Review: Rick Owens’ puffer capes will have you hoping for a cold snap

The statement cape, which emerged as one of the more curious trends on the New York Fashion Week runway, was the scene-stealing silhouette at the Rick Owens fall and winter 2020 women’s runway show here Thursday.

It was served up in glorious puffer-coat excess, fastened at the neck with a metal chain clasp connected to two grommets, quilted into a spiderweb-like pattern in the back and served up in black, smoke gray and sky blue.

Owens explained in the show notes that the hulking blanket capes, part of a collaboration with Moncler, were duvets repurposed from the interior of a customized bus, a vehicle that he and his wife, Michèle Lamy, used to road-trip through the Nevada desert on a land-art tour late last year. (We caught up with Owens shortly after that road trip when he landed back in L.A. after a 16-year absence.)

Additional nods to eco-consciousness highlighted in the show notes included the use of recycled plastic in some of the collection’s thigh-high boots and bonded-seam coats.

In addition to the aforementioned capes, the voluminous outerwear included quilted coats and cropped jackets, which sported peaked, slightly bulbous shoulders that could have been repurposed from cone bras of another era. The outerwear was only half of what made this one of our favorite Rick Owens collections to date.

The other half? That’d be the clingy, curve-hugging and downright smolderingly sexy cashmere knit dresses that draped and wrapped fluidly around the female form, some with extra-long sleeves that elongated the form, others with leg slits that reached as high as the hip socket.

Most were rendered in muted shades of gray or black, but the standouts (thanks to Owens’ more recent embrace of color) were the versions in sky blue, a color that also cropped up in long, satin gowns anchored tenuously at the hip.

If these are the kinds of clothes the Rick Owens woman will be wearing when the mercury starts to drop next fall, we can’t wait for the winter to roll back around.

Better yet, let’s make it an ice age.