Rick Owens probably had as much leather and high craftsmanship on his runway as Givenchy and Chloé did. All three shows were on Thursday. His clothes are also more simplified this season, like those of Matthew M. Williams at Givenchy, and they are an interpretation of how he sees women today. That’s what Gabriela Hearst claims for Chloé, that her clothes embody an “urgent need to champion women as leaders.”
But only Owens has the power to demolish our notions of dress, and that is the quality that separates truly great designers from those who are merely servicing the machinery of the luxury-fashion industry — that they allow you to see something you never have before.
Owens’s shapes this season are indeed very strange. They began as an irregularly formed black leather duvet jacket or minidress — let’s call it a hybrid puffer — that swelled into padded garlands and fat doughnut rings of material that looped and draped around the body. In silver and metallic hot pink, as well as tan and black, they looked like soft sculptures or the innards of your HVAC system. Or a disemboweled human, an ugly image straight from the TV news but almost neutralized or sanitized by the pink and silver. If Owens had not made a career out of taking risks and exploring both historical shapes in fashion and those that exist in nature and other areas of life, then these abstract forms wouldn’t make much sense. But they’re a continuation of a unique thought process that almost always relates to how human beings perceive themselves — as larger-than-life deities, as sci-fi animals, as glamorous vixens.
Owens said in his press notes he spends his winter holidays in Luxor, Egypt, which is home to ancient temples and monumental sculptures. This season, Owens put his models on a raised metal-grill catwalk, so that in their platform boots and bulbous, twisty cocoons and peaked-shoulder bat capes and coats they looked really enormous. If that isn’t empowerment, I don’t know what is.
On a smaller, more practical scale were rounded wool coats glazed with matte sequins, short capes, and long, dragging skirts in selvedge denim that had been reduced to a lacy web of threads with a laser. He used the same technique for the hem of a blouson utility jacket. As a basic underpinning to many of the looks, Owens updated his bustier and tube dresses in recycled cashmere, mostly with trains.
If you’ve followed Chloé over the decades — from Karl Lagerfeld to Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo and then Clare Waight Keller — it’s hard to accept Hearst’s approach. Her designs feel less like interesting fashion than packaged luxury. She opened with leather and shearling: sweeping coats, vests and dirndl skirts in easy neutrals, most shown with block-heeled riding boots. There were also some nicely done dresses in white lace-knit, a few standard pantsuits, and plain dresses with bishop sleeves. (In her lengthy show notes, she referred to a female painter from the Renaissance. The reference to both the period and the artist seemed slight, however.) I can understand if Hearst wants her clothes to be free of gimmicks, but unlike the Chloé of her predecessors, I don’t see real women when I watch her shows. I see expensive products without personality.
Williams’s problems at Givenchy are quite different. I happened to be seated at the end of a row of celebrities and, perhaps, influencers, all decked out in the brand’s spring clothes, including one girl in a bright pink, Chanel-like tweed jacket and miniskirt. Her outfit had nothing in common with the dark tailoring that opened the show, with blouses that had very long neck ties streaming down the back — a gesture that one has seen a hundred times on runways. But then in the three years that Williams has been creative director of Givenchy, he’s tried several different lines of attack, and none has really worked.
This time, the clothes — pantsuits, strict long coats, classic leather pieces — were elegant. But there is still no real design proposition here, no vision. Largely what we got was styling and product development, and Givenchy should be a lot more than that.
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