Inside Rick Owenss Venice: Italy Is Where I Create, and Paris Is Where I Am Judged

Table Of Content

• Homecoming: Rick Owens opens a theatrical flagship in Los Angeles
• Claudia Schiffer’s Cotswolds Home Is Filled With Ceramics, Chocolate, and Lots of Chanel
• Saint Laurent Unveils Parisian Bookstore
• Take a Tour of Jenna Lyons's Treasure-Filled SoHo Apartment
• INTERVIEW: Nargis and Nasir Kassamali’s Faith in Design as a Language

An L-shaped lounge system is composed of low-lying arc-backed platforms covered in army blankets and surmounted by flat mattresses. A similar platform, flat this time, holds office in the centre of the room. I first met Rick Owens at his home and studio in West L.A. He’d lived there for years, originally behind one blacked-out shop front, then two, and by the time I visited in 2000, three. Across the road was the parking lot serving his partner Michele Lamy’s restaurant, Les Deux Cafés, where gleaming stretch limousines would depose their glamorous clientele.

Homecoming: Rick Owens opens a theatrical flagship in Los Angeles

Owens showed off cute-as-pie pictures of his and Michèle’s granddaughter. Shortly afterward, his mother, Connie, FaceTimed, and Owens took her on a virtual tour of the tables to say hello to everyone. We're seeing proportions in fashion grow to ludicrous size. And there's something about that that is about mocking enforced standards of beauty.

Claudia Schiffer’s Cotswolds Home Is Filled With Ceramics, Chocolate, and Lots of Chanel

Tiny metal switches, like those in an old cockpit control panel, activate two built-in spotlights. In front of the bed, on a black plywood box, sits a flat screen TV and an iPod. From the landing, Rick’s office is on the left. It is an elongated rectangular room, echoing the downstairs showroom. Behind a long row of massive desks, a faceted cardboard wall sculpture adds an extra layer of texture. A low-backed black chair, like a futuristic Aztec glyph, sits sentinel in the middle of the space.

Saint Laurent Unveils Parisian Bookstore

The lamps look like giant willies in cashmere condoms.Well, if pee is one motif, another is the big boner. I did a collection of skirts, they kind of stuck out at the front, so there was the Boner, the Holy Boner, the Double Boner. So you see, the lamps make sense in the context of my work. My dad is ex-military, very homophobic, and ultra-conservative. We really care for each other but it really hurts how much he has to make an effort.

Rick Owens' house is a place where he can express his creativity. It is opposite his factory building where he creates his collections. In this room he lives with few things, but they are very important to him. "I don't want to live with a lot of things in this space. I'm not very acquisitive, but the things I live with are very important to me," he explains.

On the right are two administration offices, where Owens’s assistant (light well-side) and accountants (garden-side) work at keeping the wheels turning. Rick looks in, directs me up to the next level. But you don’t have a mantelpiece.And this isn’t exactly your everyday portrait. The first-floor piano nobile is a neo-Baroque bonanza in which Owens’s Judd-meets-Mountie packing-crate and elk-horn chairs look right at home. Rick Owens photographed by Assaf Shoshan for PIN–UP. In the background a wax figure of the designer, modeled by Madam Tussaud’s.

And when you can blur the standards of beauty, you can open up minds to think of other things, too. So maybe this apartment, inspired in large part by Le Corbusier’s beach house Cabanon, is less fortress than it is a frame for Owens. Maybe the austere, all-marble-everything structure does help to keep out the noise and the distractions, but it also makes for a canvas on which to drape a beautifully lived life. Rick Owens' home is not only a place to live, but also a place of creation and inspiration. His love of reduction and minimalism, paired with the extravagance and drama of his aesthetic, make this room something unique.

Aren’t you concerned about the neighbors’ prying eyes? Well, there’s no light at night, so what can they see? Besides, once you’re on the bed you’re effectively shielded from anything behind you.

Then, around forty minutes to showtime, Owens and I walked through the salon to the towering French doors overlooking the square and began to chat. Owens distanced himself from it and stressed that he and his company had not known anything about it in advance; he also banned Jera from his shows. Owens went on to call Jera his muse in several statements which he gave afterwards. Rick Owens typically produces a menswear and womenswear collection each season.

For Rick Owens, 'commercial' isn't a dirty word - Financial Times

For Rick Owens, 'commercial' isn't a dirty word.

Posted: Sun, 21 Aug 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Yet he holds a fascination for the manufacturing process. Across the landing from his office is a narrow space stretching from light well to garden in which benches are covered with resin blocks, unfinished plywood, metal rods, paint cans. True, but what’s interesting is that for all its immensity and rawness, it still feels extremely insular.The front rooms act as a kind of filter zone. And then at the back there are these huge trees, then the patio which is enclosed and gives on to the garden of the Ministry of Defense. Like Los Angeles, strangely enough, it’s a quiet little oasis, a blind space.

It’s almost biblical, heartbreaking, this man trying to get close to his son and the son making it harder and harder. After I sent him the pictures, we were in Booksoup in L.A. And I heard my dad asking the sales guy, “Excuse me, do you have anything on water sports?

Rick Owens Interview and Documentary - HYPEBEAST

Rick Owens Interview and Documentary.

Posted: Fri, 05 Feb 2016 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Well, yeah, it’s kind of like a living, breathing environment. Sometimes it seems to have a life of it’s own. Oh wow, look at this rack of shaved mink — it’s like a beautiful fog. From the left of the landing is the fashion atelier.

Owens told me he was feeling guilty that many of his most hardcore devotees couldn’t be invited this season, owing to space restrictions. “I MIGHT HAVE TO RETHINK THIS,” read the always-awesome collection notes. He had opened his home for the show, he said, in deference to the “barbaric times” we live in, times where it didn’t feel right to hold one of his typical festival-like gatherings.

The show Rick Owens shows tend to have the feelings of large, gothic congregationals. Disciples enrobed in head-to-toe Rick outfits tower over the rest of the assembled, communing with old friends and comparing gear. What I’ve always admired about them is how you can see patina and wear on even the most intense runway pieces worn by fans—they don’t bust out the fits just for the show. It’s part of their uncompromising, everyday lifestyle. Everything in Owens' house seems to cater to his aesthetic of extravagance and drama. From the army blankets to the unusual artwork and objects, each item seems to have been carefully chosen to create a unique atmosphere.