Rick Owens: The Importance of Being Different

On some level Rick Owens, the American fashion designer who works in Paris, and who has made a home on the Lido, the picturesque beach island near Venice, is an anomaly. The fashion industry claims to champion diversity, difference, and aesthetic edge, but underneath the posturing and the virtue-signalling, it is an essentially a conservative, profit-driven enterprise. That Owens has cut out a space for himself in it with his outré designs of exaggerated proportions rooted in a goth aesthetic of black leather and heavy denim that sometimes challenge the very definition of clothing is a small wonder. And yet, at 64, after roughly three decades of establishing a brand under his own name, he is being fetéd at Palais Galliera, Paris’s premiere fashion museum, with a rare retrospective dedicated to a living designer.

The exhibition itself is a clash of aesthetic values that only confirms Owens’s status as a barbarian who laid waste to fashion’s Rome and now occupies one of its most prestigious palaces. There is a bit of irony in this, since Owens finds Paris, Palais Galliera’s home, “a bit curly” for his liking. Indeed, the City of Light is full of curves built into its mid-19th Century architecture through the iron will of Napoleon III and his city planner Baron Haussman. Its buildings are exercises in curlicue mastery, and Palais Galliera, conceived in 1876, is a palace of opulence typical of the time. To see Owens’s decidedly brutalist fashions amongst the domed, ornate ceilings and mock Corinthian columns is to experience a jolt that comes from an aesthetic clash. It’s a delicious act of provocation that Owens has built his career on, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. To him the exhibit feels like “the most glamorous, wonderful funeral in the world.”

He was telling me all this while we were sitting in the living room on the ground floor of his and Michele Lamy’s, Owens’s partner of many years, Paris home. The townhouse that they have occupied since moving to Paris from Los Angeles in 2003 sits in a lovely square in the 7th arrondissement, and from the outside looks like a typical Parisian haute bourgeois dwelling. Inside, it’s anything but that. The floor is poured concrete and the ceilings are unfinished. The entire house is furnished with desks, chairs, couches and ottomans of Owens’s and Lamy’s design that show the same rigour, discipline, and lack of visible comfort that is also implied in much of Owens’s fashion. Indeed, Owens’s clothes require a commitment. They can be constraining and heavy. Owens’s current iteration of footwear that started with his “KISS” boots, named after the heavy metal band, are tall and platformed. He debuted them in his Fall / Winter 2019 menswear collection called “Larry,” after the largely forgotten American designer Larry LeGaspi, and they caused the kind of furor amongst Owens’s fans that regular fashion consumers have when a luxury brand releases a new it bag. Since their debut, the boots have gotten only taller, bigger, and more warped, which has not abated the enthusiasm of Owens’s fan base. It seems that no matter how challenging of a proposition Owens throws out, his core tribe not just welcomes it, but positively revels in it.

Not all of Owens’s clothes are difficult. Some of his jersey, sometimes cut on the bias, is both clingy and forgiving, enveloping the body while hiding its imperfections, which is one of the reasons Owens found early success. There is also an earthy pragmatism in many of his designs. As a friend once rightly noted, Owens’s biggest achievement is that he could put you in denim and jersey and make you look like the coolest person in the room. Indeed, Owens has made it a point of pride in taking mundane materials and turning them into something truly spectacular. I’ve been wearing Rick Owens for twenty years, and I still gravitate to his t-shirts and jeans, leather jackets and boots, the punk uniform that has grown more elegant and edgy in his hands with each year. Owens can also produce a commercial hit. One of his most popular items are sneakers that look like Converse on steroids. Popularized by rappers like A$AP Rocky, they have become a holy grail of fashion-obsessed teenagedom.

Another noteworthy thing about Owens is the similarity with which he treats men and women (and everyone in between). There is a lot of androgyny in his work, and a lot of similar garments that are perhaps cut differently to fit a male or a female body, but essentially send the same nonconformist signal. At the time when many brands conform to strict gender roles, and even have different creative directors for men and women, Owens blends everything together.

Although expensive, Owens’s clothes don’t signal monetary status (Which is why I never worry about losing my suitcase, because to an average person my clothes probably look like a bunch of black rags). What they signal is a cultural edge and a desire to stand apart from the mass. The members of the audience at Owens’s shows are a sight to behold; decked out in the most outlandish of his offerings, they take their display of otherness with utmost seriousness. They are a testament to the gravitational pull of Owens’s basic premise, which is to proudly fly the freak flag. Through the decades of working at the outer limit of fashion Owens has become the epicenter of what he calls “alternative beauty,” which is evident not only in his designs but in a broader cultural statement he has made, which has provided a compass to the outcasts, the outsiders, to anyone who struggles with conventions of contemporary world. “When we started, the premise of the Rick Owens brand was simple, we wanted to make something anti-bourgeois,” Michele Lamy said last year during our public talk in Paris. “My work is revenge on middle America,” Owens once told me.

 

Such display of refusal to conform to societal standards requires commitment and Owens understands that well. He is the best – and the only – advertisement for his clothes. What makes Owens attractive is that unlike many designers who take a bow at the end of their shows in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, as if to signal separation from their work, he is the living testament to his creativity. Oscar Wilde once said, “One must be a work of art or wear a work of art.” Owens does both. When I wondered out loud about the level of comfort of the current iteration of the tall boots, called “Taco Kiss” due to the wrapping layer of leather on its front, that he was wearing, he replied, with a sly smile, “Comfort is weak.”

By then we were sitting upstairs in his library, which consisted of a couch and five layers of box cases made of black-stained fibreboard – a signature material for Owens’s furniture – which served as his book case. In person Owens is charming, relaxed, and contemplative. He speaks with a distinct Southern Californian drawl at a pace that allows him to precisely formulate his thoughts. The brilliance of Owens lies in the complexity of his tastes, which defy easy categorization. From the outside you may think that all he does is listen to heavy metal in a dungeon while burning candles made of black wax. In reality, he is a cultural omnivore, whose voraciousness bespeaks his strict classical culture upbringing. For a truly cultured person the aesthetic criteria are abstract; beauty, quality, grandeur, elegance. These may be of a certain kind, but they are broad enough to signal intellectual curiosity that transcends the narrow bounds of a specific style – a symphony can be as thunderous and sweeping as a rock album, an Art Deco building as strict in its beauty as a brutalist bunker. The epic nature of Owens’s shows is inspired by 1940s Hollywood films and Russian Constructivist movement that was indispensable to the grandiose parades of the nascent Soviet state.

Owens’s preferred venue for his shows is Palais de Tokyo, and the most impressive ones are staged in June during men’s fashion week and late September during women’s, when he can take advantage of the Palais’s monumental courtyard. Its two broad staircases and the rectangular pool below provide a grandeur that Owens loves. In this courtyard he has had the pool filled with mud and placed a giant Thomas Houseago sculpture in its midst; he has set a maquet of a Tatlin tower on fire; he has built a scaffolding of epic proportions that served as the runway. He has showered his audience, because of the wind that tends to blow within the courtyard, with water and colorful smoke, rose petals and soap bubbles. And just when you think about what he could possibly do to top what came before, Owens pulls another black rabbit out of his hat. For the show that coincided with his retrospective Owens outdid himself once again by filling the pool with water and placing a giant tower in its middle (the show was called “Temple”). The invitation informed us that this was a standing show only. As we milled around by the pool, Tim Blanks, the editor-at-large of Business of Fashion, wondered out loud where the models will walk. Knowing Owens, I said, “I think they will walk in the water.” They did.

The models, starting with Tyrone Dylan, who has been opening each of Owens’s mens shows for several years now, walked out on top of the tower’s platform, wearing a long open vest over a bare torso and bondage leather pants, climbed down the makeshift stairs in their platformed boots (comfort is weak, indeed), and waded into the water. Some models who followed Dylan dove into the water, as if participating in some goth baptist ritual, before climbing back up the tower. Others stayed in the water. Several models, who turned out to be professional stuntmen – carried with them climbing cords with oversized carabiners, with which they affixed themselves to the tower before hanging face down from it. At the end of the show four streams of water shot up in the air. It was utterly mesmerising.

After the show all attendees trooped across the street to Palais Galliera to see Owens’s retrospective. A “retrospective” implies achievement, but also a closure of sorts, a final point, which is why Owens called it a funeral. “Michele bristled at the word ‘retrospective,’” Owens said. “And I go, ‘Why not?’ It is weird because it’s some kind of peak. And the implication is that it’s all about mortality. Let me just face it, why pretend it’s not all about mortality and legacy, and it’s all about possibility of decline, because decline is inevitable.”

 

Such cheerful morbidity is part of Owens’s philosophy. In his seventh decade, and with both of his parents recent passing, his thoughts inevitably turn in this direction. He has been reading various memoirs, trying to see how others dealt with facing the issues of age.

Owens also knows well that he has nothing left to prove. He has done the nearly impossible, planting himself in the middle of the fashion establishment against all odds, where no one can dislodge him. He will go down in the canon as one of the greatest fashion designers, all by cheerfully flinging dirt in the face of convention.

The exhibit itself breaks several conventions. For the first time it spills over into Galliera’s garden, where Owens covered the neoclassical sculptures into giant iridescent ensembles. He also made uniforms for the waiters at Galliera’s outdoor cafe. The retrospective is called Temple of Love, as if to defy those who identify darkness with hatred. “The statues that we covered with the fabric we called them ‘Sisters of Mercy,’’ said Owens. “And then, when it came time for us to name the show, ‘Temple of Love,’ just using the word ‘love,’ I knew that I wanted, needed to come up with something that was welcoming and warm and not the dystopia that people who aren’t really familiar with me might have expected or assumed.”

Still, the exhibit is named after a Sisters of Mercy song, because Owens never forgets his roots in the gothy, queer underground Los Angeles. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, after he dropped out of college and began taking on stray design jobs, he made the then seedy West Hollywood his home. At some point he met Michele Lamy, for whose clothing brand he designed, and eventually the two became a couple. Lamy is a force of nature in her own right, and Owens freely gives her credit; he has said that creatively she can push him to where he needs to be. Lamy owned Les Deux Cafes, a trendy restaurant in Los Angeles where many celebrities congregated. She wore Owens’s designs and it was there that they got noticed by people like the musician Courtney Love. At the same time, Owens got into his first stores in Los Angeles by simply walking in with an army duffle full of clothes he had designed. Eventually he was noticed by a buyer from Barneys, the most fashion-forward American department store at the time, and then by Vogue, which helped him put on his first show in New York in 2002 (it was supposed to happen in September of 2001, but Owens cancelled because of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center). At the same time he met Italian manufacturers who were ready to invest in his brand, and he and Lamy moved to Europe so he could be close to his factory. He started showing in Paris in 2003, and the rest is history, carefully documented in the Galliera exhibit.

That history traces Owens’s ascent from a West Hollywood outcast to the pinnacle of Parisian fashion. Owens’s origins are not always clear even to him, as he spent much of that time in a drug and alcohol haze (he has been clean for decades). But the exhibit establishes certain historical facts, such as the official formation of Owens’s brand in 1994. Owens did not keep much in the way of the archives either, often paying his models and collaborators in clothes, as was the custom then, and so the early years of his career are somewhat underrepresented. “I freaked out,” said Alexandre Samson, the curator of Palais Galliera, when he found out how little of the early work Owens owned. We met later in the day after I interviewed Owens, and Samson walked me through the exhibit, first mentally, over a drink at the Galliera cafe, and then physically. Samson has been responsible for some of the most interesting fashion exhibits of the past ten years, like one devoted to the year 1997, “Fashion Big Bang,” and the Martin Margiela retrospective. “I have admired Rick maybe since 2010” he said. Samson sees Owens as the logical choice in the lineage of trailblazing designers Galliera has touched upon before, like Coco Chanel, Comme des Garçons, and Martin Margiela. Owens in turn already loved the shows at Galliera, so the agreement to put on an exhibit came easily.

But Galliera is a public museum under the auspices of the city of Paris. Would not Owens’s flirtations with the outer edges of sexuality be a problem? In the end it all worked out, and yes, there is a room where a warning of explicit content greets visitors. In that room stands one artifact that Owens did keep in his archive – a wax statue of him urinating.

But in the end the work of a designer is about the clothes. And the clothes on display are a glorious representation of Owens’s mastery of craft. The gray felt temple constructed in the front room of the exhibit envelopes the entire space, inviting you into Owens’s world. This fabric, directly influenced by the German performance artist Joseph Beuys, is still central to Owens’s universe. It inspired him early on to buy the army blankets he used to cover his and Lamy’s house in West Hollywood, the same blankets that serve as rugs in the library of their Paris apartment. For the exhibit Owens reproduced the original felt in his factory in Concordia, Italy, and he now happily has a surplus of it. They also reproduced some of the early looks Samson was after.

 

In the exhibit, which is arranged thematically, Beuys is given his own section, buttressed by the display of the original cymbals from a Joseph Beuys photo that has served as a perennial inspiration for Owens. In the image that documented Beuys’s performance titled Titus/Iphigenie, the artist stands holding the cymbals, with a white horse behind him. “That’s kind of been in my internal mood board since I was young, and afterwards, I realized, oh, that’s where I got the white horses from,” said Owens. “Of course, it’s so obvious, because every party I’ve had, I’ve always had white horses. I stopped using them, though, because people get bent out of shape about it.” (I attended an Owens party in Milan, during his previous exhibition at the Triennale di Milano in 2017, and all I can say is that the white horses were far down the list of noteworthy things that occurred there.)

Our conversation inevitably went to the self-referential direction of Owens’s work. “I try to get as autobiographical as I can,” he said. “And you know, when there’s a pissing statue at the Palais Galliera, that can seem incredibly egocentric, but we all are, so, yeah, okay, that’s what this is about. And the other thing is, that’s what’s unusual about my story, the fact that it gets to be about a single person rather than a committee or a heritage name that has been distorted beyond recognition.”

That Owens is an auteur is without question, and that’s what makes his presence in contemporary fashion doubly important at a time when it sorely lacks authorship. Fashion is a big business and as such it has spawned layers of bureaucracy that can stifle creativity. There is no bureaucracy at Owens Corp, there is not even a design studio. And Owens’s financial backers have been steadfast in their support. “My partners have protected me and have allowed me to develop,” he said. “And I’m sure there were seasons where there wasn’t much to sell, and they always figured it out, and they’ve never really questioned me or tried to influence me.”

Loyalty is a value Owens cherishes. On his staff there are people whom he saved from sleeping in the street and who have grown with the brand. Jeff Judd, who does the music for Owens’s runways, has been his friend since the West Hollywood days. “We went to all the sex clubs together, and he always brought the coke and all of that,” Owens said. “But when I left LA, I decided for us to do the runway mixes together, because otherwise I knew we would lose touch.” By Judd’s count they have done 85 shows together.

After our interview Owens gave me a ride to his showroom, which occupies the top floor of Palais de Tokyo. He himself was going for lunch at Girafe, a chi-chi restaurant designed by Joseph Dirand, with an impressive terrace overlooking the Eiffel tower. “I never care about the food,” Owens said, “as long as they’ve got a slutty dessert.”

The showroom bustled with activity, with buyers and Owens’s staff picking out heavy leathers, denim, and tailored accounts in sweltering Parisian heat. Luxury or not, Paris does not believe in air-conditioning, and the fans ringing the showroom were valiantly failing in their effort to cool the vast space. The clothes hung on the racks, daring you to try them on. In the past several years Owens collaborated with the Italian luxury fabric house Bonotto on a capsule offering, and this iteration, commemorating the seminal New York proto-punk band Suicide, was particularly impressive in combining wools and silks with bondage details. As I was trying on the coats, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami walked in with his entourage, causing a mild commotion. After the tour of the Owens exhibit he asked to see the showroom. His colorful, childlike presence may have jarred with the austerity of Owens’s black and white showroom, but he was welcomed nonetheless. After all, this was the temple of love.

This article was originally published in T Magazine China