Rick Owens is one of fashion’s purest renegades.
The Californian, who launched his eponymous label thirty-years ago, has always gone against the grain when it comes to what’s expected of luxury designers — and his latest show at Paris Fashion Week was no different.
To showcase his Fall/Winter 2024 collection, titled PORTERVILLE after Owens’ place of birth, the designer invited guests inside his dystopian Parisian abode, a three-storied townhouse on the Place du Palais Bourbon where he lives with his life partner, Michèle Lamy.
Owens’ home is both brutalist and outlandish in equal measure.
Think bare concrete floors decorated with offbeat furniture designed by the designer himself. Luxury leather poufs backdropped by peeling walls. It’s a “concrete palace”, as Owens often calls it.
As if being invited into Owens’ townhouse for Paris Fashion Week wasn’t bizarre enough, the collection displayed by the 62-year-old certainly played its part too.
Typical of any Owens show, it got weird.
Gigantic inflatable boots, created in collaboration with Straytukay, were joined by full leather ensembles, as mostly masked models nonchalantly meandered from room to room.
The show was, of course, gothic. It was also black. A shade that adorned abnormally bulbous looks, inflatable contraptions, and cage-like figures that awkwardly wrapped models’ heads.
Rick Owens’ FW24 show was typically wild and had everything we’ve come to expect of the designer throughout his 30-year career thus far.
Though Owens inviting guests into his home, his actual concrete palace, to show such a wonderfully unhinged collection most certainly took things to the next level.
Not only was Owens’ FW24 presentation jaw-dropping and outlandish, but it was intimate too. A wonderful concoction of emotions that, when fused, make for a truly special show. Point is, even thirty-years in, Owens is evidently still at the very top of his game.
