The image of Rick Owens, the man, is conjured more readily than the image of Rick Owens, the brand of clothing. There’s the long, thin, ink-black hair; the platform shoes elevating his 5 foot 10 inch frame; the surprisingly chiseled physique, sometimes hidden under an oversized blazer (in black, of course). Few designers function as the face of their brand the way Owens does, but his clothing tends more towards a specific sensibility than simple garmentry.
Rick Owens is one of the most subversive designers of the twenty-first century. His pieces straddle the disputed territory between avant-garde and kink. Owens consciously walks this tightrope, his fashion shows are intended to shock: in 2015, one of his menswear runway shows exposed the genitalia of the male models — cutouts or draping framed the naked groin. And he courts scandal off the runway, too. In 2002 Owens contributed an urophilic self-portrait to i-D magazine which was immediately decried as indecent.
For these reasons, most tend to associate the Rick Owens’ clothing brand with edgy provocation. “My stuff seems to attract guys that I think might want to consider themselves some kind of heroic lone wolf, kind of playing by their own moral codes,” Owens once said in an interview with critic Alexander Fury. But Owens’ garments are not fetish wear: they tend to follow classical, even beautiful lines and shapes which twist and distort in unusual and interesting ways. His clothes are at once anachronistic and futuristic, apocalyptically dust-colored, with heavy doses of black and off-white mixed in. Sometimes other colors appear, but Owens has a distinctive palette and fondness for certain materials, like leather and its infinite variations of texture.
His unique taste augments every realm of his life from the color of his hair to the furniture selection in his home in Paris where he has lived for the past twenty years with his wife and business partner, Michèle Lamy. He swims in an environment of carefully selected and considered accoutrements. Owens is a sybarite’s sybarite.
Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À rebours (Against Nature) — a sacred text in the decadence tradition — is one of Owens’ touchstones. It’s no surprise that a fashion designer would delight in its delectable, visual prose. Huysmans describes in minute detail the costume that his protagonist Des Esseintes wears (“suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats” with “Parma violets in his shirt-front in lieu of a cravat”) and those of the servants with whom he surrounds himself (“stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears”). The book, Owens has said, gave him “license to unapologetically pursue and wallow in selfish, exquisite, sensorial pleasures.”
Paradoxically, Des Esseintes meticulously curates his aesthetic surroundings while pursuing a life of asceticism, a purity of loneliness. He was routinely disappointed with the men of letters with whom he once associated, finding them hypocritical and lacking in conversation; women and “commonplace caresses” leave him exhausted and disillusioned. He exudes contempt for the world and its inhabitants. He can only find refuge in himself and his luxuries.
Rick Owens’ universe is similarly solitary. Despite the numerous winks and nods to past designers and artists — inspiration from the 1920s and 30s lines of Madame Grès and Madeleine Vionnet are especially apparent — his design is singular. His are lonely clothes for lonely people. While other designers often accentuate the body’s silhouette, Owens’ designs have a transhumanist approach, which distort and exaggerate the human form. Why be human when you can be anything you want?
Fashion’s poète maudit is the subject of an exhibition at the Palais Galliera in Paris, where Owens’ sensational designs are assembled in the Neo-Renaissance palace. Rick Owens: Temple of Love is structured like a place of worship. Mannequins form altars in monotone colors; a sea of dove greys and pale whites rise up at the entrance, with gossamer fabrics tumbling down the mannequins, forming habits and capes. Owens’ voice liturgically chants through speakers above, reading from his favorite passage in À rebours: first in English, then French.
Some of the designs border on the extreme; others are only gently disfiguring. There’s a fitted cape with angular, high shoulders, arched as if they are the wings of a bird, and a puffed vest in a pearlized shade of green wraps itself around the mannequin like a knot, forming a protective bubble around the wearer. They create shapes not normally seen on the street, where most of the world has given up a pursuit of beauty for the comfort of athleisure.
On Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast Rick Owens expressed his design philosophy: “I want to be somebody that champions alternative aesthetics to the people who don’t see themselves reflected in our standard aesthetics, aesthetics that are stridently proposed in airport beauty and perfume aisles.”
Not that there isn’t beauty to be found in Owens’ designs. A clear homage to Grès, a peony silk skirt cut on the bias, is gathered and ruched along the back, sending a cascade of ripples down to the floor. The top is similarly pleated in that particular style, and an excess of fabric hangs off the shoulders and falls down the otherwise-naked back. Where Madame Grès’ designs conjure antiquity, Owens’ are otherworldly.
And then there’s another room, tucked in a corner of the Galliera, demonstrably separate from the rest of the show and replete with content warnings at the entry. Inside, an effigy of Owens stands proudly, pants unzipped and penis in hand as it micturates water into a basin. In a vitrine facing the sculpture of Owens, a silk scarf with an imprinted image is displayed, its delicate lines of thread visible. In the photograph printed across the white fabric, Owens is shown seated at a table next to a bottle of vodka, gun in his mouth, as inky splatters of blood fire through the back of his head. Across the table, another Owens is slumped forward, his jet-black hair streaming down the side of the table. On a wall label Owens accounts for himself: “I regard this suicide photograph as an homage to my youthful self destructive days, full of punk rock, rage and nihilism. It is also a nod to the self-loathing we have all put ourselves through at one time or another.”
In his adolescence, like Des Essentes who spent his childhood daydreaming and reading, Owens passed the time reading his father’s books. This authoritarian father did not permit his son to watch television. He was — Owens says — dominating to the point of cruelty, towards both son and wife. Owens hated his body, too, wishing he could be bigger, different somehow. The visions of Owens’ childhood in Porterville, California are lonely ones.
But Owens is no longer alone. He has Michèle Lamy — his business partner, former boss, muse, lover, and wife. The wall text coyly adds Lamy’s birth year in a parenthetical within the timeline of Rick Owens’ life: there, she appears after he is born (though she was born twenty years before him), as if her existence began when she arrived in Los Angeles. To the young, isolated, dysmorphic, and nihilistic Owens, finding a mirror self in Lamy must have seemed an impossible dream.
Owens moved from Porterville to nearby Los Angeles to study at the Otis Art Institute, but he soon dropped his dreams of becoming a painter, and left to go to technical school and learn pattern-making and garment production. A chance introduction to Lamy led to Owens being hired to work for her brand, Lamy, in the newly developed menswear line, Lamy Men. Within five years of designing for Lamy Men, Owens began selling his own creations. (Their romantic relationship progressed quicker; the timeline says their relationship officially started within two years of his start at Lamy Men.) Lamy has remained an inextricable part of the Rick Owens brand ever since.
Rick Owens, the man and the brand, has remained steadfastly independent in a climate where luxury conglomerates seem to own almost everything and everyone. The operation is unusually small, with only a few people working under Owens on design. Owenscorp, his self-founded parent company, only counts five board members, with Owens and Lamy at the helm.
The image of the two of them together generates astonishing allure and mystique. Lamy, with her blackened fingers — tattooed to appear as if dipped in ink — her gold teeth, and the single black line down her forehead, presides like the high priestess of Owenscorp. Her influence ramifies throughout the Paris exhibition, including in the brutalist designs of the stands (Lamy manages Rick Owens Furniture, with its austere monochromatic designs). And their inversion of the familiar age gap gender imbalance adds to the subversiveness that has become synonymous with the Rick Owens brand.
Outside the windows of the Galliera, Owens has created and erected gigantic hooded figures like haunting caryatids. No aspect of the building is free of the Owens/Lamy mood. Fashion exhibitions tend to focus exclusively on the design of the clothes within, and not as much on the inspiration behind them; Temple of Love forces the viewer into Owens’ world. Ephemera is scattered everywhere, from the books and vinyls he loved growing up, to the music he plays at his Paris home (Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde). There’s the Gustav Moreau painting of Salome that is similarly featured in À rebours, and examples of archival clothing that Owens loves. A vitrine showcases a silvery taffeta Fortuny dress in its Belle Époque glory coiled up: the century-old Delphos dress, the stuff of Proust’s fantasies, gleams as if fresh from the atelier. The end of the exhibition is a perfect replica of Owens and Lamy’s bedroom, crowded with piles of books, a television, and Santa Maria Novella’s Patchouli cologne.
The exhibition catalogue casually refers to a sense of “cheerful depravity” in Owens’ work. I find more humor than depravity, more Dadaism or Surrealism than pure nihilism. Owens, who was estranged from his repressive father for years, preaches open mindedness and tolerance. More than that, he doesn’t take himself so seriously
In fact, and curiously, Owens rejects the idea that fashion is art, a renunciation that I struggle to reconcile with the artistry of his designs. There is one dress I keep returning to, the Michima dress, a tangle of cotton tubes: it’s as if the wearer is entangled in a bird’s nest, protected from the outside world. Another item in the exhibition similarly comes to mind, a parka that juts out in front of the mannequin like a dilapidated umbrella, the fabric torn and exposed, completely obfuscating the body beneath. In my last installment for Liberties Sidebar I wrote that fashion, as an applied art, must always consider wearability. The Michima dress does not appear to me to be wearable. And neither does the parka. These are sculptural pieces. They are works of art. But Owens disagrees. Does he shirk the category because of his failed dreams of being a painter? Is it because he doesn’t want to be perceived as trying? Does he hope that the effortless artistry will lead viewers to apply the proper term without his fishing for it? Or is it that he doesn’t want to be lumped into any category, preferring to stand alone? The answer remains unclear.
Despite the cult status that Rick Owens enjoyed in the first few decades of his work, something has shifted in the perception of his clothing. His last womenswear collection was hailed as a triumph; Vogue called it “wonderfully accessible” (fashion-speak for “not provocative”). Another journalist described it as “simply elegant.” In Owens’ press release for the collection, he wrote in his signature all-caps font: “Expressing our individuality is great but sometimes we need to embrace our commonalities . . . especially in the face of the peak intolerance we are experiencing in the world right now.”
Is this the end of eccentricity? Although I have never worn one of Rick Owens’ designs — I have never felt it was meant for me, in spite of the technical mastery — I have always been glad that he and his work exist, an island of proud defiance in a sea of sameness. The people who love (and wear) Owens’ work esteem it precisely because it fills a void for them, it is a kind of community of self expression for a particular strain of idiosyncrasy. And although Owens historically has loved his moments of provocation, which at times (like that 2015 show) has left my head in my hands, I can appreciate the punkdom behind it. “A lot of what I put on the runway is vengeful,” he said regarding that moment. “Showing exposed dicks on the runway . . . it was after Dad passed, but having a puritanical father whose machismo was so sacred, for me to do that would have killed him.”
But all of this seems to be slipping away, as evidenced by the sudden glowing reviews garnered by his recent turn towards a more toned-down style. Those writers who praise the clothing’s wearability are missing the point; to most of Owens’ acolytes, his clothing has always been wearable. It’s only that the culture has morphed, and is trying to absorb his distinct brand of subculture into the mainstream. A part of me yearns for Owens to push back. But Owens has been designing for nearly three decades: maybe the rage and dissidence has worn off. Will Owens follow in Des Esseintes’ footsteps, and abandon all he has created? To whom will the lonely now turn?