Tag: rick owens

The Rick Owenscene Future Is Here

At first I thought the sunblasted video of Rick Owens’ 2027 collection, presented last week on the shadeless place of the Palais de Tokyo in the midst of the 40-degree Saharan omega heatdeath of Europe, felt like a prequel to Mad Max, with stranded club kids trudging through the desert, clinging to the increasingly tenuous expectation that there’ll be a gas station, and it’ll have gas.

As I was typing this out, I thought of a rebooted Gerry, Gus Van Sant’s near-wordless exploration of survival and the violent sublime, with the roles of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon replaced by 100 models.

But then I come back to Sand and Sea (Marina), the climate catastrophe opera installation at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where performers loll about on a doomed beach, only it’s restaged by the S&M goths scurrying under the glass floor of Anne Imhoff’s Faust in the German Pavilion the Biennale before.

Having experienced complicated awe at Owens’ similar show on the identical site in 2024, I have to say I had some concerns, stifled them, and now find it bleaker than I feared.

Previously, awkwardly related: Rick Ruled (S/S25)

Behind The Seine

SSENSE screenshot of Eva Losada’s photos of Rick Owens’ S/S25 show at the Palais de Tokyo

Ssense has an excellent interview by Steff Yotka with Alex Munro, veteran casting director for Rick Owens’ shows, about the making of the epic S/S25 show that turns out to have been the closing ceremony of pre-Olympics Era Paris:

At the apex of the Palais de Tokyo’s staircase, beside the bas-reliefs of the nine muses, there’s Munro choreographing the show, doling out groups of models like the conductor of a heavenly human orchestra. Here they come: Tyrone Dylan Susman in a sheer jumpsuit and bold-shouldered coat. Allanah Starr in a draped and caped prong dress. Charles Star Matadin in a gilded hood and Kat Q in sheer layers with shoulders that arc upward toward the sky. And here parades an assemblage of bodies on a litter supported by ten strongmen.

220 People. 25 Minutes. 4 Gymnasts. 1 Doctor. [ssense]

Rick Ruled

The streets were scouted. The fashion schools were emptied. The gazar was unfurled. The skaters were evicted. And Rick Owens’ Spring/Summer ’25 men’s collection processed momentously around the courtyard of the 1937 Palais de Tokyo— twice—to a very extended remix of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th.

In the description on his YouTube channel, Owens cites as inspiration his own youthful flight to Hollywood Boulevard, Jack Smith & Kenneth Anger, and “THE LOST HOLLYWOOD OF PRE-CODE BLACK AND WHITE BIBLICAL EPICS, MIXING ART DECO, LURID SIN AND REDEEMING MORALITY.”

Which sounds and looks like Cecil B. DeMille’s original 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, with better costumes.

screenshot from The Ten Commandments (1923), dir. Cecil B. DeMille, via internet archive

And, ngl, it also sounds and looks a lot like Intolerance (1916), D.W. Griffith’s unwieldy and obsequious sequel to his breakout klanfic hit, The Birth of A Nation (1915), with much better costumes.

screenshot of Intolerance (1916), dir. D.W. Griffith, showing the lost Babylonian set [which has been recreated in tiny part as a mall at Hollywood & Highland], via youtube

The creation of Griffith’s spectacle, from the cast of thousands to the mammoth set built on Hollywood & Sunset, was a centerpiece of Anger’s book, Hollywood Babylon.

“EXPRESSING OUR INDIVIDUALITY IS GREAT BUT SOMETIMES EXPRESSING OUR UNITY AND RELIANCE ON EACH OTHER IS A GOOD THING TO REMEMBER TOO… ESPECIALLY IN THE FACE OF THE PEAK INTOLERANCE WE ARE EXPERIENCING IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW…” also wrote Owens.

I am not really sure how the master’s spectacularly propagandistic tools are going to dismantle his ideological house. But maybe it’s the show’s second lap, where each model walks again solo. I do want one of those jackets, though.