TEXT by BY at Wallpaper
INTERVIEW by System Magazine
Rick Owens’ home on Paris’ Place du Palais Bourbon was the intimate setting for the designer’s A/W 2024 collection, a search for connection and community.
The invitation for Rick Owens’ latest menswear show – at Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2024 – was a loop of jersey fabric, stitched with ‘Porterville’, the collection’s title. It is also the name of the town in which a young Owens grew up, located at the base of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. He has credited its vast landscapes for his love of the monumental – as well as being a site of teenage angst and yearning – all elements that continue to pulsate through the designer’s work. ‘I remember the small brutalities of a sensitive childhood in a judgemental country,’ he wrote in a letter released just before the show’s start.
The show’s location – with guests sworn to secrecy in the run-up – was Owens’ current home on Paris’ Place du Palais Bourbon, which he purchased alongside his wife, Michèle Lamy in 2014. Formerly the headquarters of the French Socialist party, he calls it his ‘concrete palace’ and ‘working compound’, where he began selling his collections over two decades ago. Inside, the largely concrete space is populated by sparse, brutalist furnishings reminiscent of the designer’s oeuvre. Other rooms contain the building’s historic cornices and mouldings (albeit stripped back to their essence). This morning, guests filtered through these various rooms, taking places on furniture erected around their edges, winter sunlight streaming through the windows and skylights.
It made for a stark departure from Owens’ usual presentations, which take place each season at the vast Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and often on its monumental deco forecourt (last season, the models walked under enormous puffs of coloured smoke). The designer said that the shift came in part as a response to the ‘barbaric times through which we are living’ (recent seasons have seen Owens struggling with creating collections against the backdrop of war), describing the move from spectacle to intimacy as a kind of ‘respectful restraint’.
