This Rick Owens spring summer 2016 women’s collection is entitled Cyclops, a mythological creature, formidable, with focused vision. Who among us wouldn’t appreciate that kind of description? In the spring men’s collection, which shares the same name, that focused vision was propulsive and aggressive. When applied to women, I see that focused vision being more about nourishment, sisterhood/motherhood and regeneration; women raising women, women becoming women and women supporting women a world of women I know little about and can only attempt to amuse in my own small way.

Straps can be about restraint but here they are all about support and cradling. Straps here become loving ribbons. Sturdy sandals provide a steady base for light-as-air shifts. Tunics and boxers are topped with crisply cutaway coats with narrow, sharply defined shoulders. Sleeves on the coats are ripped off or can be removed to drift behind the bare arm like a cape.

After a long period of addressing the pursuit of the illusion of control with geometric motifs and cuts that belong in a concrete brutalist utopia, this collection unabashedly collapses into wallowing sensuality with swirling and dripping globs of washed silk gazar and cloque that point more in the direction of an art nouveau landscape. Fistfuls of silk organza and raw canvas are twisted and abstractedly draped into something as close to floral as I’ll probably ever get.

All this organic limpness is countered with the classic rigor of simple flight jackets, hooded windbreakers and sleeveless bikers all in varying weights of black leather and a metallic fabric that I chose for its semblance to something john chamberlain would have made one of his crumpled steel sculptures out of. Leather is also transparent, using a process that preserves the leather but stops short of dyeing it. It’s then waxed in a procedure similar to drum skins. This process is also applied to snakeskin to create a weird organza/hide effect.

The music for the show is Unkle’s arrangement of ‘This land’, the theme from the movie ‘exodus1', a song I use here as a reflection on the timelessly female way of protecting and nurturing a tribe, sung live by vocal powerhouse eska.

Makeup: Sammy Mourabit (Julian Watson agency)
Hair: Duffy (Streeters)
Prod: La mode en images
Music: This land by Unkle, performed by Eska with Connie Bidouzo and Audrey Gbaguidi

Rick Owens RTW SS16 Cyclops - Women