind of the beauty and the horror of homo living," he said.
"I'yard a realist, I remember, because I was talking almost stoicism, which is actually a class of fatalism."

Similar Comme des Garçons, Rick Owens has long stopped showing the wardrobe staples that run his business and still fly off the shelves of his stores. While many of the creations he puts on his rails practise go into production, his shows have become a philosophical and theatrical platform for Owens to influence a fashion industry where he'south no longer one of the immature rebels, but an established and powerful voice. You may look at his avant-garde runway collections and think they're for a niche audience, but the messages he imbues them with – and the resounding attention these shows get from the industry – inevitably echo through the halls of manner.

In that sense, his is kind of a mail-modern take on the old-school way system where haute couture would trickle down into ready-to-article of clothing—only with Owens, the influence happens on a more subliminal level. His extreme creations may not exist easily wear, but information technology's frequently the point. At his incredible menswear evidence in June, where boys dressed to nines in his majestic take on men'due south eveningwear descended from a scaffold built around the same Palais de Tokyo fountain like footling dark angels, Owens reflected on a streetwear-obsessed fashion industry currently then fascinated with normality. He played the song 'I Need a Freak' by Sexual Harassment, and said a freak to him represented "something rare, sensational, inspired past the unusual". He continued: "I'one thousand seeing this normality in the earth that's kind of being lionised and deified, and personally that'southward my refrain: I need a freak in life. I need to be surprised. I need attempt. And I need things to be rare and non banal. Celebrating the prosaic and conventional is amusing but it'south not the spirit of my spirit. It's a piffling mean-spirited. A niggling snotty."

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Above all, Owens is calling for fashion to re-embrace the out-of-this-globe avant-garde that once defined it. Jeans and hoodies will sell whether they're on a rail or not, and then this hallowed runway platform has to be reserved for thousand, inspiring statements - especially in an internet age of fashion where it'south bigger and more powerful than always.

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