Rick Owens SS23 Avant Garde Menswear Collection EDFU
The Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2023 Collection is named ‘EDFU’ after the egyptian temple:
“I had recently retreated to egypt where I found great comfort in the remoteness and scale of its history. My personal concerns and global discomforts felt petty in the face of that kind of timelessness. Lying down in the dirt with the valley of kings within view was a perspective I liked. The temples, started by one civilization, seized and added onto by another, completed by another and then unearthed by yet another, were reassuring in their stoic permanence.
We have all been so disturbed by the war and constant online stone throwing, I wanted to propose some order and discipline… I used some ripstop nylons that had a butterfly wing lightness with graph-like constructions that lent subtle soothing gridding on the body in dyneema, which is a patented fiber considered to be the strongest in the world.
I reduced hardware and visible closures to keep things quiet. I wanted simplicity but I still wanted exaggerated shapes to gently tease all the righteousness and bigotry that create so much conflict in the world.
Tailoring with extreme shoulders comes in crisp cotton or layers of silk chiffon, some in loud and foggy plaids. Coats and jackets also come in chiffon suspended from rigid mesh sheer shoulders. The transparency continues with jackets, shirts, and jeans constructed in apparition leather – a cow leather using glycerin during the tanning process and air drying without being drummed which gives it a transparent finish.
My bodysuits and shirts have gotten bigger than ever and the silhouettes are either tightly cinched or large and released to float as far away from the body as a garment can.
Skintight tops come in leather or sheer viscose, some with sharp arm-extending shoulders. Last season’s banana knits (abstracted mutant multiple armhole sweaters) are reduced to rib tank versions, some reduced to just the binding that finishes the edges.
My egyptian sojourn led me to devising tulle flyproof robes with face covering hoods worn over silk charmeuse shirts twisting around the hips and trailing on the floor, providing slashes of slithering color.
Colors are deliberately kitsch and loud with denims lacquered in an iridescent scarab finish which also coats pirarucu, a skin I use over and over. Fished as a food source by indigenous communities in the amazon forest, the skins are then sold as a waste product generating income for them.
I have developed a capsule in collaboration with bonotto, a 4th generation textile mill founded in 1912 just below the prealps in veneto, which incidentally has one of the largest fluxus art collections in the world. All the fabrics which include minimally finished cottons and raw wools, are woven on their vintage 1950s looms.
I asked paradoxe, a parisian label doing artisanal work with denim to collab on some of our denim pieces. They painstakingly unweave used and washed denim and then reapply to final garments in a process that feels as devotional and meditative as lacemaking in a cloister.
Music is a swooping, grating, unhinged exclusive mix by eprom and shades (shades is composed of eprom and alix perez) reflecting the untethered, wonky current climate.
Outside of luxor, at the temple of edfu, over the main entrance, is a carving of a winged sun, symbolizing the god horus who represents the triumph of good over evil. In today’s presentation, a blazing sun crosses the sky, falling to crash to the ground over and over and over again. Senseless destruction on repeat since the beginning of time.”
