Ritualistic, hieratical, sacred, tribal and brutalist: these were maybe the main adjectives the organisers at Milan's Triennale design museum were trying to tackle when they decided to dedicate a restrospective to Rick Owens.
Housed in the Curva - the vast ground floor space of the building - the event, entitled "Rick Owens. Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman" opened yesterday (it will continue until March 25, so people following the local fashion weeks will be able to visit it).
The exhibition is accessed through a door turned into a sort of ziggurat-like structure and visitors enter the space through a wall of horizontal lights, Owens' mystical portal into his world.
The path then allows to explore clothes and interior design pieces and watch videos of six catwalk shows on big screens, but it is not arranged in a chronological or thematic way.
Everything seems to be mixed together, with the clothes displayed on mannequins placed on scaffold-like podiums, while the interior design pieces include wooden structures covered with camel hair and Owens' blocks inspired by the German bunkers that were made from concrete and used during the Second World War. The designer conceives them as futuristic temples and as architectural elements marking the birth of brutalism (Owens' fascination with these structures actually calls to mind the work of a less known artist, Renato Nicolodi).
A bulbously shapeless cloud-like structure suspended in mid-air haunts the visitors: Owens conceived this primal sculptural black formation as a sort of "earthwork" since he made it using a mix of concrete, sand from the Adriatic coast (Owens often spends time in Venice at the Lido, where he intends to be buried one day), crushed lilies and his own hair (collected from a brush for the last 20 years).
The piece was inspired by some of Owens' favourite artists, including Josef Beuys, Michael Heizer, Richard Long and Richard Serra.
The main aim of the retrospective is to try and capture the essence of what it means being human and look at the power of creativity and how it evolves through different disciplines - from fashion to interior design objects and art installations.
During the press preview Eleonora Fiorani, curator of the fashion department at the Triennale, highlighted to journalists how the event is an interpretation of the present: we live indeed in very complex times in which all sorts of eras seem to have clashed together (think about how we long for the future, but we are also inexorably linked to the past...).
Though warmly received so far, the retrospective seems to have some major faults: first of all, there is a lack of a strong cohesive narrative behind the layout. It is all fine to combine garments from different collections together, but it must still be done in a coherent way and possibly with a story that engages the visitors.
The Curva space also doesn't do the exhibition much justice: the area is indeed too vast for what's on offer and, if visitors are also fashionistas used to go and see grand exhibitions with stunning layouts in famous museums, they will be disappointed.
The event may have looked less disjointed if Owens had filled one room of a wider exhibition about fashion, art and architecture in the Triennale space or maybe if had developed his creative discourse in a smaller and more compact gallery, but, as it stands, the layout inspires a depressing coldness rather than an industrial and architectural elegance (the only display that achieves some architectural elegance is the one dedicated to a series of draped women's wear designs reminiscent of Madame Grès).
Another interesting point to make about this retrospective is the fact that the modularity and polyfunctionality of the clothes on display (most of them recreated as Owens never kept a proper archive or taken from very recent collections) gets somehow lost in the space.
Detached from the conceptual runway spectacle (think about the fantastically energetic step show for the S/S 2014 "Vicious" collection or the S/S 2016 "Cyclops" runway with athletes strapped to each other's bodies), the garments - especially the meanswear - lose meaning and appeal, risking of becoming a tad repetitive. Showcased on high podiums, the designs also become unreachable to the visitors (creating awe-inspiring ceiling-scraping scaffold-like structures has become a trend in fashion exhibitions, but it certainly does not allow people to have a good perspective on clothes).
In conclusion, while the idea of the retrospective was good, the Triennale event disappoints, risking of making some Italian historians who know a lot about fashion and architecture (Italy has a tradition of architects turned fashion designers - think about Gianfranco Ferré and Nanni Strada) wonder if the only reason that won Owens a spot at the Triennale is the fact that he has Italian partners (Elsa Lanzo, his CEO, and Luca Ruggeri, commercial director) and partially manufactures his collections in Concordia sulla Secchia, outside Modena.
Fans who may not be able to visit are not missing much then, but they may instead check out the special box set catalogue, published by Electa (and available in a limited number of 1,000 copies) and featuring books and photo publications, a piece of the exhibition's display fabric, a small reproduction of a head of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti "Italian Loudspeaker" made by Italian artist Thayaht in 1935 (similar to the one given to the guests invited to Owens' S/S 18 menswear show) and a vial of Owens' personal fragrance.
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