Rick Owens Brings the Step Team

Rick Owens sent step dancers down his runway at Paris Fashion Week and the fashion world had approximately the reaction you’d expect from a room full of people who hadn’t seen it coming. The SS2014 show replaced the standard model procession with competitive step teams from American HBCUs—women moving in aggressive unison through choreography that had nothing to do with the usual grammar of a fashion presentation. The clothes were almost secondary. Almost.

Owens has a history of using the runway to do something other than show clothes, but this felt different in scale. Step dancing carries its own history—HBCU culture, Black Greek-letter organizations, a competitive tradition built on precision, stamina, and collective will going back decades. Dropping that into a Paris couture context isn’t contrast for its own sake. It’s an argument about whose bodies belong in which rooms, made without a press release.

The clothes themselves—the draped silhouettes, the leather, the asymmetry—moved differently on bodies that moved differently. Which is the point. Owens has always been interested in the body as a structural object, and a step dancer’s relationship to her body is built from entirely different materials than a runway model’s. You could see it in how the garments responded, how they held or released. It wasn’t a gimmick, even if plenty of people called it one.

Fashion week rarely produces moments that still feel worth discussing years later. This one does.