Move over, Thom Browne, there’s another bad boy in town. Rick Owens. And he’s done it again. I just can’t get enough of his S/S 2014 ready-to-wear collection. I want to applaud him, thank him, and tell every designer in Western fashion to take note. THIS is how you take cultural inspiration and turn it into something unique without effacing its value. This is how you translate other cultures into something unique without stealing from those cultures. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain.
In the fashion world, it is easy to live in a culturally insulated and isolated bubble. Many designers and clients act like what they do exists solely for them, and they have no shame about it. Designers take hints from the streets, clients assimilate fashion cues from other countries, and the word “tribal” gets thrown around as if it’s not an embarrassingly outdated slur. All we know is what we do, and we take from the “other” or the “exotic” without batting an eyelash. The most credit we give is when we rename the “other” as our own creation. Never mind that autonomous factions of people go about their daily lives in diverse ways outside of the Western fashion bubble. When we like it, we take it and we make it our own. There would be nothing wrong with that if we were to give credit when credit’s due.
Where does Rick Owens come into play? Well, the bad boy has raised a middle finger to this close-minded attitude of rapacious elitism. This season, he put together a show that challenged everything. For S/S 2014, Owens used dancing known as “stepping” to convey the vicious nature of his clothing. During the show, step teams from American colleges performed step routines on the runway, fully outfitted in Owens’ 2014 collection.
Now, stepping is probably not common vernacular for most fashion week attendees. It’s a highly regarded African-American art form and has its own legendary history. Rick Owens said it himself in an interview with style.com: “There’s like this whole history that I’m not gonna even insult by trying to explain because I’m just not going to do it justice. But I suggest that everyone Google step teams.”
These were real women in real clothes with attitude that for once was actually fierce. There were curves, muscles, and stoic faces to go with the beautifully crafted clothing (leather vests, enviable sneakers, tunics over shorts). The runway was not only a showcase for the clothing, but for the art of stepping.
Don’t get me wrong, as a woman of color, I can tell you that we’ve got a long way to go. It would be a mistake to assume that Owens deserves an award for somehow saving fashion from its dire plight of unethical cultural elitism. But a) I don’t think that’s what he was looking for and b) at least now we have a tangible example of change in the industry.
In addition, it would be easy to assume that Owens fell in the trap of using a common stereotype (the strong, "vicious" black female) to sell his apparel. But I think to read the show as such is to miss the multi-facted glory of its triumph over stereotypes and racism.
It matters that the step teams were the ones modeling the clothing. Owens didn’t hire fashion’s favorite waifs to model the designs. He didn't assimilate a culture and then throw away the culture's original value by pretending like Western fashion invented it. And he didn't reduce the original culture to a caricature or stereotype. He could easily have done so in interviews by offering some flippant, superficial remarks about stepping. Or by hiring step teams to simply open the show before skinny white models stomped down the runway. He wasn't looking for credit for the inspiration, just the clothes. He recognized something in stepping that was similar to what he wanted to convey in fabric.
The revolution of this show started a much-needed conversation. Owens made it possible to entertain the idea that culture can be its own inspiring phenomenon. Designers can respectfully translate culture into fabric without reducing it to something exploitable or marginalized in the sphere of Western fashion. Now we know what different looks like and how powerful it is. We don’t need to appropriate this power to appreciate it. Perhaps this time around we may learn something from it.
Image sourced from: http://www.vogue.com/fashion-week/spring-2014-rtw/rick-owens/review/
Watch the footage here: http://www.vogue.com/fashion-week/spring-2014-rtw/rick-owens/review/
And here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU4e2ssOVjo
