Rick Owens opened up his Paris house to host his newest menswear present

The invitation for Rick Owens’ newest menswear present – at Paris Trend Week Males’s A/W 2024 – was a loop of jersey material, stitched with ‘Porterville’, the gathering’s title. It is usually the title of the city by which a younger Owens grew up, situated on the base of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain vary. He has credited its huge landscapes for his love of the monumental – in addition to being a website of teenage angst and craving – all components that proceed to pulsate via the designer’s work. ‘I bear in mind the small brutalities of a delicate childhood in a judgemental nation,’ he wrote in a letter launched simply earlier than the present’s begin.

Homecoming: Rick Owens A/W 2024 present

The present’s location – with company sworn to secrecy within the run-up – was Owens’ present house on Paris’ Place du Palais Bourbon, which he bought alongside his spouse, Michèle Lamy in 2014. Previously the headquarters of the French Socialist get together, he calls it his ‘concrete palace’ and ‘working compound’, the place he started promoting his collections over twenty years in the past. Inside, the largely concrete house is populated by sparse, brutalist furnishings paying homage to the designer’s oeuvre. Different rooms include the constructing’s historic cornices and mouldings (albeit stripped again to their essence). This morning, company filtered via these varied rooms, taking locations on furnishings erected round their edges, winter daylight streaming via the home windows and skylights.

It made for a stark departure from Owens’ traditional displays, which occur every season on the huge Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and infrequently on its monumental deco forecourt (final season, the fashions walked underneath huge puffs of colored smoke). The designer mentioned that the shift got here partly as a response to the ‘barbaric instances via which we live’ (latest seasons have seen Owens scuffling with creating collections towards the backdrop of battle), describing the transfer from spectacle to intimacy as a sort of ‘respectful restraint’.

Certainly, the gathering itself had a sense of intimacy. Huge, shaggy varieties wrapped across the physique – a warped imaginative and prescient of consolation – whereas Owens’ architectural puffer jackets have been raised excessive on the neckline as if to recommend safety. Elsewhere, a sense of softness was echoed in all-in-one ‘house fits’ knitted from gentle recycled cashmere, alpaca and merino. Some have been worn pulled right down to the waist with shimmering tangles of sequins in stunning branch-like constructions, each unusual and delicate. Different seems took a darker type, with clothes dwarfing the physique or crafted from recycled bike tyres by Matisse Di Maggio, a rubber-wear specialist from Paris. 

‘Assortment proportions are grotesque and inhuman in a howling response to a number of the most disappointing human behaviour we’ll witness in our lifetime,’ mentioned Owens in his description of the gathering. ‘There may be the everlasting utopian hope of someplace higher.’

To populate this utopia, Owens established a solid of collaborators which he sees as embodying a brand new way of life – ‘creatives who reside their aesthetic defiantly and fully’. These included Steven from Fecal Matter and Gena Marvin, each recognized for his or her dramatic, otherworldly seems (a ‘cheerful depravity’ describes Owens). Each walked the runway, whereas London-based designer Straytukay labored with the designer on the distinctive inflatable boots that appeared all through the present. Owens additionally recreated a DIY model of his signature ‘Kiss’ boot by designer Leo Prothman, which he had found whereas scrolling social media.