Sep 30

Sep 30 Rick Owens SS24

Optimism was the word floating around at Rick Owens SS24 “Lido” Collection as the audience had the chance to admire the, now complete, integration of color into the American designer’s universe. Hints of color have always made their appearance in Owens’ collections, especially in the last few years, but now you could say that the abysses of his light-absorbing cosmos have been redecorated.

With a palette that included beiges, reds, browns, pale pinks and desert oranges, the collection was as experimental as always. As if lighter colors had relieved garments from gravity, shoulders were pushed to new heights and parachute-inspired capes granted the models an ethereal solemnity. Maybe romanticism is the word?

In a collection packed with technical wonders and conceptual trajectories, an interesting element was the transparent pieces exposing the architectural details sustaining these levitating structures. And if the easiest way to approach abstraction is by subtraction, maybe this could be one of the motifs through which we could read the collection: in fact, color itself can be a testament to abstraction, ask Rothko. There is calmness in abstraction; not necessarily purity, but a joy that is not confined to the body. Communal delight.

Utterly cinematic were also the duvet-style inflated pieces that came both in black and red: either an extension of the body, its evolution or its gentle correction, these are not clothes content with the status quo. And this is joy at its purest.

Most models walked the runway with their heads covered by translucent veils which neither hid nor revealed the face beneath: indecision, suspension and ambivalence are, once again, all features belonging to a romanticist Weltanschauung. Rick Owens is now a romantic.