Back in June, Rick Owens’ SS16 menswear show at Paris Fashion Week was hijacked by a model unfurling a banner mid-runway that asked that someone “Please kill Angela Merkel...Not”. The stunt was performed by a German model named Jera, a longtime muse to Owens who was promptly dropped from his agency. Unsurprisingly, Owens was not pleased about it all, telling us backstage that he was “furious” and “punched him when he came off stage.” Although many were shocked at such a strong reaction from the designer (particularly after a show that explored ideas of male aggression) in a new interview with Surface magazine he explains the reason for his actions.
“I was pissed at that moment. I thought, ‘Hey, this is my spotlight, and you fucked it up,’” Owens explains. “The whole reason I hit the guy was I knew if I didn’t react very strongly it might get out that this was some stunt that I had planned. Everybody had to know how strongly I disagreed with this.”
The designer also goes into detail on Jera’s personality and the consequences of his runway protest, saying: “He’s always been a heavy drinker, and a little erratic, which was adorable. But what he did was just so illogical. He was very accepted here and embraced by a community of people who were very affectionate toward him – a group that now feels more hostility toward him than I do because they feel protective of me. It was really a self-destructive gesture.”
Of course, Owens is no stranger to controversy or provocation (see his penis-flashing AW15 show) but this model’s actions took the spotlight away from the designer’s collection and instead focussed it on a misplaced political statement. As he explains, the biggest problem he had with the outburst was that it was rooted in negativity – “Whenever I do provocation, I’m always doing something that I feel is based on warmth and kindness and love.”
Watch a four minute crash course on Rick Owens below:
