Recently Rick Owens, a self-proclaimed “sissy kid” from Porterville, Calif., turned underground Los Angeles designer turned Parisian fashion dark lord, opened an OnlyFans account — for his feet.
The nominal motivation for the account was a show. Not the epic men’s show/quasi-religious experience he held Thursday, but a career retrospective at the Palais Galliera. Entitled “Temple of Love,” it places his futuristic, freak-meets-goddess aesthetic convincingly in the pantheon of such fashion greats as Azzedine Alaïa and Mario Fortuny and confirms his place as the most inside outsider in fashion.
But having reached that pinnacle got him thinking about decline, which got him thinking about the Countess of Castiglione, one of Napoleon’s mistresses and a celebrated beauty who eventually retreated to an apartment on Place Vendôme and, Mr. Owens said, “only ever did portraits of her feet.” So he decided to do it his way, with all the profits going to a refuge for trans youth.
Sex and death are an integral part of the Owens shtick. So are wide-ranging classical allusions, beauty and generosity, all of it wrapped up in a complicated battle of grandiose silhouettes and far-flung references that gets resolved in some of the most gorgeous, original clothes being made today.
That is why the sweeping display of the museum show is bookended by two small rooms. One features a rumpled bed that is a replica of the bed in Mr. Owens’s home. The other, which comes with a warning label, features a number of videos, including one of Michèle Lamy, Mr. Owens’s wife, muse, business partner and all-around enabler on her 80th birthday, pulling down her underpants and sitting squash on top of her chocolate birthday cake.
In front of the videos, on a plinth, is a life-size, anatomically correct sculpture of a shirtless Mr. Owens in leather jeans, peeing into a basin. He had it made by the experts at Madame Tussaud’s for a Pitti Uomo men’s wear show in 2006.
There is no other designer working today — certainly not one with about $140 million in annual revenues — whose life and self are as fully intertwined with his brand as Rick Owens. He sleeps and eats where he works and works where he works out and wears what he makes. None of it is a performance. All of it is real. From the outside it can look bizarre, but it is always entirely sincere. Almost routine.
Simply consider a day in his life. Or how his life is reflected in his day.
8 a.m.
Mr. Owens always gets up at the same time, even on the weekends and even on vacation. He and Ms. Lamy sleep on the fourth floor of his headquarters, which were once the Socialist Party headquarters in the heart of bourgeois Paris.
The room is dominated by a monumental bed of his own design and a giant flat-screen TV. The first things he does after his alarm goes off is read the newspapers, answer emails and then, at least for the last few months, watch “The Black Cat,” a 1934 movie starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The film is about “a young couple whose car crashes and they end up in this big mansion owned by an architect who, it turns out, happens to have a satanic cult and keeps his ex-lovers in glass cases in his basement,” Mr. Owens said.
“It’s black-and-white Art Deco, kind of creepy, wonderfully satanic and also ridiculous,” he said, which could also be a description of his own work. “But there’s something about how the villain has found a way to trap his passions, to isolate them and keep them in a very controlled way, that is soothing to me. So I indulge in that.”
Mr. Owens doesn’t have a particularly elaborate morning beauty routine. The exception is his hair, which he dyes black himself every two weeks. He doesn’t cut it, but he does get it chemically straightened every three months.
“It’s getting thinner,” he said. “Every time I go to the hair salon, I’m nervous they’re going to say: ‘We just can’t do this any more. Your hair’s so thin, and there’s a bald spot.’” He said that if they did, “I’d find somebody less scrupulous.” He likes it because “it just tidies everything.”
“I don’t like clutter,” he said. “Maybe there’s something undisciplined I’m afraid of. Obviously, I live with Michèle, and she is completely chaotic. But there’s something so graceful about the way she does it that I admire. She’s the only one who can make me raise my voice. She loves confrontation. I love diffusing confrontation, but every once in a while, she pokes the bear, and I just kind of lose it. Then I hate myself for months afterward for being so weak.”
10 a.m.
After his coffee — always two and a half cups of espresso — Mr. Owens heads downstairs to his office-studio. He hates breakfast. “I need the espresso and that emptiness to feel momentum,” he said.
The office is on the second floor of the headquarters. On the first floor is the dining room, which contains a Georges Hoentschel urn that was shown in the 1900 Paris Exposition. (It was part of a pair; the other one is in the Met.) Nearby is the grand salon, which is filled with Rick Owens furniture and art that he and his wife have collected.
They have an Anselm Kiefer that was given to them by the artist, an aluminum tank filled with sperm by the Estonian rapper Tommy Cash and two steel benches designed by Mr. Owens, atop which are stacks of what looks like insulation but is actually felted human hair by the Serbian artist Zoran Todorovic; people can sit on the art.
Routine is very important to Mr. Owens. “When I was young, I was a raging alcoholic,” he said by way of explanation.
“It was melodramatic, a little bit nihilistic, a little bit self-destructive, very fear-based, about never fulfilling my potential, never making it,” he went on. “So when I stopped drinking, I got very into routine. Maybe that became my next addiction.”
It wasn’t drugs. Mr. Owens said he and Michele “did LSD and mushrooms during Covid in our garden, but after 20 minutes I was ready to move on. I just don’t have the patience to commit. And I don’t want to know the dark sides of me.”
11 a.m.
After 20 years of living in Paris, Mr. Owens has started taking French classes. He liked the idea of learning something new, and he thought it would be “polite” to read part of the exhibition’s audio guide in French — including a passage from Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” But “it’s even worse than I thought,” he said.
“I wonder if some buttons were being pushed, reminding me of school, and the pressure and the stress of feeling stupid and awkward.” Nevertheless he has kept up with the lessons because he said he would.
12 p.m.
There are only about five people on the Owens design team; Mr. Owens cuts and drapes most of his clothes himself.
“I used to be into destroyed everything,” he said. “I realized that the destroyed thing, which is a very common classical trope, was an adolescent expression of contempt, which makes me wince a little bit. I still have that defiance and rebellion, but now, instead of just complaining and expressing contempt, I feel the responsibility to make a proposal and to contribute instead of just complain. I’m aiming for something more elegant than just rejection.
“It’s a tricky thing. You want to be reckless and bold and go as far as you want to go, but you can’t go too far or you alienate everybody.”
1:30 p.m.
Mr. Owens generally eats on the terrace of his house with Ms. Lamy. Once a week he may go to Café Marly in the Louvre with the Paris store team. He eats the same thing almost every day: salmon or whitefish with a salad of beets, avocado and egg whites and pineapple and melon for dessert. Recently he changed his diet after consulting with a nutritionist.
“There’s a certain amount of pressure every day that I accept, and I enjoy,” he said. “But I was waking up feeling a little more anxious.” He attributed it partly to the death of his parents.
“I suspect it was my father,” he said. “His body was shutting down, and he could not accept that. I look at my dad a lot because he is me — all of the bad things in me, all of the good things. He was an orphan during the Depression, and his life was very much about refining himself to be the best he could be. He was very honorable.
“Unfortunately, he was also kind of mean. But he’s my blueprint. So I’m thinking, ‘Is this anxiety coming from a chemical imbalance?’ I went to get blood tests. The nutritionist said, ‘You’re eating too much cake.’”
2:30 p.m.
When he and Ms. Lamy moved to Paris, in 2003, Mr. Owens started taking a nap every day on the daybed in his dressing room. He calls it his escape route. “I had to respond to so many people, this was my way of shutting everything off,” he said.
His dressing room and bathroom — an all-marble box that contains only a marble toilet — are next to the bedroom. Ms. Lamy’s is on the top floor, and her dressing room, which is lined in cardboard packing boxes where she keeps her clothes, doubles as a guest bedroom. It is also where their cat, Pixie, a hairless sphynx that resembles a gremlin, sleeps.
Every once in a while they clear out their closets and send a rack of clothes to their factory in Italy with a note: “This is for the church.” It means anybody can take whatever they want.
3 p.m.
Back to work, perhaps checking out the last details for the museum show. If Mr. Owens goes to the Galliera, he likes to stop at a grotto behind the Grand Palais, where dragonflies flit among the bamboo. When he sees them, he points and goes, “Aw.”
“People who aren’t into fashion, or who don’t know me, can assume that I’m this dystopian, aggressive provocateur,” Mr. Owens said. “So when we were coming up with a title for the show, I thought we needed to balance that with something warm and welcoming. Just putting the word ‘love’ out there is never a bad idea.” Later he said, “It’s better than ‘I hate conservatives.’”
6:30 p.m.
Instead of princess cake from the Swedish Institute in Paris, which used to be his favorite pick-me-up, Mr. Owens now has a protein shake made with Abbot Kinney’s coconut yogurt, one scoop of protein powder, two kiwis and blueberries for a snack. Then he keeps working.
8:30 p.m.
Lately Mr. Owens has been hitting the home gym he set up in his studio. He thought, “It’s great to work out, tinker on something, work out, tinker.”
Currently he is working out to a new remix of “Burning Down the Sluthouse” by Lovefoxy and a techno remix of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” When he started exercising, he took guided steroids for about two years, which he credits with totally changing his body, but he doesn’t anymore.
9 p.m.
Mr. Owens does not cook. Mostly he and Ms. Lamy eat out — in the winter at J.K. Place because it’s cozy and in the summer at the brasserie on the corner. Then they watch TV. Lately they’ve been watching the Bella Freud podcast “Fashion Neurosis” (Mr. Owens has been on Ms. Freud’s couch), and before that they were watching the HBO series “Getting On” with Laurie Metcalf.
Before bed, Mr. Owens will have a few cigarettes. “I just do it in a very controlled way, the way I drink coffee, the way I kind of do everything,” he said. “It’s very much about getting the cigarette buzz before I go to sleep.” He smokes only Marlboro Light 100s from Japan, which he likes because the box is all white and doesn’t have any warning labels. He keeps a stash in his dressing room.
Recently he started drinking again, in moderation. He has a shot of gin before bed. He likes Seventy One, which is in what looks like an enormous cologne bottle. “I was thinking it would be nice to have a delicious little warm buzz at the end of the day,” he said.
Also he thought: “If anything goes wrong, it’ll take about five years before I really tank the company. But I don’t need to escape the way I did. I’m in a different space now.”
11:30 p.m.
Bed.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
Simbarashe Cha is a Times photographer and visual columnist documenting style and fashion around the world.
The post Inside the Bedroom, Bathroom and Mind of Rick Owens appeared first on New York Times.
