THE  fashion designer Rick Owens recruited black American college students who are members of step teams to exhibit some of his 2014 collection in Paris. According to Robin Givhan of New York magazine, Owens’s aesthetic is “rooted in nontraditional beauty, confidence, and power.” Gee, that’s strange. It looks to me more like homicidal rage than “confidence;” more like primitive and Satanic ugliness than “nontraditional beauty,” but then I’m not marinated in chic hideousness and revolutionary nihilism every day of the week as Givhan is.

Even in the world of haute couture, blacks are incited to hatred. Givhan, who is black, mindlessly praises the “energy” of the show. And who would dare to correct her? Givhan writes:

From the first models who strode out to thumping drumbeats, the Rick Owens spring 2014 presentation projected an energy not typical on a Paris runway, or any other in recent memory. Standing mostly in silhouette on high scaffolding with a pair of unadorned staircases, the models pounded their chests with a synchronized audacity, then descended the stairs and moved into the vast open performance space en masse, with scowling expressions of determination and ferocity. They twisted and rocked to the beat, throwing their heads back, their arms moving in sharp, angular gestures and their legs rising up in back kicks, side kicks, and deep forward lunges.

Owens says the purpose of the show was to say (something not very nice and unprintable) to conventional beauty. The idea that this is somehow an original stance would be laughable if Owens was just one more black-clad, grungy, tattooed art student. But he is a top designer.

— Comments —

Matthew writes:

You’re right, nothing new here:  the “dance” the  models perform is an urban American appropriation of the Polynesian haka, a ritualized challenge performed by warriors to intimidate the opposition before battle.  The All Blacks, the national union rugby team from New Zealand, has performed haka before all its matches since 1905.  Here are the All Blacks before their 2011 World Rugby Cup match with France.

If Rick Owens’ models look angry and murderous, and their dance looks violent, that’s exactly the point.  This is a prelude to combat, offered to us as a substitute for those effete and outdated notions of beauty, grace, and elegance.  The show’s thumping drumbeats and the reviewer’s breathless celebrations of “power” tell us that no one today believes more in the myth of the Noble Savage than the contemporary Leftist.  And, as Lawrence Auster might have reminded us, to the Leftist, the savage never proves his nobility more than when he channels his rage to cut our deserving throats.

Diana writes:

Her entire bio reeks of Obama-style entitled privilege.

I scan these things nowadays wearily. The same buzzwords leap out at my jaded eyes: Detroit…valedictorian….Princeton….

What will these people do when they no longer have whites to help them punch over their weight?

Jane S. writes:

The fashion industry is a stronghold of the Left and has been since at least the 1930s. Establishment fashion magazines like Vogue are hate-America propaganda rags from cover to cover, interspersed with pictures of clothes.

Dan R. writes:

I got a kick out of reader Diana’s reference to the “New York Times/New York magazine industrial complex, though I think one might add The Village Voice at the far left end of that spectrum. They all seem to be part of a continuum. The crazy-left ideas first get tested at the Voice, gain more respectability when they make it to New York, and have become part of the culture by the time they reach The New York Times. What a world!

Daniel S. writes:

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