We had been again at Rick Owens’s Place du Palais Bourbon manse at this time. As he did in the course of the January males’s season, Owens traded the bombast (his phrase) of his Palais de Tokyo exhibits for a setup extra intime.

Owens’s singular, sweeping imaginative and prescient stays a lot large enough for the monumental Palais. Batwing shoulders scraped the earlobes, puffer vests swaddled torsos like protecting shells, and leather-and-down boots that riffed on the inflatable rubber ones he placed on his males’s runway evoked house costumes, as if his fashions may’ve simply returned from a stroll on the moon. The deep pink costume worn by Matières Fécales’s Hannah Rose Dalton regarded prefer it had sprouted wings in again.

However presenting chez lui—the previous French Socialist Celebration headquarters and an area Owens has referred to as “mild, everlasting, and uncooked” prior to now, a becoming description—gave him a cause to concentrate on smaller gestures too. Like sweaterdresses that limned the physique from neckline to platform footwear, with a porthole in again to point out off a mesmerizing tattoo, say, and very elegant bias-draped attire accessorized by shearling capes that mirrored his obsession with ’30s references—hey, Jean Harlow.

“It’s not straightforward for lots of designers to be so autobiographical,” stated Owens, and he wasn’t simply referring to the truth that he struck the real-estate jackpot when he purchased his residence 20 years in the past. As one among Paris’s final impartial designers standing, he has fewer voices in his ear and independence to do as he pleases. This was a set by which his gothic instincts duked it out along with his inclination for goddess-y silhouettes—each sharpened throughout his outsider childhood—and each side got here out victors.

“Once I’m speaking about Porterville”—his California hometown, whose identify appeared in an Artwork Deco font marching throughout capes—“I’m speaking about oppression and intolerance, and that’s a reality of life that’s by no means going to go away,” he stated. “A part of my function in life is to counterbalance that with this cheerful perversity.”

He identified that the shaggy mohair coats with shearling swatches including definition to their shoulders had been modeled on army-blanket variations he made in his early days as a designer on Hollywood Boulevard, the primary place the place he could possibly be who he wished to be. Resurrecting them was much less an act of nostalgia, an overused tendency in style in the meanwhile, than a gesture of hope.

“I’m providing different choices than the slim, strict, virtually merciless aesthetic requirements that we’re bombarded with every single day,” he stated. “It’s not an aggressive warfare, it’s a mild teasing: Let’s blur the traces. Once you blur the traces aesthetically, it makes different attitudes about acceptance blur.” The web trolls are most likely past fixing, however this present was a reminder to different designers, impartial and never, of the ability and persuasion of fierce authenticity.