Rick Owens

[JetLag]

For info, what is not from Rick in the first picture is from JuunJ (fixed)

[upsilonkng]

isn't that jacket/vest lenny's wearing InAisce?

[Faust]

That's what I thought

[Crowzer]

This movie become interesting.

[Patroklus]

more movie riiiick

ichi the killer

[Chinorlz]

Mayhaps it is just Rick doing a grumpy cat impression?

[mrbeuys]

DANCER - Rick Owens and Fred Astaire

Rick Owens, Winter 2012 | Kevin Tachman

“I dressed him until he was thirteen or fourteen … I always dressed him like a little gentleman.”
Connie Owens, The New Yorker, 2008


When Rick Owens showed his Mountain menswear collection back in January, the biggest surprise wasn’t (or shouldn’t have been) how wistful it felt, with its’ old-school formality and its’ nearly-straightforward pairings of high-waisted black trousers and twisted pale-blue shirts; it was the fact that you could be so utterly surprised by the simple, suddenly-explicit presence of the very things he’d always been so openly, expansively passionate about. Reading back through a decade and a half’s worth of interviews, there’s a consistent empathy for the swooning elegance and loaded glamour of the Thirties and Forties. But things spoken about or just remembered are very different from things seen. And for all his references to Adrian of Hollywood or Charles James, nostalgia never seemed likely to be Owens’ trigger spot. Till now.

That’s largely because the Owens we see is so completely a creature of the millennial dark side; an L.A. nightcrawler whose distorted, distended shrugs and battered biker jackets always seemed like premonitions of some future dystopia, not ghosts from a submerged past. And the stranger, and more aloof, and more viscerally alien those forms became, the further from any sense of tangible reference they felt; instead, things that might once have been clothes but that had somehow morphed into an altogether more fluid combination of fabric and volume, skeleton and skin. And the ghosts, when glimpsed, always seemed so wildly otherworldly, from a time so remote that the garments embodied nothing other than impersonal magnificence - a vision free of the jarring familiarity of the recent or the still-remembered.


“I grew up in Porterville, California, one among a multitude of towns, including one perched high up in the mountains. The students who lived there came down in a bus. It took two hours in winter, because of the snow, and some days they were stuck up there in the clouds. It was all very glamorous. They were all athletic, tall and good-looking, always tan from skiing. There seemed to be something special and exotic about them. As if they belonged to a different species.”
Rick Owens, Fashion Magazine, 2008

Today, the town of Porterville - a big town/small city deep inland from Los Angeles - seems to trundle along largely unaware of Rick Owens’ existence (although he lived there from the time he was three in 1964, until he departed for college.) On the local museum’s website, his name sits right at the bottom of the Hall of Fame list, below baseball players, racing drivers and bit-part actors. (He’s not the only misfit the town can call its’ own, though: Margaret Hamilton, the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, makes the line-up too.) For the most part, though, he’s been forgotten.


But Owens hasn’t forgotten Porterville. It keeps on seeping through the cracks in his epic reinvention. Long before the invincible millennial muscleman came into existence, there was an only child, who grew up in an old presbytery, without access to a television, and surrounded instead by classical music and Victorian books. He hated his time at Catholic school - and yet he can’t escape the strange, austere beauty of nuns’ robes, even today. And his disciplined, rigidly authoritarian father - to this day a vocal conservative, who campaigns against gay rights when not attending his bisexual son’s fashion shows - dominated his world; the voice of compelling, unsparing restriction.


’ “Few in Porterville even know the name Rick Owens. However in Paris his name lights up every kiosk selling fashion magazines. Big posters announce his upcoming shows, and he will soon have his name on shoes, bags and perfume as well as his elegant clothing,” says Bethany Phillips, an Owens family friend. According to Rick’s mother, this may be an exaggeration, but Rick Owens, 42, has definitely made it big.’
‘Porterville’s Owens making a name for himself in Paris’, The Porterville Recorder, 2003

“Rick the kid was a soft sissy.”
Rick Owens, Vice, 2009

Emerging from that, the ultimate revenge may perhaps be that of becoming the most provocatively outsiderish outsider you can possibly be. Even today, Owens uses the word ‘freak’ as a compliment. He abandoned Porterville for a new life and a new start, dropping out of his art degree course in Los Angeles and disappearing into the city’s frantic alternative scene. And somewhere over the next two decades the Owens we now know emerged; a jaded, damaged hedonist, stripping away skins in a process that feels almost like purification.
And the intrigue of his work has lain in seeing that process evolve from those first battered coffins and machine-washed leathers, as Owens carves and elides the most unpromising materials and shapes into something with a resonance far greater than that of his own private back story.


“I used to love going dancing and doing like a little line of coke and some martinis and dancing all night”
Rick Owens, frockwriter.com, 2007

“I just dance.”
Fred Astaire, Steps in Time, 1958

It’s always interesting to see how Owens is relentlessly labelled an ‘American’ designer. He is just that, of course - but the word stands for corn-fed, centre-weighted normality, not the introvert angst of the marginal and the marginalised. And though he has reshaped himself into the man he yearned to be in high school, with the Joe Dallesandro hair and the sculpted body, everything else - the lost years of drugs and sex clubs, the grey-shaded marriage to Michéle Lamy, and above all the clothes which distort and defeat any attempt at fitting in - have all marked him out as high priest of a global cult of alienation. People wear Owens’ clothing as a badge of honour, flaunting their dispossessed, unaffiliated, at-odds-with-the-world aesthetic. And I imagine they’re unlikely to be thrilled by the betrayal of a collection - like this one - whose inspiration is someone as sentimentally old-hat as Astaire.

Of course, Fred Astaire wasn’t normal either. He wasn’t even Fred Astaire, for starters - he was Frederick Austerlitz Jr, an immigrant Nebraska tot dragged into vaudeville to accompany his talented older sister. Yet despite being so self-evidently different, nor being any of the things ‘American’ should have meant - not ruggedly masculine like John Wayne, or irrefutably, forcefully handsome like Gable or Gary Cooper - he became of cinema’s most unshakeable romantic icons.


‘Mr. Astaire’s secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino … sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend it isn’t sex at all … everyone in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.’
James Agate on Fred Astaire, The Sunday Times, 1933

“I’m kinda doing the opposite of sex in a way.”
Rick Owens, Dazed Digital, 2012

And of course Astaire, like Owens, was a master of re-proportioning. His suits were re-tooled with higher armholes to maximise movement, and shortened trousers to draw attention to those dangerously effeminate ankles and dancing feet. And he ordered the most fastidiously tailored garments, only to break them down by battering them repeatedly against walls. Off-screen he might have been closer in his ideals to Owens’ conservative father - but despite that he embodied a subversively alternative version of American masculinity. The same might be said for Owens; ultimately, his achievement may be less in the art form he’s devoted himself to than in the self he’s so spectacularly choreographed.
A decade after he left Los Angeles, Sunset Boulevard - his hunting ground during those lost years - still slices across the city’s rim, winding out of the eastern badlands into Hollywood’s shabby haze. Halfway along the Strip, the pavement outside the Viper Room remains a shrine to River Phoenix, whilst further along, in the safe, high-hedged serenity of Beverly Hills, the ghost of Norma Desmond lingers. Grunge and glamour, destruction and immortality: aspects of an unalterably specific American-ness that Rick Owens seems finally to be coming to terms with.


Written for 1972projects http://1972projects.blogspot.co.uk/2...d-astaire.html

[nostromodo]

Is the rumor true?? H&M x Rick Owens??

[bonejelly]

April fools day bud ^

[gaborb]

Style Notes by Rick Owens, from Mr. Porter.

[Crowzer]

April fools day bud ^

For now.

[the breaks]

Had to check out "Katie got bandz" on youtube... it's pretty bad. But then again, most rap these days is :)

[Faust]

Nice article, mr. Beuys. It links the bio bit to the work pretty well. Funny how we can't shake off the very things we would like to forget.

[stemcell]

Any thoughts/more information on the "bspoke series," is this just marketing for a $3k blazer or is there a new collection subset that is more specifically "hand made." Just thought it was interesting...

http://www.ssense.com/men/product/rick_owens/black_b_spoked_series_hand_sewn_blazer/66557

[Dane]

those sleeves are indeed strange