If street and refined, or luxe and cool sound like fashion-world opposites, Rick Owens brought them together into a beautiful New Age merger in his first Ready-to-Wear show for Revillon furs. (Like Yohji Yamamoto, Owens showed during Couture week, three months ahead of the Spring 2004 pack.) On a sunny Paris morning, in a disused eighteenth-century townhouse, he sent out a collection that fused his trademark underground aesthetic with the luxury pedigree of the French furrier. Over his familiar baseline of fine, stretchy, neutral tanks and cropped, cross-dyed, distressed denims, he layered a succession of soft shrugs, vests, jackets, and coats, constructed in hip melanges of fur and skin.
Cut on the bias out of rectangular shapes, his jackets are designed to fall forward in front, up in back. The idea—easy, asymmetric, undone—was underscored by deft techniques, like implanting pale sheared sable with sprouting tufts of horsehair on the shoulder or utilizing alligator skins in unorthodox cuts to expose the spine configurations furriers normally discard. “I didn’t want to destroy anything,” Owens said of his left-field yet respectful approach to remaining the venerable French house. “But I obsessed over the question What do people really wear when you see them out?”
The result of that obsession is a vision of understated richness, reflecting the designer’s view that “the biggest luxury is not having to impress people.” That, of course, doesn’t rule out moments of drop-dead chic, like a skinny coat in white ostrich, trailing vests made of strands of vulture feather, or the rock ‘n’ roll elegance of snaky opera gloves inset with plumes of goat hair. Owens also included a few high ostrich platform pumps among his beloved flat bikerish boots.
Having recently moved his entire business to Paris from L.A., Owens says he is drinking in the new city’s atmosphere and is aware that the stakes have been raised. “As an American in Paris, I definitely feel like I have to rise to the occasion intellectually.” He’s certainly moving in the right direction.
