Rick Owens is a dark romantic. His skill of mixing shadows, hard and light materials earned him a cult following faithfull consumers. Critics are avidly waiting for his next collection. He has become the industry top label for leather jackets, fierce sneakers and women shoes. He is not a designer to morph the human body, but to embrace shape, use drape and bias cutting.
Rick Owens is facing a with a life-size wax sculpture of himself, staring out of shredded wadding and packed in a wooden crate in a corner of his London store. It's an oddly unnerving sight, as the cult Californian designer is first to admit: brown-eyed and eerily close in appearance to the man himself, the look of it is made no less disturbing by the fact that it is severed from the waist down – it has no legs.
Rick Owens has some issues for less obvious reasons. His replica sculpture appears, somewhat bizarrely, to have rouged cheeks and lips that might not unreasonably be described as rosy. "And the eyelashes are too curled," he says. "I'll have to cut them."
Eventually, the sculpture will reside in Tokyo and there's one bounded for Korea, too. In that case, a wind machine will ensure that "its hair goes crazy". The original Rick Owens waxwork takes pride of place in his Paris boutique.When it first went on display at the Pitti Immagine fashion fair in Florence in January 2006. It caused something of a sensation, not least because it portrayed the designer, hanging from the ceiling, jeans lowered, pissing on to a mirrored floor. Today, and perhaps given the relatively bourgeois retail environment that it calls home, the bottom half is draped in black cloth, though anyone visiting may lift its skirts, if they so desire.
The project was initially personal. In 2003, Rick Owens moved into a mansion in the 7th arrondissement of Paris where he lives and works in splendour with his now wife and partner of more than 20 years, Michèle Lamy. The grand house, says Rick Owens, demanded something special. And so Rick Owens came to London and, specifically, to the specialists employed by Madame Tussauds.
And it was a rite of passage, he argues, warming to the formality of the subject. "At a certain point in his life, "Rick Owens says, "when he reaches a level of stature, a man commissions his portrait to go over the fireplace. It's a classical tradition, but I thought I'd do it in wax because that's funnier. It's my Dorian Gray moment."
Almost a decade later, Rick Owens is this time in London to oversee the most recent expansion of his empire. As always, he is wearing his own designs, specifically layered fine-gauge cashmere and jersey T-shirts with "drippy" necklines and raw edges, equally louche cropped dhoti pants, the crotch of which reaches a little above his knees, and huge black leather Rick Owens sneakers.
On the day we meet, Lamy, who is French, is in attendance – she, too, is all dressed in Rick Owens, accessorised with armfuls of bangles and signature wedge-heeled boots. She holds out her hand to reveal tattooed fingers and, when she smiles, there's a flash of gold-plated front teeth. Last year, Rick Owens said in an interview: "In the beginning I made a point of bringing up my sexuality because I wanted to do it before anyone else could. I was with Michèle and hated the idea of someone whispering to her, 'You know, I think your husband's gay'. I was going to say it first. I didn't want anyone to think they could embarrass me, or Michèle." In a 2008 New Yorker profile, he described Lamy as "a mesmerising sphinx. I'm fascinated by someone who acts completely on instinct and feelings, where I'm so pragmatic and sensible and kind of, compared to her, boring and conservative."
In a fashion climate ruled by luxury-goods conglomerates and an excess of merchandise that is both overwhelming and, increasingly, banal, Rick Owens' less-than-conventional career trajectory – his business turned over more than $50m last year – is an inspiration. He doesn't advertise and his twice-yearly men's and women's collections, both shown in the French capital, are more of a development of his chosen aesthetic than a radical about-turn. While his price-tags rival that of any other designer name, Rick Owens is less than reverent in his treatment of haute materials, actively encouraging the finest cashmere to ladder or silk chiffon to fray. His colour palette is monochrome and all the shades of "shadow" and "dust" in between.
Rick Owens was born in Porterville, a town not far from Los Angeles, in 1962. He was an only child; his
father is a retired social worker, his mother worked as a schoolteacher and is an expert seamstress. They are now 89 and 78 respectively, and travel to Paris to see all of their son's shows. Rick Owens went to the local Catholic school.After school, Rick Owens went to the Otis College of Art and Design in LA, but dropped out after two years. He claims to have not had the intellectual stamina to survive there. Whatever, he ended up learning how to cut patterns "with all these Korean ladies: not glamorous. I didn't grow up in the industry, like Marc Jacobs, or Halston. I worked for knock-off companies in LA. I knocked off patterns for years."
It is now that Rick Owens first met his wife Michelle Lamy, more than 20 years ago, in the time that he was employed as a pattern maker at a design company she owned and ran in Los Angeles.
At the end of the Nineties, Rick Owens, by then an integral part of the Los Angeles subculture, began making clothes for himself and his friends. A washed leather jacket with ultra-long, skinny sleeves – they have ribbed wool panels along the inner arm ensuring they cling just so – a bias-cut skirt with a long, asymmetric train and narrow T-shirts in suitably sludgy shades.Lamy, who at the time owned and fronted Café Des Artistes, one of the city's most celebrated night spots, wore his
clothes. So did Courtney Love. Rick Owens christened his signature look "glunge" – a grunge/glamour hybrid – made clothes at home and then drove around selling them to retailers himself.
Visionary indeed, Charles Gallay paid for half of Rick Owens' collections up front, becoming an unofficial patron and enabling him to produce the next one and Rick Owens sold. By this time, Lamy had bought a second restaurant – Les Deux Cafés – located in a former crack house and the two were living together in drug- and alcohol-fuelled decadence inspired, Rick Owens says, by Baudelaire, Tennessee Williams and "just this whole idea that a candle that burns at both ends might burn shorter, but it burns brighter. Originally I was going to be like Charles James. I was going to make beautiful things and live in glamorous squalor on Hollywood Boulevard and die the hero for having stuck to my vision and not compromised."
Instead, and following an editorial featuring Kate Moss in a Rick Owens jacket in French Vogue in 2002, the designer came to the attention of American Vogue's Anna Wintour, who sponsored his first runway show in New York.
Rick Owens was also among the most coveted insider labels of the day. Then – and indeed now – collections sold out almost instantaneously. And while other independent designers were quick to sell their businesses to fashion giants LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), the Gucci Group and more, Rick Owens secured backing courtesy of the Italian sales agency EBA, then representatives of European names including Olivier Theyskens and Ann Demeulemeester. President Luca Ruggeri and his sister-in-law Elsa Lanzo, now Rick Owens' commercial director and CEO respectively, moved manufacture and distribution to Italy and Rick Owens and Lamy relocated to Paris. They've both been clean – and serene, as it goes – for more than 10 years.
"There was a heavy dose of self-destruction in there," Rick Owens says of his former life, "because of shame and about having been so much of an outsider and rejected early on in a small town. I think it had to do with fear. I guess I grew out of it. You get older. You figure it out. And also I just got scared. It went too far and, really, I could feel myself dying."
The "history of the damage" is still central to his creative output, he says. "Definitely. And there's a lot of
self-acceptance in it, too, because I don't punish myself any more for having made mistakes. I don't punish myself fornot having been perfect. It all happened for a reason. It was all fine. I'm fine. I'm not perfect and I don't haveto be. And neither does anyone else."
Early Collections
SPRING/SUMMER 2003
September 2002: First collection. Rick presented his Spring/Summer 2003 collection at the New York Fashion Week.
FALL WINTER 2003
March 2003: Rick Owens decideS to move to Paris for his Fall collection, and showed it during Paris Fashion Week.
FALL WINTER 2003 - HAUTE COUTURE
July 2003: Rick Owens made his Haute Couture debut in Paris.
SPRING/SUMMER 2004
October 2003: During Paris Fashion Week Rick Owens showed his collection for next Spring.
FALL WINTER 2004 - READY TO WEAR
March 2004: Rick Owens presented his Revillon Fall collection in Paris during Paris Fashion Week.
SPRING/SUMMER 2005
October 2004: At Paris Fashion Week Rick Owens showed his collection for next Spring.
FALL WINTER 2005 - PARIS FASHION WEEK
March 2005: Rick Owen's Autumn/Winter collection was shown at Paris Fashion Week.
More and more celebrities like Madonna, Rihanna and Lenny Kravits are embracing Rick Owen's style and also influential fashion pack members: Marc Jacobs, Carine Roitfeld and Lara Stone.
As driven as he is considerate, and as raw as he is extremely refined, Rick Owens, the person, is perhaps his most magnificent construct. A "workaholic", responsible for his men's and women's main line, the more accessible Rick Owens Lilies and Drkshdw, and now fine-fur, and furniture collections, he says that he found the runway experience difficult to begin with.
Moving forward discreetly with the zeitgeist, the mainstay of Rick Owens' business – the languid silk "flow" pants, the ultra-soft and skinny sweaters, the proud-to-be-droopy shorts that resemble nothing more than nappies, the dignified draped, bias-cut gown and, of course, the oft-emulated washed leather jacket – remains the same. The designer works out, eats well and "hates holidays – I get antsy". Rick Owens is still something of an outsider, working with a skeleton team and, principally, with Lamy, in splendid isolation, although the latter continues, on occasion, to give good party.
“When you create a signature, are telling a story,” says Rick Owens.
Recently made a partnership with Eo Bocci Associates – agent designers like Ann Demeulemeester and Olivier Theyskens – which only serves to confirm their interest in expanding the firm across Europe continues.
