A confrontational, brilliant collection from the dark lord of fashion.
Surely you’ve seen that meme circulating right now—the one that goes, “Men would rather [do some absurdly difficult task]than go to therapy.” Men would rather start a band, get impeached, become the greatest golfer of all time, spend ten years coming home from the Trojan War…than go to therapy. It’s a gallows-humor twist on a horrifying reality: male aggression, especially white men’s suppressed anger, is at the center of so many of the world’s problems right now.
Men’s fashion, meanwhile, is in a golden period. But designers only glancingly acknowledge that their customer base is in the midst of an identity crisis. Shayne Oliver was maybe the closest to touch on it, with his macho BDSM vibe at Hood By Air, and Demna Gvasalia always hits it in Balenciaga’s biannual fright fests of global domination. But other than these oblique overtures, designers have mostly ignored the monster festering in the western world, instead pushing men towards gender-neutral clothing, privileging notions of softness and vulnerability, and encouraging freedom of expression and individuality. Maybe they feel it’s an American problem and so it’s none of their business, or maybe they believe it’s more empowering to reward good behavior than experiment with bad. But genius ideas are far more likely to come from experimenting with bad behavior, and genius ideas are what Rick Owens almost always delivers.
On Thursday, Owens took on what’s become fashion’s last taboo: “A ROUGH SKETCH OF OUR BARBARIC CONTRADICTORY TIMES,” as the designer put it in his show notes. (Owens writes in all-caps, and so we shall respect the maestro’s stylings.) I saw the show in three distinct scenes: big, sexy, dumb provocateur; Jack Dorseycore; and paranoid, world domination-hungry monster. The first portion featured Owens hotties, in tighty-whities and huge-ass coats, stomping around with “look at me, because my outfit is screaming and my dick is nearly out” bravura, and droopy knits with holes that gaped open like yakking mouths, or were squinched shut like, um, you know. (“LOUD AND DUMB CAN ALSO BE CONCISE AND ELEGANT,” Owens said, reflecting on The Ramones.) The third section took the oversized coats that Owens first showed last January. Then, he used them to play with the narcissistic exuberance of online performance. Now, he turned them into giant kingmaker blazers, like ’80s Armani power suits on steroids.
Owens knows arrogant sexuality like no one else, and he played his tighty-whitie card expertly on underwear-clad zaddies and boy toys snarling and preening. Then throw in those ponyhair thigh-high boots with cleats, and the creepy picture comes fully into focus: are these humans or animals? Probably something in between. I thought of Elizabeth Schambelan’s n+1 essay on the long history of “big bad wolves” from prehistory to fraternity culture, and of the men dressed in fur pelts at the Capitol last week: men who retreat to an animal state to engage in a twisted ritual of bonding, to commit acts that animals undertake to survive but humans only undertake as acts of defiant evil.
And then there was that middle section. Owens said he did more “normal clothes” for this collection, and my friend Steff Yotka (Vogue’s fashion news editor, and my resident Owensologist) said she found it even more perverse for Owens, king of the sexy bizarro, to do his own take on dressy-casual. Of course, he does a big business of his drop-crotch sweats, shrunken leather jacket, and lean blazers, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has become an unofficial face of the brand. But to my mind, this was the first time he’s conjured his problematic customer—Dorsey himself as well as the legion of millionaire and billionaire ascetics who find a match for their own unorthodoxy in Owens’s freak-of-nature world. Owens is the rare designer who designs without moral judgment, who reflects the world as he sees it rather than working to represent an idealized version of masculinity.
This collection was chilling and electrifying—one for the history books, and one to chew over for months to come. It could devour you.
