It was sheer coincidence that Rick Owens, an American in Paris, staged his “Mastodon” show, named for an extinct species, the same night as the Republican debate in Detroit, where Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were characterized by this newspaper as “fighting for their political lives.” It was a fluke of timing that Mr. Owens subtitled the show after a Salvador Dalí painting (“Swans Reflecting Elephants”) at a moment when most observers, including those at the side of the runway, feel they are living through a surreal time. And it was just happenstance that he was looking at embracing “the inevitable end of a cycle” just as issues of the decline of the republic were on everyone’s minds.
Really: This isn’t sarcasm. It wasn’t planned that way.
Mr. Owens had been, he said, thinking not about politics but about the destruction of the environment, a concern since his men’s show earlier in the year, and this was a kinder, gentler continuation of that train of design. But just because it started in one place does not negate its eerie resonance in another. Some things just happen that way.
It was impossible to see the gracefully draped cream tunics, cowls creating their own topography, the elephantine trousers, mudslide leather boleros and boiling sea-foam capes, however, and not feel a potent nostalgia for a world gone by: Natural or political just depends on your point of view. Either way, the clothes touched a nerve.
By VANESSA FRIEDMAN
Source New York Times
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