Watch women getting strapped to women at Rick Owens

“I just thought that there were physical messages we could explore other than putting women in really high shoes,” says Rick Owens in an interview for the spring/summer 2016 issue of Dazed, speaking on his SS16 womenswear show which saw models strapped to other models. As one of fashion’s great iconoclasts, this wasn’t a manoeuvre designed to trigger a social media ‘moment’, but a reflection on “nourishment, sisterhood, motherhood and regeneration”. That said, it will remain embedded in the memories of those present as one of the season’s most climactic moments.

This video, premiered exclusively on Dazed, captures the build-up to the show – complete with shots of the models rehearsing the gravity-defying performance and of Eska singing her spine-tingling rendition of “The Exodus Song (This Land Is Mine)”.

For the new issue, which is out now, Dean Mayo Davies spends the afternoon in Owens’ ‘batcave by the Seine’, trying to unpick the designer’s SS16 vision. “I’m not trying to suggest I have any big message,” Owens reveals. “I just like looking at different angles of humanity and picking out moments of beauty that might be overlooked.”

“I feel like I’m fulfilling a moral responsibility by putting good energy out there,” he goes on to say. “Do I sound like an earnest, new-age hippy? I’m totally a selfish cunt, but I like the idea of trying to be better and I like the idea of that transcendent level being always out of grasp, but we try anyway because the effort is reward enough.”

Read the full interview here.