By his own estimation, Rick Owens said his spring 2025 men’s show back in June — akin to watching a biblical epic by Cecil B. DeMille — ranks as a personal best, and it was indeed deeply moving and uplifting as a display of unity, diversity, dignity and defiance.
His women’s show on Thursday night reprised his wide casting of real people of all shapes and sizes, culled from fashion schools and his own company. Facial tattoos and piercings seemed to be preferred.
The spectacle felt more solemn and downbeat, a mood fed by Wagner’s dramatic, throbbing “Liebestod,” the blackout contact lenses and the dark-hearted fashions, most of them black and with Owens’ familiar ramrod or smokestack shoulders, fishtail skirts and Frankenstein-esque boots.
His 120 models strolled out in clumps, little fashion tribes united by their hooded capes, biker leathers, snug bomber jackets or purposely laddered knitwear.
Owens titled the collection “Hollywood,” and these women looked less like Hollywood extras and more like characters fully in charge of their own narratives, styled in looks that straddled “just the right balance of elegance and camp that I’m always going for,” the designer said. Plenty of the long dresses could play a role on top Tinseltown red carpets.
Guests were handed black ponchos upon arrival at the outdoor venue in the parvis of the Palais de Tokyo. Indeed, the plastic-covered benches were sodden, as it had rained practically the whole damn day.
Then miraculously, the clouds parted and unleashed that magical slanting golden-hour light, and blue sky to silhouette the shrouded characters on the roof edge tossing white flower petals to mingle with the white fog.
Backstage, Owens confessed that he long resisted using classical music for his fashion shows, finding it too “emotionally manipulative,” until that June men’s show, when Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7” swelled from the speakers.
He makes no apologies for it now amid the war in Ukraine and emerging conflicts elsewhere on the globe.
“I felt like to combat barbarism, I had to introduce as much dignity and civilization as I could.…We should just go as rapturous as we can,” he said.
His other antidote is alternative beauty, or as he calls it, “cheerful depravity, because the world can be such a judgmental, smug, conservative and condemning place.”
Indeed, Owens held out hope that his inclusive casting, and broad fashion offering, might welcome more people into his alternative fashion universe. Boyish shorts, bra tops and zipper-streaked macs, jersey tops and little jedi robes were among the options.
Is fashion’s dark lord trying to make his clothes more approachable?
“I’ve always thought it was approachable, and it is actually because I wouldn’t have survived this long if it wasn’t,” he replied. “Anybody can go into the store and they can find something. Not everything is shoulder pads and wings.”
For more Paris spring 2025 reviews, click here.
