Rick Owens’s Breath-Taking A/W'22 Show

Vogue fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen reports on Rick Owens’s full-saccharine, full-emotion, full-hope show, which few Paris Fashion Week show-goers will forget.

Rick Owens played Mahler’s 5th Symphony

Rick Owens had originally planned a much different soundtrack for his show. “It was this really brutal dubstep. It was all artillery fire and ominous,” he said backstage. In light of the atrocities taking place in Ukraine, he changed his mind. “I thought, now is the moment for hope. This music is so sentimental and really clutching at the heartstrings, it would have been too kitsch to use it before. But now, it seemed right.” The music in question was Mahler’s 5th Symphony, a hauntingly beautiful piece that helped to make Owens’s show one that few in attendance are likely to ever forget. “I decided to go full-saccharine, full-emotion, full-hope. That music is like an aching for hope, it seems to me.”

The runway was fogged with smoke

Before the show began, Owens filled his Palais de Tokyo runway with white smoke. Out of the fog – to those breath-taking violins – emerged mighty, ghostly silhouettes: shoulders raised to the heavens, floor-length skirts that slithered around the body and dragged long trains in their wake, and volumes draped into hooded shrouds, sculpted and padded like soft armour, or thrown majestically over the shoulder with haute couture pathos. “It was always gonna be a soft collection. It was always meant to be pretty,” Owens said, but with current affairs in mind, perhaps his creative process had been premonitory: a gesture of pure beauty and intense hope in a time of turbulence.

The collection was soft and moving

“I have always found great comfort that in the history of the world, good has somehow always managed to triumph over evil,” Owens wrote in his self-penned show notes. “During times of heartbreak, beauty can be one of the ways to maintain faith.” Owens is acutely sensitive to the world around him, and doesn’t just create beautiful statements to reflect a mood, but to affect it, too. That premise was evident in the poetry of his chosen fabrics: soft, gentle, tactile, inviting, and – despite their otherworldly grace – very human. In the foggy melancholy of the show, they looked almost dusty, as if they had arisen from a great ordeal and powered through. It was incredibly moving.

Owens infused the runway with his ceremonial new scent

Owens placed in the hands of some of his models portable fog machines, which left trails of smoke behind them as they walked the mile-long runway. He infused the smoke with oil scented with the fragrance he has created with Aesop – which will be released this month as oil and candles – blended from vetiver grass, black pepper and elemi. It evoked the aroma that hits you when you enter a catholic church: a memory of the frankincense and myrrh that lingers after the burning of real incense. Vaporised by Owens’s fog machines – “carried like brutalist thuribles,” as he put it – the scent filled the room with a ceremonial and solemn haze, which – like everything else on this runway – was entirely soul-piercing.

It was poetry in a time of turbulence

“Fashion has always been about communication, and signalling value systems to others,” Owens pointed out. “Value systems regarding physical beauty and status, but also about moral beauty and beautiful behaviour. In times of menace and strife, the way we present ourselves can express what we endorse and aspire to: an empathetic and gracious way of moving through the world and treating others.” Because the business of fashion materialises in theatrical shows – which can seem celebratory but are, in essence, just showcases – fashion week will always cut an uncomfortable contrast when it coincides with shattering world events. While we can’t change that, we can count ourselves lucky to have industry members like Owens, who approaches that contrast with such sensitivity and poetry.