Rick Owen’s women carry other women

This Spring Summer 2016 season in Paris I look at the celebrity media circus around certain designers and their entourage and it feels very dated.

Whereas in the past, throngs of buyers and press would crowd in anticipation at the entrance of an Azzedine Alaïa presentation, now it is crowds of screaming teens at the barriers of the Balmain show, desperate to catch a glimpse of a Kardashian, kids trying to get pictures of the models and celebrities.  Jared Leto, Kanye West, and Kim, with her mother, Kris Jenner, were there.

There is also lot of talk in Paris this season about clothes that empower women, clothes that make you sexy without having to show a lot of skin, without revealing too much. Rick Owens is one of those designers.

Last year I wrote about Rick Owens presenting strong clothes that can be worn by any body type and in extreme movement . This season and to quote Cathy Horyn from The Cut, Owen “recruited local female gymnasts and paired them off, with one woman carrying the other as she crouched on the front of her partner’s torso or, in another arrangement, against her partner’s back, head down and legs draping over the other woman’s shoulders. They looked like a Surrealist sculpture».

Women wearing other women, women carrying women…..something to make you think.

In this interview on DazedDigital Rick Owens says: “There was an Annie Leibovitz image of Leigh Bowery carrying his wife Nicola in a harness they would use for a birthing performance that I always loved. It was transgressive and sweet at the same time. I thought doing it with women would be a nice interpretation and developed other poses from there”.

*Principal photographs: Francois Guillot and Alessandro Lucioni