Kinga: IMG: Rick Owens: Fall/Winter 2008 via style.com

When designers reference heavy duty artists the results can sometimes be...well..gauche. Take the waltz for SS 08 between Richard Prince and Louis Vuitton. It was very clever and layered in the shrewdness thereof. It was visually witty, commercially astute, beautifully image managed but also it was literal. Richard Prince's nurses begat Louis Vuitton nurses. Prince's babe on a hot rod...translated to LV's supermodels on a hot rod. Literal is not always a bad thing but it does lessen the possibilities of prolonged looking.

That is why Rick Owen's FW 08 Paris show has been playing on my mind for weeks now . I've always liked Rick Owens but never loved him the way you were seduced into loving Jil Sander in her hey-day or Hedi Slimane in the middle of his Dior reign. Is it because Owens never gave you all that art gallery gravitas? I think that was what created a distance and why I never dropped a credit card in his name.
But recently the media machine has been revving it's engines up for Rick Owens. John Colaptino wrote a dazzling piece on Owens in the March 10th issue of The New Yorker that is worth digging up. The article manages to make Owens both poignant and mythic in a strangely disarming way, the result of which I am actually now thinking of devoting that credit card to Owen's idea of "glunge" ( grunge plus glamour). Maybe that's because we're on the brink of that inevitable 90's revival and maybe its because Owens is channeling that spirit in cashmere and mink which is probably the only successful way to dig grunge back up from its crypt.

The Lee Bontecou sculptures that informed Rick Owen's Fall/winter 2008 show

But what has really won my heart is how Owens took artist Lee Bontecou's ominous looking sculptures and chanelled them into looks for his FW/08 runway show. The clothes were completely in keeping with Owen's sustained iconography even as they managed to open a new wing (literally) in his image vocabulary. It was a great twinning act in that you didn't need to know a damn thing about Bontecou and could, if you wished, simply have honed in to what Owen's was doing with the legs of his pants. Split open and made even more sculptural by the use of his footwear, Owens created a silhouette that you recognized from the armies of goth kids that have marched up and down St. Marks Place for decades. Raw and ragged it was but also it was impeccably cut and clever in the use of triangular patterns at every which way on the models. I loved it. The hair in the face, the newness of the foot, the caveman cool of the fur, the darting, the partings that happened at the top with the hair and at the base with the pants...it was a visual symphony of themes and ideas.
That is exactly the kind of ingenuity that makes you want to run and buy a skinny Rick Owens leather jacket. I think it might be time to consummate the relationship.