Bold silhouettes; black ropes against smooth torsos; soft, dark leathers; fabric torn delicately, low slung, against Brutalist structures. The Rick Owens Paris show was a scene of distorted forms pacing concrete, a stripped-back dark minimalism that somehow felt new and exciting, though the dystopian tropes are now well worn. It may be the end of the world, but it will be beautifully tailored.
Rick Owens, the avant-garde goth designer, has legions of dedicated, cultish fans — informally known as the Tribe — who not only admire his careful balance of asceticism and esotericism, but embrace his aesthetic as a lifestyle rather than merely a fashion label. He is beloved by the fashion world too, with admirers including Anna Wintour, Vera Wang, and Bella Freud.
Perhaps the most famous of his disciples, however, is Kanye West, who once described Owens as “a major source of inspiration”. He even dressed his first wife, Kim Kardashian, in his designs: the sheer, cream two-piece ensemble she wore to the 2018 CFDA Fashion Awards accentuated her figure in a way that was both grungy and glamorous. Kanye clung to the aesthetic, but he took it in his own ostentatious direction, dressing his second wife Bianca Censori in ever more revealing outfits, where the clothes became secondary to the performance of wearing them — and ultimately wearing nothing at all. Whereas Owens’s designs always seem somehow fresh and cerebral, carefully balancing nihilism with a sense of mysticism, West’s project increasingly lacks any redeeming sense of subtlety.
There was a crassness to Kanye and Bianca’s stunt at the Grammys, which was more jarring than the nudity itself. The spectacle was too contrived, too formulaic. If the intention was to titillate, somehow it failed. The stunt seemed, if anything, anti-erotic; it exhibited not deviance or innovation, but just a sense of trying too hard.
It also seemed to pierce the careful equilibrium between exploitation and consensual personal fetish. Soon after, Kanye bragged of “dominion” over his wife, then burst into a series of antisemitic rants and attempted to sell Swastika t-shirts on his website. Fashion and fascism became uncomfortably enmeshed. Whereas Owens once played with dystopian themes, West’s stunts seemed symptomatic of a real personal decline, his wife leaving him days later.
In the backlash that followed, it seemed for a while that Kanye had given kink a bad name. By sliding from a play of domination into full-blown Nazism in a few days, he confirmed the suspicions of BDSM-critics; an enthusiasm for fetish had just masked his more dangerous beliefs and desires. And yet it seemed unfair to conflate the issues too readily; one man’s affection for both kink and fascism did not marry the two.
That same week, I picked up a copy of Anastasiia Fedorova’s book Second Skin, which explains how kink is not just for show or exploitation, but is also a compulsive way to be intimate, to develop oneself, to explore for the sake of exploring. The erotic is “a way of seeing”, and her book is concerned with those for whom fetish is not just a passing fashion or a sly form of manipulation, but a mode of optimistic transformation. “I am not my usual self,” she writes. “I have stepped into unchartered territory, where I can temporarily embody something different.”
It doesn’t have to appeal to everyone: it is not for everyone, and that is the point. In this secrecy there is something rare and therefore covetable. Perhaps this is why the wider culture pays attention and seeks to monetise it; for every counter-cultural movement or community that comes to represent something desired, there is always the risk of dissolution and co-option.
“The stunt seemed, if anything, anti-erotic; it exhibited not deviance or innovation, but just a sense of trying too hard.”
As with Owens’s fashion, it is a challenge to be inclusive and subversive at once, to be successful without one’s aesthetic attracting strange interpretations. In the case of the London kink scene, many of the club nights Fedorova writes about were shut down due to complaints of obscenity, even as the wider culture seemed to embrace a tepid or brutalised version of the same aesthetic. There is a revived conflict over what is allowed and what is not, in clubs and in awards ceremonies, magazines and relationships. Can Censori be naked at a party? Is choking permissible? Can West sell Swastika t-shirts online? Must you scorn the man who licks spit off the floor, must you talk at all? It is apparently all up for debate.
What is accepted or not is constantly being challenged. As the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, we learn our romantic scripts not just from the people who have brought us up but also from the communities and culture around us, and even from particular partners. Our wider cultures determine our behaviour in sex and love, and crucially what we do and do not allow ourselves and one another. The script can be revised. We need not get caught in repetitive cycles — though many, quite contentedly, do.
When it comes to BDSM, it would be naive to believe that personal sexual practices are contained from the outside world in every such relationship, or that sadomasochistic dynamics cannot be a front for deception and real abuse, or that communication may not always be clear enough to prevent true harm. Played out against a landscape of endemic violence against women and girls, even the most seemingly secure and intimate relationships can be vulnerable to the contagion of the outside world, not to mention the repressed or concealed facets of one another, whether BDSM is involved or not. But it is precisely because we are so influenced by the world around us that we must be honest in exploring our desires, as well as exploring what reviles us and why.
Many of us don’t want to bear witness to another celebrity’s exposure, whether sexual, or political, if it’s not in the script we have passively agreed to. West and Censori broke the social etiquette we were familiar with, and it hit a nerve. When we discuss whether a woman such as Censori could genuinely choose to be a part of a humiliating spectacle, perhaps we are really expressing an irritation that, with the prevalence of visual media, we cannot help but watch it. We, the audience, are part of the spectacle because we can’t stop consuming it. The voyeurism is no longer a choice, and there is no safe word, no exit.
And this is why, conversely, kink is so popular: it offers a way out, new options, an alternative way to be and feel when the media bombard us with pictures of wars and fires, images that seem like it really is the end of the world. We might not really be free, or safe, but in the right light, in some playful unexpected moment, we may feel that we are free regardless. There may be some fleeting satisfaction in this self-awareness.
“Enjoy your symptom!” writes philosopher Slavoj Žižek. This, to me, seems to be at the heart of the rise of this particularly dystopian, hyper-visible brand of fetishism that characterises our cultural moment. Owens captures a communal neurosis in a way that has garnered him loyal followers, who have found in his fantastical world a mirror of their anxieties, and a freedom from the real world. The fetishised sickness is a contained sickness, a controllable one — a sort of pain management. In this containment, contagion unites rather than alienates its patients.
In psychoanalysis, the “symptom” is a substitute for one’s instinctual impulse that, through repression, has become displaced and distorted, so that it resembles a compulsion or sickness. Noticing or treating the symptom may give some satisfaction, but it cannot fully cure the deeper issue. And yet we can enjoy the symptoms, in a sense; we can probe the things that attract and repulse us, we can understand ourselves a little better through our fantasies.
Owens presents a fantasy world where what we fear is turned into something not only attractive but shared; he takes the ethos of fetishist counterculture and creates a wider movement. But the key to its success is still a sense of mystery and containment, a holding back; too blatant, and at the wrong moment, the spell breaks. Something must always be left to the imagination; some things must stay repressed for others to be enjoyed.
