I’ve been reeling, happily, all day after seeing Rick Owens’ Womens Spring 2014 Paris runway show. He recruited American college step dancing teams to wear his clothes, and the young women do it while strutting, jumping, and stomping across the stage en masse like possessed tribal warriors. The media focused on Owen’s enlightened casting, since the women are, by industry standards, heavy and muscular, and almost all are African American. But what’s most exciting is how the presentation, called Vicious, deftly reimagines the runway show, turning a rarified formal presentation into a full-on kinetic assault.
Rather than stare beatifically into the mid-distance, as models do, these ladies grimace and bare their teeth. Many of them wear their hair naturally, with Afros stuttering dramatically a half-second behind their strong, compact frames. Rather than sauntering down a catwalk one-by-one, the dancers, each one dressed uniquely, appear in teams of twenty-four grouped by color: first black, then beige, and then white. So instead of a single ensemble appraised in stasis we have a storm of them at once, stretched across flaring limbs and torsos. The spectacle is especially thrilling in the final dance, when dancers bump against each other, swallow each other in a throbbing huddle, and then – each woman crouching to grab the hips of the woman before her – join in a long pulsating chain that turns and marches off stage like a giant prehistoric insect. There’s is a blunt, thundering beauty in this that doesn’t often find its way onto the runway.
Image courtesy of Rick Owens, 2013.