'Follow me on www.twitter.com/leo_gamero for the latest fashion news! Rick Owens Spring 2016 Ready-To-Wear PFW from Vogue.com PARIS, OCTOBER 1, 2015 by MAYA SINGER In a recent interview, actress Carey Mulligan complained about the fact that the characters she plays are often described as “strong women.” That label, she said, makes it seem as though strength in a woman is the exception, not the norm. And it rubs her the wrong way. It’s not uncommon to experience a similar frisson backstage at a fashion show, when a designer says that his (or her) collection pays tribute to “strong women”—the message is always well meant, but by setting up strength as a quality found only in a particular type of woman, it demeans the fairer sex as a whole. At his latest show, Rick Owens put paid to that way of thinking. Owens’ latest coup de théâtre wasn’t a tribute to strong women; it was a tribute to female strength. That’s a major distinction. Chanteuse Eska, who performed last year with Owens’s wife, Michèle Lamy, at the Meltdown Festival in London, presided over this evening’s proceedings, singing the theme song from the film Exodus. As she sang, models exited in new Rick Owens looks—some of which, like the sleeveless dusters and crinkled anoraks, registered as atypically accessible silhouettes, while others, such as the short dresses collaged from canvas and leather, reiterated Owens’s signature sculptularity in a new, almost dreamlike tone. Periodically, the défilé was interrupted by an incredible sight: a woman, dressed by Owens, carrying another woman down the long length of the runway. Their bodies were yoked together; sometimes the women being carried hung upside down, legs slung over their partners’ shoulders. Other women were strapped on like backpacks. Speaking before the show, Owens said he’d been thinking—wondering, really—about the ways women nurture others, metaphorically taking on another human being’s weight. That inquiry was communicated forcefully by the show’s staging. The carrying women, with their human freight, also suggested the physical labors of pregnancy—an undercurrent amplified by the Owens silhouettes featuring distended volumes that were almost carbuncular. When the last model crossed the catwalk, wearing a short dress and one of those terrifically commercial crinkled anoraks, she looked sublimely unburdened—until you noted the straps crisscrossing the jacket in back. Even the most sylph-like, seemingly footloose and fancy-free woman is prepared, at any moment, to shoulder a weight. That, at any rate, appeared to be Owens’s message in making those load-bearing straps his show’s closing image. All women are strong. Even the ones who don’t know it yet.'
Tags: spring , Ready-to-Wear , Fashion Show (Film Subject) , Rick Owens (Fashion Designer)
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