Social Distortion
Review of Rick Owens Fall 2024 Fashion Show
By Mark Wittmer
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
THE THEME
Picking up where he left off with his men’s show last month, Rick Owens’ Fall 2024 women’s collection formed a surreal and gripping intersection of the intimate and the horrifying. At once sympathetic to the escapist desire for comfort and protection, Rick simultaneously calls out the privilege inherent in that desire, suggesting that there is no escape from the violence that shapes our world.
The title of the collection, Porterville, is named after the city in California where Rick Owens grew up, while the staging of the runway show in his own Paris home forms a similarly personal gesture of the designer inviting us into and perhaps offering us shelter within his own world, his own story. That sense of comfort and intimacy is picked up within the collection itself as the recycled cashmere knit bodysuits that anchor many of the looks, as well as in the softly cocooning volumes of shearling capelets and enveloping long coats.
At the same time, however, and within many of these same looks, there is an inescapable feeling of the grotesque, the distorted, the sinister. The menswear show’s inflatable boots created in collaboration with designer and protégé Straytukay made a return and were further developed, anchoring almost every look in a warped and elongated leg silhouette that reworked the human body into insect-like proportions. Owen’s frequent use of knotting and wrapping were also used to unsettling effect, twisting familiar forms into Cronenberg-worthy body-horror creations.
THE BUZZWORDS
Intimacy. Distortion. Body horror. Contradiction.
THE SHOWSTOPPER
Look #49
While this sculptural couture cage might feel reminiscent of Hellraiser’s cenobites, it also unmistakably reminds us of the real images with which we are all too familiar of bodies tangled in rubble and rebar in the aftermath of the genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza.
THE DIRECTION
Owens has of course shaped a generation of forward-thinking artists and designers, and it’s exciting to see him expand his creative community and vision by working directly with some of them. In addition to the boot collaboration with Straytukay, he also teamed with designer Leo Prothman, latex specialist Matisse Di Maggio, and performance art duo Fecal Matter. Though the collection’s message is quite bleak, this openness to communal collaboration and the ideas of young people might point to a way forward and maybe even something like hope.
THE QUOTE
Collection proportions are grotesque and inhuman in a howling reaction to some of the most disappointing human behavior we will witness in our lifetime.”
– Rick Owens
THE WRAP UP
A wider conversation can and should be had about fashion’s relationship to politics and the way the industry stifles meaningful commentary. All art is political; art that pretends not to be is simply a tacit endorsement of the status quo. Rick Owens is doing more than most by refusing to pretend that things are fine and by reflecting in his work the alienation and horror of living in the world today. At the same time, though, it feels a bit frustrating that Rick, as someone who is so ostensibly concerned with conflict and injustice, points vaguely to “disappointing human behavior” but hasn’t used his platform in a more direct way. If you won’t actually explicitly acknowledge that your home country is supporting a genocide and call for a ceasefire, why all the show around being upset?
Perhaps Owens thinks of his art as speaking for him, and in many ways that’s true. This is a stunning, challenging, unsettling collection that we should not look at and then go on with our day without some serious reflection. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what most people will do – scroll on to the next thing, feeling as though that privilege to just scroll on to the next thing hasn’t been explicitly called out. But if we really sit with the intersecting motifs of comfort and grotesqueness present in this collection, we can see Rick saying that that privilege is inherently tied up with the violence and oppression it seeks to turn away from.
