Last update - 10:38 27/02/2009
Master of disaster
[FONT="]
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1067486.html[/FONT]
By Eugene Rabkin
Tags: Fashion, Rick Owens
Rick Owens, an American designer who lives and works in Paris, is the last person who would tell you he's a rebel. Draped in a black cashmere shawl that could be the flag of his multimillion dollar fashion label - which produces aggressive clothing with elements of goth and punk - Owens sits at one of the tables in his showroom-cum-studio-cum-apartment on Place de Palais Bourbon in Paris. It is the morning after his Fall-Winter 2009 menswear runway show, his first in a couple of years and an instant hit. The rave reviews have already come out in the fashion press, and the first-floor showroom swarms with buyers from all over the world.
The showroom is long and narrow, lined with racks of Owens' signature slim leather jackets, asymmetric tailored coats, and featherweight rayon T-shirts. His chunky black boots (including a men's pair featuring a five-inch heel), oversized sneakers and huge leather bags are displayed in the adjacent room. The main room has a glass wall at the back with a door that opens onto a courtyard. Two stuffed monkeys on a stand (Owens is fascinated with monkeys) are the room's only decoration. Black-clad assistants rush around filling orders; tall, skinny boys model clothes for the buyers, putting them on and ripping them off at the speed of light; and the phone rings off the hook.
Owens sips coffee and butters his raisin toast, unaffected by the hubbub. His tanned face, with its expressive brown eyes and long black hair, is absolutely calm and just a little bit weary. His voice is calming in itself, a relaxed Californian drawl, interrupted by sincere, warm laughter. Owens has a welcoming presence about him. "Excuse me, I have to go hug somebody," he says, getting up to greet Alan Bilzerian of the eponymous Boston boutique. Coming back in a few minutes, he says, "That was Alan. He hasn't been feeling well lately, so naturally I am worried."
Though the fashion world often claims it loves a rebel, it rarely welcomes one. Owens is one of the few exceptions who has not only survived in this cutthroat business, but has also prospered.
He was born in Los Angeles in 1961. His family soon moved to Porterville, a small town halfway between LA and San Francisco. As a teenager in high school, Owens got into goth culture. "Wearing black was a way to project a more menacing demeanor and to hide my insecurities," he says. Still, those years have left a permanent imprint on his style. There is nothing polished about his designs - the raw and twisted seams, the unfinished hems, and the earthy colors emphasize his desire to reflect a world that is imperfect. This is probably what first attracted me to his clothes - they firmly insist on imperfection. They defy the glamour fantasy that popular culture, fashion included, tries to cram down our throats.
The double
After finishing high school, Owens moved back to Los Angeles to study painting at Otis College of Art and Design. He dropped out in his second year and got a job as a pattern maker in a sportswear company owned by Michele Lamy, a French expatriate who lived in Los Angeles for many years. Owens and Lamy soon began an affair. At the time Lamy was married and Owens, who is bisexual, had a boyfriend. After some time, they left their significant others and moved in together. Lamy closed the sportswear business and opened a restaurant, and Owens started making clothes. They have been together for 19 years.
Lamy descends the stairs and Owens introduces us. She makes quite an impression, especially if you have never seen her before. In her sixties, she is petite and fierce. Her piercing blue eyes, deeply set in her dark face, are inquisitive and glow with energy. She is dressed in an alligator vest, with a fur vest on top of it, gray and black tights with a rectangle pattern, and over-the-knee boots. A huge oxidized silver necklace resembling a cross hangs around her neck. She looks like a Viking queen magically transported into the 21st Century; I found myself wishing she carried a sword.
"You know, the first two years we lived together, I couldn't understand a word she was saying," says Owens, "and not because of the French accent, but because she is a very instinctual person - she doesn't finish sentences, she has no regard for punctuation, she talks with her hands, and it's all very vague, whereas I am really a very pragmatic person. But that's exactly what I need."
Their life together in Los Angeles was infused with drugs and alcohol, but today both of them are completely sober. Owens works out almost every day, even while visiting his factory in Italy. "I work out and then I come home and take a little nap. I need this time to myself. Otherwise I get oversaturated. When I used to live in Los Angeles I had a personal trainer and would take steroids. I love steroids - they get you to a higher level when you work out. Of course I got too puffy, but they helped me to build up the muscle, and once I lost all that top weight, I was in good shape."
Owens' body is now slim and muscular, and he does not mind displaying it. His store in Palais-Royal features a nude wax statue of him that Owens commissioned from the artisans at Madame Tussaud's. This statue was first displayed in 2006 at Pitti Uomo, an Italian menswear fashion fair. It was suspended in the air, the hands holding the penis, out of which a stream of fake urine poured onto shattered glass. In the store, the lower part of the statue is covered by a black blanket.
"Once, Rick was in the store adjusting the blanket on the statue, and some people came into the store and were staring at one Rick fiddling with another Rick's groin," recalled Barbara Ayme Jouve, the store's managing partner, "and I said, 'Rick, there are people staring at you,' and he turns around, smiles, and drops the blanket." Owens's fascination with the double is apparent elsewhere - in a book of his photographs, "L'Ai-Je Bien Descendu?" ("How Did You Like My Descent?"), there is a picture of Owens urinating into his doppelganger's mouth.
Perseverance pays
For a while, Owens and Lamy lived in a rented apartment off Hollywood Boulevard. Lamy spent most of her time at the restaurant and Owens concentrated on his designs. He avoided the fashion world like the plague. "Right from the beginning I steered clear of the editors, PR companies and stylists - I went straight to the stores I thought highly of, the ones that 'got' fashion. I simply showed up with a bag of clothes at their door and I wouldn't leave until I met with the owner."
His perseverance paid off. Owens first got his clothes into Charles Gallay in Los Angeles, and then cut an exclusive deal with Maxfield after Charles Gallay closed. By going directly to the stores, Owens let his clothes speak for themselves, and people responded to his language of destroyed luxury. His talent for combining elegance with grit manifested itself in washed shrunken-leather jackets with super-slim arms and cashmere T-shirts whose seams were irreverently shredded. This was beauty of another sort, without the fatuous glitter.
By the end of the decade, Owens' name started to make its rounds in the fashion circles, finally reaching Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. Wintour gave Owens prominent coverage in the magazine, which also sponsored his first runway show in 2002, seven years after he started selling clothes in stores. In the same year, with Wintour's influence, Owens received an award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Soon after, Owens developed a financial relationship with Luca Ruggeri and Elsa Lanzo, whose investment firm, EBA, partnered with young designers. From the start, Ruggeri had full confidence in Owens. "I first saw Rick's work at Maria Luisa [a Parisian boutique]," says Ruggeri, "and I was immediately intrigued. I had never seen such unconventional clothes anywhere. I asked the owner who the designer was, because I had never heard of him. Next time I was in Los Angeles, I looked Rick up. We had a meeting and we hit it off."
Ruggeri invested in Owens, and found an Italian manufacturer for him, Olmar and Mirta. "It is a real mom-and-pop operation," Owens says, "and it's in the middle of nowhere. They'd never seen anything like my designs, and it was hard to make them understand what I wanted to do. I lived six months of the year in the factory, because the town didn't have a hotel. They were really nice to me, though - they gave me a room with a couch, which also doubled as my office, and built a shower for me."
Around the same time, Owens was hired as a creative director for Revillon, an old French fur company. Finally, shuttling between Los Angeles and Europe became unbearable and in 2003 Owens and Lamy moved to Paris.
Today Owens feels at home in the City of Lights. "From my place I walk through the Tuileries gardens to Palais-Royal [his boutique near the Louvre], and to my gym. To say that it's my neighborhood is amazing. When we first moved and we would drive through Place de la Concorde on the way home, I would think, 'That's incredible. That's what my life is like now.' And to tell you the truth, now every once in a while I forget to notice all this splendor and I get mad at myself."
Despite the move, Owens remains close to his parents in Porterville, "I bring them to Paris twice a year for my women's shows. First it was a huge deal for my parents to come here, because they are from a small town and they never traveled, but now they are bored with Paris. I like bringing them here because they are still protective of me, and I like to feel that. Of course they can be overpowering, especially my Dad. He used to be a real fundamentalist. He has mellowed out now, but he still will say something hilarious, like, 'Don't you know any heterosexuals?'
"I think that my success has forced him to come to terms with my way of life. Money changes everything. I still tease him sometimes. He'll introduce me to someone and say, 'This is my son. He is a businessman in fashion,' and I'll say, 'I don't know anything about business; I'm just a big sissy making dresses.'"
Drugstore cowboy
The French have a notoriously ambivalent relationship with American culture, and Owens was unsure about the reception he would get designing for Revillon. "An American designing for a venerable old French house is not exactly the kind of thing that bowls them over, but I did not care. I don't believe in revitalization of old fashion houses. It's a ***** thing to do, just for the paycheck. It's so much more hardcore to do your own thing. So I did not feel the weight of tradition or anything like that, and I started from scratch. I think in the end I won them over."
It is hard to say what the French love in Owens. Maybe it was his gig at Revillon, which lasted briefly before the company went out of business. Or maybe their fascination with Owens was akin to that of a complacent bourgeois watching a Western. And here was a drugstore cowboy of their own - weird, unconventional and the complete opposite of them.
Perhaps this enigmatic image is what lures celebrities to his work, because Owens is currently in the spotlight. The online and print tabloids are full of pictures of stars (Jennifer Aniston, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, Victoria Beckham) wearing Owens' clingy tees and shrunken leather jackets. Not to be outdone, male pop royalty like John Mayer and Justin Timberlake have made Owens' jumbo sneakers, which retail for $1,400, their footwear of choice.
on error resume next ShockMode = ( IsObject(CreateObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.4")))if ( ShockMode
