There is a lot to see at fashion week. Blink (or scroll too quickly) and you’ll miss the details: purses with feathers, futuristic sunglasses, forked jewelry. Throughout the month, we’ll be highlighting the things we saw that surprised or delighted us.
PARIS — A couple of seasons ago, Rick Owens introduced the concept of the personal, portable fog machine.
The designer has long used fog to create atmosphere on his avant-garde catwalks and said last season that he was drawn to the “mysticism” and “disco hedonism” of it.
The mist was also “big and cheap and dumb, and I love that,” he said at the time.
On Thursday, some eight months after pitching the idea on a Venice beach, his portable machines finally made an appearance at Paris Fashion Week, celebrated as a “modernist brutalist version” of a censer, those incense dispensers that they hung from chains in churches, as Mr. Owens described them last fall.
The effect was more than mystical; it was anarchic.
The models held the lunchbox-sized devices at their sides, shooting mist like exterminators spraying ants. Photographers at the end of the runway protested loudly each time this happened because the fog obscured their vision, and their lenses, for at least several seconds.
Intentional or not, it was interpreted as an act of defiance on the part of the models, of controlling their exposure, deciding when they would be visible and when they would be mysterious wandering clouds. (Clouds walking very tall, as they were wearing Mr. Owens’ signature extreme platform boots.)
While a previous iteration of the portable fog machines was black, the ones shown this season were covered in gold foil. They’re refillable, ideal for anyone looking to ramp up the drama of a stage on the go, with a built-in tank for the liquid that creates fog, which the brand claims is non-toxic.
The machines will be available for purchase, but the brand has not yet revealed when or where they will be sold, or how much they will cost.
Source: www.nytimes.com