DIRT

On September 28, 2017, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Rick Owens presented “DIRT” — the collection that followed the previous season’s “GLITTER” with the blunt, reductive logic that governs all of Owens’s work: if the preceding statement celebrated sleaze, transgression, and stomping bombast, then the next must answer with earth, stoicism, and the grim optimism of a civilization trying to build order from wilderness. The invitation featured a 1908 Italian Futurist head by Thayaht depicting the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Owens gave four words to contemplate — STOICISM, FERTILITY, FUTURISM, HOPE — which read less like a mood board than like the founding principles of a religion that no one had yet agreed to join.

The women’s show was staged around the fountain at the Palais de Tokyo, which sprayed water throughout the presentation while models descended through it — guests had been given ponchos to protect themselves, and the combination of falling water, semitransparent fabric, and bodies moving through mist produced an atmosphere that was simultaneously ceremonial and post-apocalyptic, as though the models were emerging from a flood rather than walking a runway. The soundtrack was a bare-bones remix by Lavascar — the band formed by Michèle Lamy, her daughter Scarlett, and Nico Vascellari — and the music’s anxious throb underscored the visual proposition that these were not clothes for a world at peace but armor for a world in which peace was something you had to construct from available materials. The men’s show, held earlier in June, had featured a Constructivist scaffolding structure erected above the courtyard pool — inspired by Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized tower — with models parading high above the audience, appearing to walk across water while Egyptian Lover’s “I Need a Freak” played beneath them.

The suit jacket was the collection’s central garment — Owens called it a “respectful uniform” and a “symbol of civilization” — and the variations on tailoring ranged from tight, high-cut jackets designed to lift the torso to oversized blazers with large functional pockets that suggested the suit had been repurposed for survival rather than ceremony. The pants were high-waisted and full-legged, designed to drag on the ground like ball gowns or be hiked up to reveal hiking boots with tractor-turbo tread soles, and the silhouette this produced — a figure simultaneously dignified and feral, dressed for a boardroom that happened to be located in a bombed-out cathedral — was Owens’s most articulate statement yet on the relationship between civilization and collapse. Thin white cotton T-shirts were stretched over the body in layers of neckholes and armholes, what Owens described as a “crude American’s brutalist interpretation of French confection,” and cargo leg chaps and fertility belts created swelling volumes that scrambled familiar body shapes into something biological and architectural at once.

The materials were developed in-house with the obsessive specificity that characterizes Owens’s production: a twill gazar made from silk and paper yarn, nylon-cotton technical canvas with a duchesse sheen, stiff cotton sateen canvas, chalky matte rubber-and-cotton canvas, shiny lacquered canvas, metal mega-bugle-beaded canvas, and lacquered twelve-ounce denim in industrial black, blue, and green. A fabric called “sugar twill” — German paper yarn woven with polyamide yarn to create a deeply textured, brittle gazar — captured in textile form the collection’s central paradox: beauty achieved through deliberate roughness, refinement that refuses to disguise the labor of its own construction. A plastic tarp lurex tape woven on metal warp, left unfinished to create a stiff, burnt-plastic texture, pushed the vocabulary of fabric into territory that most designers would classify as waste.

The women’s garments introduced pieces with interior zipped compartments that functioned as what the studio internally called “fertility bags” — garments-as-glorified-handbags, signifying rebirth and optimism — and the term captured Owens’s deepening interest in clothing as shelter, as portable architecture that the wearer inhabits rather than simply puts on. Garments were draped, bunched, cut, and swirled into amorphous dresses and togas, T-shirts wrapped around towering rucksacks, and bandaged legs created a mummy-like appearance that placed the models somewhere between refugees and goddesses — figures who had survived something catastrophic and emerged from it not diminished but transformed. The collection sat between the celebratory excess of GLITTER and the mythological weight of TECUATL two seasons later, and what it proved was that Owens’s project — now entering its third decade — was not a style but a cosmology, a complete system for understanding the relationship between the body, the garment, and the ruined world they both inhabit.