Rick Owens does not wear underwear.
It is, he said, the Californian in him. Never mind that Mr. Owens, 63, has lived in Paris for much of his adult life. That coastal breeziness is hard to shake.
“I just wear socks and shorts,” the designer said in his still-intact Cali drawl after his men’s runway show here on Thursday.
Why exactly was Mr. Owens mentioning his unmentionables? To make a point about this dazzling collection, one that saw him stripping things back. (That’s strip back, not strip down, folks. Backstage, he was modestly cloaked in a sharp-shouldered topcoat and sprawling leather pants that wrinkled around his boots like a Shar-Pei’s mug.)
“This was a basics show,” Mr. Owens said. It opened with a set of long johns and unfurled into melton coats and spartan white hoodies. Basics, right?
Well, to someone who has never witnessed Mr. Owens’s intergalactic gothic wizardry, these would be some pretty unorthodox basics. Yes, the zip-front melton overcoats were subdued (this is executive wear, Owens style), but leather jackets came scrunched to the navel, and those long johns were paired with a pecs-high crop top, revealing the strapping physique of Mr. Owens’s muse, the model Tyrone Dylan Susman.
“A beautiful body is still more exciting than expensive clothes,” said Mr. Owens, a dedicated gymgoer. (In another life, Mr. Owens could have given Billy Blanks, the Tae Bo guy, a run for his money. “If I could get washboard abs, anybody could,” Mr. Owens said. “I swear! Because I’m just a lazy pig.” This critic, who has been surviving on pomme frites and croissants for the past week, began to feel mighty inadequate.)
Other ingenious Owens flourishes would have been basic only on the planet Zod, like a white hoodie bearing the texture of fossilized duct tape and boots with undulating strands all around, calling to mind swooshing carwash brushes.
“I want refinement and simplicity, but I want moments of madness, too,” Mr. Owens said. You want mad? Peep his earlobe-kissing jacket collars, which he called “DRACUCOLLARED” in his show notes. (Mr. Owens, on top of everything else, writes some wonderfully Seussian news releases.)
“I always love that heavy-metal Dracula glamour,” he said. Tilted up, the erect collars gave the models the image of Bela Lugosi attending a Kiss concert. But the designer assured me that when folded down, “they end up looking kind of normal.”
Normal, though, is not what Owens consumers craze. The disciples who fill his shows, pulling out their most beloved Owens inventions, are evidence of this.
In the front row of this one sat the British singer FKA Twigs, in a languid leather jacket and thigh-high brown boots, and the star Owens shopper Dave Chappelle, in a swaddling sleeveless puffer and black leather flares. (There is something curious in that, as Mr. Chappelle has become ever more polarizing, he has started to dress like the frontman of a German nu-metal group.)
But the real flashes of brilliance can be found in the standing section. There you can spot the die-hards with mutant puffers worming around their shoulders like air-conditioning tubes, ethereal mohair sweaters and Tractor Boots with soles the size of G.M.O. baguettes. I zeroed in on a fleet of 20-something men in broccoli-top hairdos wearing matching black Owens jackets and versions of his muscular sneakers. They bounced around giddily waiting for the show to start.
It’s happy converts like these, already acquainted with the alien extremes of Rick Owens’s output, for whom the so-called basics he presented will really be just that.
