TECUATL

On June 20, 2019, at the esplanade of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Rick Owens presented “TECUATL” — named after his grandmother’s Mixtec maiden name — and for the first time in a career that had spanned two decades, the designer who had built an empire on the mythology of the lone, culture-less figure in black directly addressed the fact that he was a Mexican-American man from Southern California who had spoken Spanish before he spoke English. The name itself was an act of reclamation: TECUATL, meaning “Lordess of Water” in Nahuatl, the Aztec language that four imposing men in floor-length hooded robes chanted from drums at the rear of the runway while models descended the grand marble staircase of the Palais de Tokyo in vertiginous plexiglas platform boots.

Owens had stated that he “never really explored my Mexican-ness but the debate over a border wall made me more conscious of who I would be separated from,” and the collection channeled that consciousness into garments that were simultaneously his most personal and his most monumental. The silhouettes were Owens’s familiar vocabulary — angular shoulders, elongated torsos, the tension between volume and exposure that had defined his work since the early 2000s — but filtered through what he described as “Stoic Bauhaus Aztec priestesses in an Art Deco Valhalla filled with bubbles animated by Fantasia Disney.” The description was absurd and precise: the collection looked exactly like that, a collision of geometric modernism and pre-Columbian ceremony staged with the theatrical grandeur that Owens brings to every show but that felt, here, earned by the personal stakes of the material.

The Bauhaus Bodybag — essentially cargo pants that extend all the way up the torso, wearable as pants with the top folded down or as a full jumpsuit — was the collection’s most significant structural innovation, a garment that literalized Owens’s longstanding interest in clothing as shelter, as armor, as a portable architecture that the wearer inhabits rather than simply puts on. Constructed in lightweight black nylon with exposed silver zippers, snap closures, and grommet accents, the bodybag channeled military utility through the vocabulary of avant-garde fashion, and the rare runway “Fitted” version — which never went to mass production — has become one of the most sought-after Owens pieces on the archive market.

A collaboration with Champion reinterpreted American sportswear as togas, loincloths, and briefs — Owens recalled his Mexican cousins wearing Champion in the seventies, and the tonal embroidered Champion “C” logo appeared inside a star-shaped symbol that merged corporate branding with something older and more sacred. The ten-piece capsule, priced from a hundred and seventy-five dollars for briefs to four hundred and eighty for a long-sleeve tee, was the democratic counterpoint to the collection’s more extreme propositions. Geometric masks and crowns by Wintercroft — designed first in cardboard, then fabricated in metal — sat on the models’ heads like “metallic alien Aztec crowns that might have come from a Fritz Lang film,” and the materials throughout ranged from iridescent coated canvas to paper-thin snake leather to cotton duchesse coated in beetle-wing iridescence, each surface catching the Parisian sunlight with a different quality of reflection.

Nicole Phelps, writing for Vogue, called it “one of the most captivating collections of the week — if not the season,” and the critical consensus was that TECUATL represented something new in Owens’s work: not a departure from his established vocabulary but a deepening of it, a revelation that the monochromatic severity and post-industrial aesthetic that had defined the brand were not, as some critics had assumed, expressions of cultural blankness but the deliberate choices of a man who had suppressed one identity in order to construct another, and who was now allowing the suppressed identity to surface in forms that were abstract, ritualistic, and unmistakably his. What TECUATL proved was that Rick Owens’s work had always been about heritage — not the specific heritage of Puebla and the Mixtec, but the broader question of what it means to build a self from the materials available, to construct an identity as deliberately as one constructs a garment, and to acknowledge, eventually, that the materials you began with are the ones that matter most.