Review of Rick Owens Spring 2024 Men’s Fashion Show
Damaged Goods
By Mark Wittmer
With his Spring 2024 menswear collection, Rick Owens reconsidered some of his signature motifs – architectural tailoring, draping and wrapping, and a monochrome black palette – to carve out an intimate and healing space within the darkness of modern life’s mechanisms of violence and alienation.
How one handles adversity is what defines one’s character,” Rick reflects in his show notes, and this collection sees him respond with simultaneous vulnerability, intimacy, resilience, and strength.
Owens’ designs have often accurately been called “architectural,” and the last two seasons saw him specifically look to the monumental and enduring architecture of ancient Egypt, referencing temples and pyramids to find a sense of the enduringly human in the face of an unsteady present. This season, that sense of architecture is taken even further back to its most primal and essential motive: the need for shelter. The structures of garments evince a look toward protection, patience, and healing.
While the broad, angular shoulders of tailored jackets do in a way suggest power, they also have the Byrneian effect of making their wearer’s head and body seem smaller, shrinking away from the absurdity and violence of the world like a snail into its shell. New riffs on his iconic footwear include padded boots that closely mimic the kind that protects a broken foot or ankle, while tops wrap or closely cling to the torso like casts. The Edfu-inspired peaked shoulders return again, but applied to comfort staples like sweatshirts and denim jackets, and are distressed as if this temple has now been worn down over the millennia.
At the same time, however, a sense of exposure and vulnerability forms a counterpoint to this feeling of shelter, creating a dialectical tension that shows these states to be mutually reflected in each other. It’s a Rick Owens menswear show, so of course it begins with Tyrone Dylan’s exposed chest, although most of his familiar abs are hidden by the corseting effect of the collection’s ultra-high-waisted and extra-long pants. Billowing coats, structured tailored outerwear, and belted wrap jackets with monk-like hoods are often worn over bare torsos, creating a play between exposure and protection, organic body and artificial encasement.
For as much as Rick Owens’ designs can feel otherworldly, they also show a deep connection to the state of our world – to contemporary and historical currents in fashion, but also to politics, history, and culture more broadly. With war, pandemic, artificial intelligence, and capitalist greed haunting our everyday lives, there’s no shortage of reasons to feel disconnected from ourselves and others, and terrified for the future.
This collection again sees the designer unite this human awareness with his mastery of craft and understanding of design codes, facing the violence, alienation, and exploitation of our contemporary world with courage – which doesn’t mean not having fear, but being brave and steadfast in the face of fear – and through art giving us a place to take shelter.
