PARIS — For Rick Owens, making a hardcore music video with self-described drag terrorist Christeene Vale isn’t just about shock value. It’s about tolerance, kindness and balancing out what the designer sees as rising bigotry and cruelty in society.
At a party during the most recent Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, Owens and Vale premiered the video, titled “Butt Muscle,” which opens with a scene depicting Vale relieving himself on the designer—- and then gleefully exalts almost every X-rated fetish in the book. Drag artists, dancers and two live horses were among the guests at a party that raged until 6 a.m. at a clandestine club under the city’s ring road.
“There’s a climate right now that is going in a direction I’m uncomfortable with, and I feel an obligation to balance that out,” Owens told WWD in an interview at his Paris headquarters. “If we have extreme self-righteous bigotry on one side, then we need to balance that out with some cheerful degeneracy on the other.”
For Owens, the “underground” may no longer be possible, but the importance of counter-culture is rising. “Sometimes there are social and political climates that people want to react against and this could be one of those moments
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