Rick Owens’s Autumn Winter 2024 collection, Porterville, marked a return to his oppressed roots. Named after his small Californian hometown, the show served as both confrontation and reflection. Owens has described Porterville as a place burdened by intolerance, and by reclaiming its name, he turned that history into creative resistance. Presented within his Paris home, the show was stripped of spectacle and rich with intimacy, as models drifted through the Palais Bourbon residence like fragments of memory.
The silhouettes in Porterville expanded on Owens’s language of distortion and volume. Inflated rubber boots made in collaboration with Straytukay reshaped the lower body into sculptural masses, while enveloping jackets, capes, and layered wraps elongated the figure beyond familiar proportions. Techniques like draping and stacking returned with new extremity, producing shapes that felt protective yet alien. The palette softened from his usual monochromes into custard, greygreen, and dusty rose, suggesting a quiet shift toward vulnerability.
Materiality carried emotional weight throughout the collection. Collaborators Leo Prothman and Matisse Di Maggio contributed experimental constructions that fused rigidity with tactility. Rubber, leather, wool, and knits collided to create garments that felt both sheltering and suffocating. Owens described the work as an acknowledgment of oppression that endures across time, and this tension gave the clothes a sense of survival and confession.
Ultimately, Porterville read as a personal statement on individuality against conformity, and as a form of atonement for the hardships Owens faced in his youth. He was not alone in this journey. Owens gathered friends, artists, and long-time collaborators to take part in this intimate confrontation with his origins. The experience was not nostalgic, but rather an effort to reconcile with the constraints of his past and transform them into a matured vision of self-determined beauty.
Porterville also marks the return of the recurring Jumbo Lace motif, which first appeared in 2021 for his Spring/Summer 2022 Fogachine collection. This pair of Ramones Lows features exaggerated, thickly woven shoelaces atop a deep, luscious forest green leather upper.
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