It’s hard to imagine how romanticism could succeed in a place like a factory or coal mine. Most of what we know of them are gruelling, dehumanizing labour, a profound lack of inspiration, a suffering working class, and a landscape more suited for machines than men. Rick Owens however, fashion’s “Lord of Darkness,” is interested in the factory– or some idea of it, rather – for these very reasons. Last week, the designer returned to the Palais de Tokyo to present his FW25 menswear collection, titled “Concordians,” a display steeped in the feeling of studious isolation and, in the designer’s words, “almost bleakness.”
Eponymously named after the mysterious Owenscorp factory in the industrial town of Concordia, Italy, the show was an event of fashion as much as an argument for a cloistered life subsumed within the rhythm of an industrial production schedule. Owens makes this statement because, as he puts it, this “is what it takes to be able to focus on reaching for something weird and wonderful.”
A Slouching, Lumbering Drama: The FW25 Walk
The clothes looked deliberately heavy. With dracu-collared jackets and coats rendered with ethically sourced heavyweight calf leather, models did not walk down the runway so much as lumber, slouch, and hulk their bodies across to a reversed sample of David Bowie’s Heroes. Trousers and shirts were built with a heavy crosta suede. Some skirts and boots sported a spiky feathery stitching of woven laser-cut groppone cow leather, which evoked a parade of rageful flightless birds in lethargic motion—or the eerie glee of the Death Note death god, Ryuk. Most looks were also fixed with thermal long johns in a compact wool-viscose blend jersey as armour against the European winter. The effect was sharp, dramatic covering against plunging necklines, and exaggerated shoulders against fluid strips and soft fabrics.
On this front, the model man became the factory man and the factory man a devoted monk inside a monastery of industry. Beneath it all, a carnality bubbled beneath the surface like wet black tar, completing the ascetic eclipse of the factory aesthetic, pointing to a divinity in the union of worker and machine, creator and creation joined in pursuit of something holy.
Inside the immense anatomy of a “Concordians” silhouette, the human body took an arcane shape, mutating in its rebellion against form. “Concordians,” used this dichotomy to disturb the relationship between protection and exposure, blurring the distinction between armour and amour with the visual texture of skin and pitch-black contacts fitted into models’ eyes. The eyes were interesting because more than anything, they emitted sensual delight while reflecting a bodily vulnerability within the rigid structures of a manual and machine-intensive labour system. It is complexity continued in the signature “hustler wash” of the brand’s denim, which interplayed metallic gray and dirt-earth tones to embody not only the exerted resilience of the word “hustle” but also its contingency to grime, sweat, skin and the body in toil. The message was clear: industrial life makes the body penetrable and possessable for the purpose of producing. So, for Owens, the factory is not only an external imposition but an equally pleasurable state of the soul.
In this state, the body becomes incarnate ugliness. People are no longer exactly people, but rather fauna of the ironworks. Elemental animas of mineral dye, bronze foil, and pressed wax. The beauty here is born from distressing and disintegrating convention; from shredded and collaged jeans, exposed skin against brutal exteriors, the unfathomableness of the colour black, the grouty tinge of the colour white, and the blinding, backlit runway. “Concordians” in this way nodded to the mystical logic of apophasis and negation. The paradoxical process of being made through being unmade, the illogical logic of countermovement from dereliction to delight, and woe to weal.
From ‘Hollywood’ to FW25: A Thematic Evolution
What Owens presented in this fall-winter collection continued an aspect of “Hollywood,” the brand’s ss25 menswear collection which debuted last summer, with womenswear showing in the fall. Beyond the autobiographical detail, the broad resonance of the show could be interpreted as a similar response to human suffering that “Hollywood” launched by bringing 200 models together to create an “army of love” amid “a time of discord and intolerance.” This sentiment even goes back a few seasons, to when Rick staged shows for small audiences in his house because he felt “guilty.” One Dazed article explained that “out of respect for the conflict going on around the world… it didn’t seem right to put on a massive fashion extravaganza when so many people are suffering,”
Owens gave a more performative display of the logic that drove the philosopher Simone Weil from a comfortable academic career into the hardship of Parisian factories during World War 2. Like Weil, we glimpse in “Concordians” a relationship to the divine which is lived out through a constant stripping away of the self, a permanent awareness of the void, and a closeness with death. We also understand how by opposing convention, we may position ourselves for some general good or spiritual benefit.
In “Concordians,” Owens remains self-aware of the world around him and his proximity to the suffering of others. Instead of guilt, he relies on the intensity of aesthetic experience to press hope that all will be well. He devotes himself to the factory, arguing the possibility of a romantic orientation to our bleak world; that we can still reanimate it and seize the means to make the industrial machine serve us instead.
For a collection that finds its making in unmaking, it is almost ironic that Owens talks about reaching for something weird and wonderful. Clearly, the weirdest and most wonderful thing is the reaching itself, the wanting without end for the thing that is always just out of reach. For this purpose, the signature kiss boots were reconfigured with an extra stable industrial sole in a model simply called The Factory. “For steady footing on factory stairs,” Owens wrote in the show’s release.
Jonathan Divine Angubua is currently finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of fashion, he is most inspired by strangeness and beauty.