Rick Owens Spring 2017 - Runway Review

Pretty—but in a way that only Rick Owens can interpret. For spring, the designer continued to blur the distinction between fashion and art with a highly creative display that teetered from the figurative to the outright abstract.

In shades of citrus yellow, pale pink, gray and black, Owens’s artistic flourishes began at the shoulder and collar with stiffly draped lengths of fabric enveloping the models’s torsos like origami. It was hard not to be entranced by the show, with its frothy fabrics tied into unyielding abstract shapes and placed on the model, with seemingly complete disregard for the contours of the human body beneath.

As Nina Simone crooned “Wild Is the Wind,” whole skirt pieces were placed flapping down in front of the model’s bare, uncovered legs and flashes of fur circles were placed haphazardly on the bodice that swirled with the convergence of fabric.

The show climaxed with a series of “fog coats,” ostrich plumes hand-knot end-to-end to produce a waterfall of fluff cascading from the shoulders of silk gazar coats.