Cyclops

Rick Owens titled his Spring/Summer 2016 women’s collection “Cyclops,” but the name was secondary to the image that dominated every account of the show: models carrying other models. Women walked the runway at the Palais de Tokyo with other women strapped to their bodies — bound to their fronts, slung across their backs, hoisted onto their shoulders like human backpacks. The effect was startling, tender, and profoundly strange. It was fashion as performance art, or performance art as fashion, and the distinction had ceased to matter.

The gesture operated on multiple levels simultaneously. At its most immediate, it was a visual spectacle — the kind of runway moment that transcends the fashion press and enters the wider cultural conversation. But it was also a statement about solidarity, about the physical reality of carrying another person, about the intimacy and difficulty of mutual dependence. Owens described the collection in terms of community, of women literally supporting other women, and the earnestness of the sentiment was made bearable by the strangeness of its execution. These were not models gently holding hands. They were bearing each other’s full weight, and the strain showed, and the strain was the point.

The garments themselves — draped jersey, architectural layering, the extended silhouettes that constitute the Owens vocabulary — served the performance rather than competing with it. Colors stayed within the expected range: black, dust, concrete gray. What “Cyclops” demonstrated was that Owens’s project had evolved beyond clothing into something closer to total theater. The runway was not a showcase but a stage, and the clothes were costumes for a drama about bodies in relation to other bodies. It was the logical extension of everything he had been building since those early collections in his Los Angeles apartment — fashion as a complete world, governed by its own emotional and physical logic.