Presented in Paris in September 2014, Rick Owens’ Spring Summer 2015 womenswear collection, Faun, deviated from his previous highly theatrical Vicious womenswear show. Yes the one that everyone still talks about with the four American step-dance teams. For Owens, knowing that continually trying to surpass that scale would become a trap, hence he moved his shows from an enormous concrete sports arena into the Art Deco halls of the Trocadero to “calm everything down” and give audiences something subtler to respond to. He approached his clothes similarly, comparing his process for this season to architecture, where plans are established in advance and rationally executed to create calm and logical elegance. When asked what was occupying his mind for the show, Owens simply answered: 'refinement.'

The collection took its name from L’Après-midi d’un faune, or The Afternoon of a Faun, the 1912 Ballets Russes production choreographed and performed by Vaslav Nijinsky to music by Claude Debussy. Owens had grown up listening to Debussy and was drawn to the wider artistic world surrounding ballet, including Stephane Mallarme’s original poem, Leon Bakst, Cubism and early twentieth-century modernism. More importantly, he was fascinated by Nijinsky’s choreography, which rejected the graceful movement expected of classical ballet for something flat, angular and deliberately awkward. Its famously scandalous ending, in which the faun pleasured himself over a scarf left behind by a nymph, pushed that even further.

Owens saw how Nijinsky disrupted an established aesthetic language with something radically new and wanted to apply the same thinking to his clothing. Rather than simply borrowing ballet imagery, he dismantled its familiar motifs. Tulle, frills and pastel colors were made uncomfortable and structural, with the fabric smocked, pleated, crimped and folded into architectural volumes. This led to another major reference, Marcel Breuer. Owens wondered what the Bauhaus architect and Brutalist master might create if he worked in tulle rather than concrete, describing his collection as “Brutalism with tulle.”

Beneath these structural constructions were what Owens called “rationalist summer essentials”: roomy shorts, tube tops, oversized sleeveless T-shirts and blocky mantles. Waxed poplin and crisp nylon were sliced, flounced and frilled, smocked dresses expanded sideways like compressed tutus, while transparent layers developed into floating wings and sculptural funnels around the body. Leon Bakst returned through the palette, with his exuberant Ballets Russes colors muted into pale gold, khaki, blue, pink and other dusty tones layered through the tulle. Make up wise, models appeared intermittently chalked in white body paint, resembling nymphs.

To close off, let’s talk about the footwear. Taking their name from traditional Japanese geta, Owens reworked the elevated wooden sandal into these leather platform clogs. As the models walked, the clogs struck audibly against the runway, grounding the otherwise weightless layers of tulle above them. Seen in multiple looks, this all black version features a lower 6 cm platform with a deeply cut geometric wooden sole, an open toe strap and a rigid leather sheath wrapping around the ankle.

Tagged Size EU36.