Fashion house RICK OWENS presented its Spring Summer 2023 Womenswear Collection titled EDFU, after the Egyptian temple on the west bank of the Nile, on Thursday, September 29th, during the ongoing Paris Fashion Week. The collection was inspired by the history and the timelessness of Egypt – The temples started by one civilization, seized and added onto by another, completed by another and then unearthed by yet another. Designer was also inspired by silent films featuring American actress Theda Bara. The movies became designer’s esthetic recipe – ancient stories about faith and higher purpose mixed with a camp and lurid exoticism seen through a turn of the century black and white art nouveau filter. The collection is made mostly of sustainable materials, in either milky non-colors, or bright colors such as yellow, pink and fuchsia, and black.
SPRING SUMMER 2023 COLLECTIONS
“Channeling Theda Bara posing for Gustave Moreau, sinuous gowns in translucent leather turn the wearer into a 700-million-year-old jellyfish, gracefully and languorously trailing sheer and serpentine trains. Full grain cowhides collected as a waste product from the food industry are tanned using only organic materials and natural glycerin that fill the pores of the leather and give it its softness and transparency. Like wearing gelatinous fruit roll ups. Continuing a jellyfish silhouette, bell-shaped frilled jkts stop at the waist or at the hips or explode into huge mantles constructed from 200 meters of recycled tulle made using econyl, an Italian yarn made from recycled waste materials collected from oceans and landfills. Pearl, oyster and ivory gowns and jackets in ripstop nylons also provide butterfly wing lightness with graph like constructions that lends subtle soothing gridding on the body in dyneema, which is a patented fiber considered to be the strongest in the world.
Shoulders are either wide and rounded on shield shaped blousons, or sharp and narrow on tees and flight jkts extending and narrowing and elongating the arms into parentheses framing the body… By exaggerating or distorting the body in such a pronounced way, the message is a vote for otherness – a departure from tasteful and perhaps narrow aesthetic conventions and maybe an encouragement to consider open mindedness in other areas outside of personal appearance as well.” – Rick Owens
