This story appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue. Get yours now.
written by STEFF YOTKA
photography KRISTINA NAGEL
Rick Owens fetches me from downstairs, calling through his palatial concrete house, “Do I have a date? Oh, I do!”, his voice heightening as he turns the corner to find me in his dining room. It’s the zillionth time I’ve seen him, but with each time, he looks more and more like Rick Owens—the Rick Owens he dreamed himself to be. A planar face, black hair licking at his middle back, feet hidden in giant Geobaskets, a low-cut tank with tattoo spikes piercing from his wrist up his forearm.
Becoming the Platonic ideal of Rick Owens has been his life’s work, a bildungsroman that stitched together a man, who, at 63, is more beautiful than he was at 23, more brilliant than at 33, and with each passing day becomes smarter, tougher, kinder, and more stringently himself. Over his six decades he’s changed a lot on the outside, but on the inside, he’s remained a tenderhearted observer, taking in the world and transmuting it into his own sacred language.
“When I was young, my mom really liked putting me in short suits with knee socks and combing my hair very …” he gestures to part his mane slick over one eye, a tenderness in his voice as he remembers his mother. “She was very much proud of her little gentleman. She always said that with her heavy Mexican accent.”
The most enviable quality of Rick Owens is that gentleman’s generosity. It has persisted in him at every age, in any outfit. He is warm and glamourous but not shy, so that when you are close to him you are captured in his shine. Sitting next to him, watching him put his long, Californian sentences together, is the most magnetic experience. He could have been a poet, a performer, a podcast host, or just a big personality, but instead he makes clothing that changes our minds.
He has done it for 33-and-counting years, convincing people of thigh-high leather platform boots, shoulder pads that horn upwards towards one’s ears, fuzzy mint dust balls that tremble around the body, and crunched ball gowns that peel out like metal John Chamberlain sculptures made for a red carpet. He’s made filmy underpants and sturdy overcoats, layers and layers of black jersey tees, and bomber jackets whose “dracucollars”—his term—cloak the face. Once, he made an aquamarine thong sequin bodysuit. Another time he made a neutral long-sleeved cloak. The only thing predictable about a Rick Owens show is that it will challenge your conceptions of proportion, appropriateness, and aesthetics.
We are now sitting on the low couch of his home’s second-floor studio. Candles are lit, the makings of his upcoming collections are in media res all around us. It’s so plainly beautiful, but there is something else happening. When Rick Owens sits beside you, you are forced to confront the you that you could have been if all those other things hadn’t gotten in the way: the emails, googling “what is khia asylum and my shayla,” the comments section. He looks mildly offended when I ask him about not wanting to be challenged (something he said offhand on a podcast), and I can understand why: I’ve misunderstood what he meant. He meant that to be yourself, you have to eliminate everything that does not yield for yourself from the equation.
“I have more rage for work than ever. So if that was interpreted as saying I’m tired, that was not it at all,” he begins, picking up the pace of his talking from considerate to sharpened. “Okay, here’s an example,” he turns to me to spell it out. “After the ‘Hollywood’ show, the big white show and everything,” where over 200 models cast from around europe navigated the Palais de Tokyo in a series of ivory ensembles, culminating with a parade float supporting four backbending gymnasts. “The next day, Michèle had gone somewhere. Nobody was in the house. It was a Friday and nobody had left any food for me. So I’m in my boxers wandering around the house, looking in the refrigerator, looking for a croissant or something, like a piece of bread I could toast. Nothing.” He gets his arms involved to make the image of himself wandering this concrete palace in hopes of even a crouton Clear. “I’m in the kitchen on a step-ladder, looking at the shelves to see if anybody left any bread. I put on some shoes and go down the street. All closed, everything. I’m wandering around looking for bread.”
He pauses to stare me down the barrel. “I’m thinking, I bet Armani has bread.” His eyebrows raise a little, I can’t tell if he’s joking or furious. “So that’s what I meant by challenges.” The warm smile returns. “That’s what I meant by challenges, and that’s what I mean by serenity. I want to have bread.” So now he always has bread in the house.
“If I die in the next five seconds, I won.”
RICK OWENS
To avoid this kind of lazy misinterpretation from us regular degular fashion schlock jocks, Owens has to make grand, sweeping, obvious, rational, and emotionally triumphant arguments for himself four times a year on the runway. Sometimes, he does it in books and at parties so we can all understand the importance of being ourselves in every inch of our human bodies and all the inches beyond them. Our duvet covers, our homes, our sphynx cats named Pixie, our mirrored cabinets that took three years to install, every book we own in our libraries, every song we listen to, the hotel off the beaten path we have dinner every night with our beloved—it all has to be of all of us, other-wise what are we doing here?
That’s the question Temple of Love answers, a forthcoming retrospective that sweeps through Paris’ Palais Galliera museum like a biblical flood. Chronicling Rick Owens, the man, the journey, the products, and the brand through the course of his entire life, from the childhood books his father read to him to his most recent fashion shows. The exhibition is a symphony of shape and texture, haunting in its scale with more than 100 pieces between clothing, furniture, and some other salacious little surprises.
Michèle Lamy, his day one “Hun,” appears like a statue on posters that will plaster the city. The Temple of Love is for all of us, but it is mostly for her. Getting the poster approved was a bit of a challenge, Owens explains, because the Parisian government funds the museum and wasn’t initially keen on a photo of Lamy draped in wool, looking somewhere between sculpture and saint. “I sent them this long email saying that I was inspired by this statue [on the Left Bank] and it follows in the line of French culture: Jean Cocteau, Saint Laurent, Alphonse Mucha, posters for Sarah Bernhardt, Toulouse-Lautrec”—he’s speeding through reference pictures on his Macbook that he emailed to the government. “They finally said yes.”
Just behind us in his office is a wooden model of a statue with peaked shoulders that will stand in the Galliera’s rotunda. The final ones will be 7 metres tall, about a dozen total, and covered with matte brown sequins. Right now it is a 7-foot plywood shell. “You could fit inside,” he jokes, and so I climb on my knees and get inside. Even at 5’8″ in Rick Owens Kiss heels, I am still small because I let those other un-Rick- like things get to me. Not only do I buy my own bread, I’ve made marketing decks, for god’s sake.
The statues, the books, the feelings, they will outlive me for sure. I will be forgotten, and you, if you don’t change your life right now, will be forgotten, too, but Rick Owens will not. He will be forever, all of these tombs he’s made while living like a king, like a pharaoh, like a god.
“I’ve got immortality,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m already there. To ask for more would be a lot. I’m conscious of everything I’ve gotten and how it’s way more than I ever dreamed of. I never had the imagination to dream that big. I’m still cranky. I’m still petty, but I’m also thinking, ‘Wow, if I die in the next five seconds, I won.’”
His gentlemanly smile.
“I so won.”
In 1987 Rick Owens met Michèle Lamy. It’s possible that without Michèle Lamy, there would be no Rick Owens. She has buoyed him to new heights and may be the only person who challenges him, who awes him, and who can change his mind. “Michèle really loves flux and constant motion and movement,” says Owens, and as such she brings new characters and new ideas into their lives. During my visit at their house, she is the boss: She tells him their schedule, the furniture that’s moving around, the opera they are seeing later that evening, that Pixie has “built her new home” behind some construction panels, and at the sight of little Pixie they both aww.
When we stumble across a picture of Lamy in 2016, walking through snow in a gigantic outfit of Owens’ making, he becomes like a boy in love. “It is so cute, because she really dresses like that,” he lets himself be a little cheeky. “It’s very, from runway to reality.” Lately, they have been watching reruns of HBO’s Getting On in bed, a hospital comedy starring Laurie Metcalf, but Lamy gets bored of shows quickly. They’ll find another streaming comedy soon.
The first original clothes Rick Owens made, beyond his school projects and things for himself to wear, were for her labels, first Lamy Men and later Shi Shi. Their success convinced him to stitch his own name on a tag for the first time in 1992. Over the rest of the riotous 1990s, Owens and Lamy linked up as a couple and lived between the Chateau Marmont, the Laurel Hotel, and finally at 1641 Las Palmas Avenue, which became a warehouse, design studio, home, store, and headquarters for Lamy’s famed hangout-turned-restaurant Les Deux Cafés. It’s with Lamy that Rick Owens really becomes more than a man: He turns into a brand.
Rick Owens garments started appearing in fashion editorials in 2000. That year, he hosted a fashion show in Los Angeles and then another with the support of Vogue and Style.com in New York. In 2001, he inked a deal with Elsa Lanzo and Luca Ruggeri, two Italian fashion distributors. Together they found a factory in Concordia, Italy, to produce collections. Twenty-four years later, Lanzo is still the CEO of Owenscorp, their umbrella company, and Ruggeri is still its commercial director. Owenscorp now owns the factory in Concordia. Owens and Lamy moved to Paris in 2003 to be closer to their partners and their factories, setting themselves up in the Place du Palais Bourbon the same way they did on Las Palmas: It’s their house, their design studio, their party palace, and a cathedral where pilgrims visit to pray at the hem of his garments.
Steff Yotka: Do you remember when you met Michèle?
Rick Owens: I probably met her at a party at her house. At that time I was hanging out with Rick Castro. He’s a fetish photographer now, but he was a stylist then. And I was hanging with Vaginal Davis and Glen Meadmore, who were performing in clubs, and they were kind of drag but kind of punk. Glen did this weird cowboy drag with eyelashes and a bad wig and a cowboy skirt and pants and sang cowboy techno-punk songs about “Cornhole Me” or “Peel It Back, Grandpa.”
Sounds amazing.
Glen is like 7 feet tall and super skinny. He was also maniacal. He would just throw himself all over the stage and he would hurt himself. I mean, he was just totally reckless, which was part of his charm. I remember it was New Year’s Eve, and I remember he squatted on a beer bottle and then he gripped it with his ass and he sang his song with the beer bottle up his ass.
It’s hard to hold a beer bottle like that—
—and hold a mic.
Right. Holding a lot of things.
Anyway, Glen and Vaginal were part of Michèle’s group, too. I remember Glen and Vaginal kind of standing on platforms or something on each side of the entrance to Michèle’s house and going in, and that was where I met her. I have a feeling, but remember I was drunk the entire time, so my memory is frozen.
Was it love at first sight?
It was attraction. But everybody was, and is, attracted to Michèle at first sight. She has so much magnetism and allure. She was always incredibly attractive to me, but then I started noticing her afterward, when we started working together. She always wore little tights with a jacket or something. Running around in the little tights, she was very cute. The hair and the jewellery and everything … And then the way she is.
Was it around this moment that you felt that you sort of became Rick Owens? You spoke a lot about the transition between “small-town sissy” and the more realised version of yourself.
When I met Michèle, I was pretty fully formed. Because I had left trade school and I was working in the garment industry and I had a job and I had enough money to live and to enjoy myself and to go out and to go to nice restaurants every once in a while. There was a minute there early on when I started working that I was at my most flamboyant, where I felt, “Wow, I can do whatever I want and this is what I want to do.” I got to LA like in ’79, ’80. I had 10 years to sow my oats. I kind of toned it down by the time I met Michèle. The ’90s were with Michèle. Everything since then, Michèle.
What was it like for this shoot to dress Michèle in all these clothes?
It’s what we do. It wasn’t unusual. That’s a fun way of playing for us.
What’s the secret to a long and happy marriage?
I have no idea.
Well, you have one.
I know. But it’s just luck. And it’s also a happy marriage and business. The business partners I have are the ones that I started out with—that never happens. And they just found me.
I feel like you’re being a little too humble about all of this, if I could be honest.
I’m absolutely not. It’s totally magic because it just doesn’t make any sense.
I just remember there was some little voice in the back of my head thinking, “Well, I just have to get through this now, because one day I won’t have to deal with my finances.” Where did that arrogance come from? Where did that entitlement come from? I definitely was [financially] insecure at the beginning. But then, there was this arrogance, this entitlement that I knew I had something special. That’s where the drinking came in—because I had to really get out and promote myself in a way that was not comfortable for me. I was just like, “You just got to survive and tread water and keep yourself out there until somebody finds you that can help.” So that is exactly what I did. And they showed up.
I was already selling clothes at the right stores—Maria Luisa in Paris, Charivari in New York, and maybe at Browns in London. That’s how they found me. Luca and Elsa proposed distributing me and hooking me up with a license in Italy. They wanted to start their own thing, and I was their first project. I think their plan was to have a group [with other brands], but they got absorbed in us. There was so much to do, and as our business grew, they didn’t have time to take on anybody else.
So I literally just made myself available in public and waited for somebody to show up. And it actually happened. How often does that happen? And how often does it happen that you end up with the right people for you?
If there’s a disagreement in the business, who wins the argument, you or Elsa?
I can’t really think of any conflict. I’m sure there are minor ones, but we’re both so solution-oriented that neither of us really wastes time. We can figure things out and figure each other out. It is a marriage. The other thing is, she and Luca have so much kind respect for what I do, they don’t try to influence that. It’s exactly the same for me with her. I would never have gotten here without Elsa. I’m not going to second-guess her.
“My biggest motivation is to combat judgement. That’s what the pentagrams are for. They’re playful, they’re kitsch, and they’re camp, but they’re also about otherness.”
RICK OWENS
In 1981, Rick Owens left Porterville, California, where he was raised on Catholic schooling, Japanese woodcuts, and Wagner operas, the only child of John and Concepción Owens. After a stint studying painting, he went to trade school for pattern cutting. He became the best pair of shears at a high-quality dupe factory, and even without much of a plan, he already had a look: “It was just always black T-shirts and the leather jacket. But I also had made this black velvet coat for a school thing that already had the padded quilted shoulders. And then I had the nose ring with the rosary to my ear and a lot of Chanel white bisque foundation. I never did lipstick, but I had a smoky eye, not really black like I do now [on models]. My hair was kind of this mohawk-y thing that went partly that way [up] and then partly that way [back]. It was either black or bleached. And there are no pictures.”
Owens was primed for rebellion from an early age—rebelling against his parents, his Catholic school, and the stringent 1960s society of his small town. But his eyes were opened to a glamourous and kind version of rebellion when he came across David Bowie. “I think I was 17 when I saw David Bowie’s appearance on Saturday Night Live,” he recalls of Bowie’s 1979 performance with Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi. “I saw that video online recently and somebody in the comments said, ‘Wow, this totally changed my life.’ Get in line! I guess Bowie changed all of us. That was a real turning point in aesthetic contemporary culture. I still look back on it, thinking how it brought this level of glamourous, cool weirdness that I could hook onto and that I could so relate to.”
Joseph Beuys, Gustave Moreau, Jean Cocteau, Iggy Pop, punk and goth icons, even the fallen saints, the witches: They give Owens the freedom to be against something. After seeing Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album cover, “I thought, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ There’s a precedent.”
You always speak about your clothing as being a rebellion or a reaction against conservative norms. Maybe the first time we spoke, you said something like, “I’m not niche. I’m mainstream now.”
Did I?
Yes. I remember because I called you niche, and you corrected me. Ten years later you’re definitely right.
I wish I was niche. Niche sounds better. I wasn’t being arrogant. I was kind of resigning myself to the fact that I’ve overexposed myself and sold out. I always think, if you know who I am, you’ve already decided. But then I forget that there’s new people, every day, who are starting to notice aesthetics or who are starting to consider the aesthetic choices they’re making. They’re just starting to become aware, like I did when I saw Bowie on Saturday Night Live.
What do you feel like you have to rebel against now?
Judgement. My biggest motivation is to combat judgement. That’s what the pentagrams are for. They’re playful, they’re kitsch, and they’re camp, but they’re also about otherness. They’re also about people who have been condemned for otherness, like witches burned at the stake, who were probably just really fun people.
People’s instinct to condemn things that they don’t completely understand or are not completely comfortable with—that condemnation is something that I’ve experienced. The judgement, the condemnation, the contempt. I feel what every goth feels: Oh, you think I’m weird? I’m going to show you weird! Especially now because condemnation is so pervasive and so accepted. It is just so dumb. The other lesson is judgement has always been there. It’s never going away. It is part of the glory and the horror of life, just like evil, and pain, and suffering. Somewhere it serves a purpose, an awful purpose, but it’s part of life.
Who’s judging you?
You can see a lot of lies online about me being a satanic paedophile with AIDS or whatever. The stuff that you see about Michèle is worse. I don’t know if I’ve reached a level where I get more of that than normal people would, but I think anybody can relate to being judged viciously or just unfairly. That’s what I’m reacting against a lot.
You react to judgement in a very peaceful way. Will you watch the inauguration later today?
Oh no.
People like Trump react to judgement with selfishness and vitriol and evil. You react with your work, which is so welcoming and beautiful.
I just want to provide an alternative, a retreat. It’s not a manifesto. There’s always been a part of the world that’s like me, so this is the part of the world that I’m here to celebrate and embrace. When I said I was mainstream, it’s like my niche spilled over somehow. Remember when I did that book about Larry Legaspi? This makes me think of him because he had a very specific, flamboyant, Manhattan kind of aesthetic. Then somehow, he applied it to Black soul culture with LaBelle, and that spark created something. Then somehow he got connected to Stadium Rock [with KISS] and that became part of American popular culture. So you just never know where things are going to leak out. I think somewhere what I did is similar to that, a little bit.
The “Larry” collection [Fall 2019], to me, felt like a turning point for you. The clothes got more glamourous, in a traditional sense of glamourous. You can see obvious throughlines in your work—platforms, black, drapery—but are there also moments when you’ve made a marked change?
Probably The one that’s most blatant that everybody has noticed is the period where the clothes started getting more abstract and more constructed [“Glitter,” Fall 2017]. That was very much about Michèle. That’s when she started wearing Comme des Garçons. I endorsed it, of course, because nobody on the planet can wear Comme des Garçons better than her.
It wasn’t like a violent conflict, but I did feel like: You are part of this world. This is our survival and you represent that. We’ve built this whole thing to support you and me, and then for you to endorse somebody else feels disloyal. As a partner, you should be promoting what we’re surviving on. Her answer was so good: “You know what? I just feel more powerful in her clothes.”
Was that like a knife in your heart?
It definitely stung. But I also had to look at it with an objective eye. This is what life is about—everything that happens, I’m going to use it. Nothing is off limits. Everything is personal. So I thought, I’m going to do a blob like that. Comme doesn’t have a monopoly on blobs. Everything that we as creators do is a composition of everything that we’ve seen before. It could be a Comme des Garçons blob, it could be a Peter Pan collar from a Givenchy dress from the 1950s. We’re all using that stuff. Comme is using straps from Johnny Rotten’s leather jacket. Obviously there was some level of discomfort, like, “How can I process it all, this tiny sense of betrayal? Michèle’s my best client, how do I follow along with her evolution and the way she feels about herself as she’s physically changing?”
That was your only stylistic pivot?
I can see that one best. A lot of people have told me they can see the minute that Tyrone [Dylan Susman, designer, stylist, and muse] showed up. That changed things, too. It made people say things like, “Tyrone has ruined everything.” But there are other people that think—and people in my team who think—Tyrone is the best thing that ever happened for us. It got us a whole new perspective in the world. Those are the most blatant ones that I can think of. I’m sure I could point out more.
To me, Rick Owens’ career has four chapters. The Californian early days, of which little documentation exists, except the bias leather jackets worn by Courtney Love, Corinne Day, and Kate Moss. Then, his ethereal heavenly era, the transition from underground to aboveground. These fashion shows of his early Parisian days have angels and nuns, wafting chiffon and revealing jersey. Even if it is gothic, there is a sweetness to his first decade in Paris, an optimism of finding oneself in the place one was always meant to be. As the world turned more brutal in the early 2010s, so did Owens’ work. In 2014, he hung a punk band upside down on the runway that began a third chapter of showmanship: the 2014 step dancer show, the women hung upside down from other women collection in 2016, the “Glitter” collections of 2017 (that coincided with Lamy’s CDG romance), and the 2018 collection where a funeral pyre burned at the centre of the runway. Then, lastly, with the “Larry” collections of 2019, Owens began to flirt with glamour. He’s been doing mermaid hems, hot pink, gold, even more voluptuous platforms and sequins, morphing them into a ravishing rebellion against the horrors of the 2020s.
Do you have a favourite collection?
I have a few. I like those “Glitter” collections [Fall 2017 menswear and womenswear] that were a response to Michèle’s Comme des Garçons. I accepted the challenge and I responded with my solution. The Step Team show is so beautiful, but it’s also slightly unnerving because I can see how there could be a raised eyebrow. I mean that tension and that—was that wrong or is it right? There’s something about that that was challenging and interesting. I feel like it could have gone wrong, but it didn’t.
With every show, you can see how there’s still the rage in me. I have to admit, now it’s almost a moral duty, being a reaction to judgement and condemnation. Now I almost feel like an evangelical urge. If I do well, and if people want to buy my clothes and know about me, I can talk about this more and push my agenda, which is one of the best things I can do with my life.
I have the power to lend my voice to the opposite force of Trump. It’s a small voice, but it’s something I can do.
What’s your worst collection?
Oh, I’m not going to tell you that because of people who have clothes from that collection. But there are a few that Elsa and I always refer to. We just drop that name every once in a while.
So there is one that’s a keyword?
There is, actually. I would cringe five years ago when I looked back at it. I look at it now and I’m going, “Oh, well, there’s some cute ideas here.”
Will you tell me off the record what show that is?
I don’t want to manifest it.
For every strain of the sacred, there is also a sacrilegious core nestled into the accepting and lovely heart of Rick Owens. One of the first pictures of him to be published in a magazine was published right here in i-D in 2002. He stands, leather pants at his ankles, peeing right into his own mouth, a second Rick comped on the left page, kneeling receptively.
Numerous other urophilic portraits exist—he calls one taken by Nick Knight almost a decade later “glam!”—as well as pictures of Owens blowing his brains out with a Colt .45, a video of him simulating sex with a horse, and, more recently, a picture of his crotch lightly covered by pentagram underwear to promote a collaboration with Champion. (Few remember the specifics of the collab, everyone remembers the package.)
This perversity extends to his work. Male models walked with their genitals exposed in his Fall 2015 “Sphinx” show—his most brazen fashion display of provocation—but there are always taut bare torsos, extra-low-rise trousers, and gigantic boots worn with black-eyed contact lenses.
When he was a child, Owens would listen as his father read him fantasy and adventure books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The covers, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, feature bulging male figures, Amazonian women, satyrs, and other mythical creatures fused with the human form. “It’s muscles and glamour and sex,” Owens says, looking at pictures of the covers now. He chuckles, “I think this explains everything.”
I heard that when you walk into the Temple of Love exhibition, the first thing you see is a statue of you peeing.
Oh, not the first thing. That is the finale. I did it originally for Pitti Immagine 20 years ago. It was pissing on a pile of mirrors on a little pile of dirt. It was referencing that picture that I’d done a long time ago of me pissing in my mouth in i-D. So I’ve used piss a lot. Piss is one of my motifs. I actually explain it on the audio guide in French.
I heard you were learning French. How’s it going?
It’s terrible. I FaceTime with an instructor every morning at 11, like six days a week. One of the texts [in the audio guide] is about piss, in French. I’m going to read it to you in French.
Okay, I’ll try to understand.
No, I’m just kidding! This is my introduction to the fashion world.
[Owens starts reading in English from the catalogue]
“In 2002 was a spread in i-D magazine of a self-portrait of standing me in shiny leather pants pissing into the mouth of a kneeling me in shiny leather pants in a corner of my concrete studio off Hollywood Boulevard in LA. I think at the time, I was a bit embarrassed of having to insist that my voice was worth listening to, and the idea of an image of me kneeling at the altar of my own creative discharge felt at least slightly self-aware. I didn’t really think of it as being that provocative.
“I thought of it as an allegorical image related to self-absorption, isolation, and the urgency of expression and the fear of it dying on the vine unwitnessed. It also bluntly alluded to the sex club life I’d been immersed in my younger years, a period of unsentimental and primitive sensation that had a pleasing sense of strict purity at the time. Piss drinking was such an operatic ritual submission and consuming someone in such a primal way. It wasn’t a ceremony I ever actually practised, but I would go on to use this imagery as an example of extreme commitment in several subsequent creative projects, a gesture of desire as poignant as Salome’s demand for John the Baptist’s head.”
There’s a lot of Salome in this exhibition. Part of that, I realised, is to kind of underline the fact that I’m not doing anything new. My gloomy pursuit of transcendence has been part of the Symbolist culture of Paris since Gustave Moreau’s time. I have some Gustave Moreau paintings [in the exhibition], but I also have a John Chamberlain foam sculpture that I think is very American. It’s this great contrast, this big foam blob next to these exquisite angels. And there was [a Moreau painting] called Angels of Sodom that was always my favourite, but they wouldn’t lend me that one because it’s too famous.
In 2008, you made a reusable cock ring fashioned from a goat’s eyelid sold in a toadskin case. Where do you source such materials?
[Owens starts bombastically laughing]
Okay. I didn’t invent this.
What do you mean?!
I found them in a sex shop. There’s sex shops on Rue Saint-Denis That sell them, and they come in a little cardboard envelope, and it’s got a slip of paper with the instructions in bad English. I included the instructions exactly the way they came. It says that you have to moisten it and you have to place it over the “acorn” of the penis. I guess that’s the head?
[We’re laughing even harder, gasping for air]
I still don’t understand how that would work. I would assume if it’s going to do anything—I don’t really see how it can—it’s with the eyelashes, if they’re wet.
Sorry, there’s eyelashes still on it?
Yes. That’s the whole point.
That’s the point? Okay. You found the toadskin case to sell it in?
No, we made them.
[The laughter is so great we can barely speak]
Of course.
This goat’s-eye cock ring is the weirdest thing. It was also resourceful.
Sustainable even!
Glamourous in this weird … Is it glamourous?
Uhm?
Well, it was grotesque. That’s what it was. The fact of putting it in this glamourous white, bleached, albino toadskin case and putting it in a high-fashion context, that was just some symbolism.
Dadaist shit.
Any other secrets you want to share with me?
I’m such a blabbermouth. I just give everything away. Also, secrets seem a little vain. Why do I think my life is so important that anything’s worth keeping it a secret? On the other hand, oversharing is tacky, a bit narcissistic. Michèle called me a narcissist once. I was like, “Where did she pick up that word? Am I?” I’m always curious about that side of me. I did, somewhere, have to have this confidence and arrogance to insist that what I was doing was worth looking at. For somebody as overly sensitive and as fragile as I was when I was young, to have figured out how to get here … I think if anybody’s listening, it proves that if I can do it, anybody can do it. So that’s why I overshare.
At the beginning of our conversation, Owens produces a scan of his birth chart made by his late father, John Owens. Richard Saturnino Owens was born at 9:31 a.m. on November 18, 1961 in Encino, California. He is a Scorpio sun, Capricorn rising, Aries moon.
His father, a conservative “bigot”—Owens’ words, “I said that I felt he was bigoted in another article, and after that, he never spoke to me again”—not only hand-drew this birth chart, but also chose the name Saturnino. “I think it was a middle name somewhere down the line in my mom’s family, but Dad heard about it and he liked it,” Owens explains. “Dad was so pedantic and rational, studying philosophy and psychiatry. So, it’s a surprisingly mystical move on his side.”
I’ll tell you what I know of Saturn.
Saturn is the father of the gods, his shrine the highest on the Palatine Hill. Cloaked in raw wool, he presided, if you believe Virgil’s Aeneid, over the Latium for a short moment in the long life of Rome, but in that moment Saturn gave laws to all the nymphs, satyrs, and fauns of the hills. He didn’t tame them, but he led them. It was a fair and prosperous era.
Navigating the complicated and messy worlds of fashion, love, business, sex, celebrity, partying, and art is a bit like surviving at the mercy of the gods. It has killed lesser men. It kills them again and again. Rick Owens can’t be killed.