All Eyes on Rick Owens’s Spring 2016 Cyclops Show

Editor’s Note: In honor of Vogue Runway’s 10th anniversary, our writers are penning odes to the most memorable spring 2016 shows. New today: Rick Owens’s Cyclops collection.

First thing that morning Clare Waight Keller delivered one of her coolest Chloé collections ever: pretty-grungy-boho-flou. At lunchtime, horrendously late as usual, Sebastien Meunier dropped a pretty strong one for Ann Demeulemeester. Mid-afternoon there was a super-fun A.F. Vandevorst show that ended with the masked models being chauffeured away on Harleys. Plus, it was a sunny autumn day in Paris: All in all, 360 degrees of beautiful.

However by far the most beautiful single episode of my Thursday, October 1, 2015, began at around 6:30 p.m. in the inky gloom of the Palais de Tokyo basement, where we’d wended our way down the endless spiral staircase to Rick Owens’s spring 2016 show. I wasn’t reviewing, but just there to watch, tucked lazily into seat I-b-16 behind Maya Singer.

Reading Singer’s review now reads like a perfect contemporaneous written snapshot. As she reported, this show was periodically punctuated by an “incredible sight,” the 12-or-so looks in which there were two models, or: “a woman, dressed by Owens, carrying another woman down the long length of the runway.”