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 63, 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.
