“I’m Going To Stab You 75 Times”: A Pleasant Chat With Rick Owens
Rick Owens has been standing for more than three hours. He is standing characteristically tall, wearing his towering Kiss Boots, at the back of his recently opened Berlin store next to a huge speaker pounding out piercing industrial techno. A stream of devotees, some of whom tell me they’ve spent an hour and a half queuing, ebbs and flows around him, clutching Owens’ new hardback book in one hand and their phones, camera app at the ready, in the other.
You’d think the 63-year-old designer would be exhausted. Within minutes of being in the space, dodging tall topeless male waiters serving drinks, I certainly was. A techno-induced headache was thumping in time with the beat.
But Owens is chipper. He’s enjoying every minute of the book signing — “It’s like a moshpit love orgy. I could do this forever,” he says. “I wallow like a pig in all of that goodwill” — and he still has the energy to crack jokes. At least, I hope they’re jokes.
“Now I’m going to stab you 75 times,” the designer says, grinning and ushering me into a mirrored changing room so we can talk. We’re alone. And he’s still cheerfully going on about my demise: “Then, I’m gonna cut out your tongue and use your mouth as my ashtray.”
“I didn’t sign up for that,” I squeak. Owens is still smiling.
Normally, this kind of promise might feel left-field. But this is Rick Owens, “the Lord of Darkness,” so adored that his fans collect and trade rare photos of the man himself. He wants me to be his ashtray? I’m flattered.
That’s the thing with Owens: His name precedes him in a way few other designers’ do. He has been immortalized through rap lyrics, runway stunts, and knowing freakiness. Hence why I’m not worried that he’s threatening to torture me in the same tone that he might ask me about my day. Hence why there’s a huge mob of androgynous fashion goths and streetwear-clad teenagers spending their Friday evening just trying to catch a glimpse of him. And hence why Owens was able to curate an extensive career retrospective in Paris’ historic Palais Galliera, despite still being very much alive and in the mix.
“A lot of people shy away from the word ‘retrospective’ because it implies a peak and a decline,” says Owens, adding that his wife, the uncategorizable Michèle Lamy, all but begged him not to use the label for the exhibition. “I thought: Fuck it. We’re all thinking about mortality, we’re all thinking about what we leave behind.”
“Temple of Love,” open till January 4, is everything Owens has left behind so far, i.e. three decades of industry-shaking designs. And Temple of Love, the accompanying book produced with fashion historian Alexandre Samson, charts everything that happened between the designer’s strict Catholic upbringing in small-town California and his reign as a world-conquering fashion designer. This is the book that Owens has been gleefully signing all evening.
A foreword from Hole singer Courtney Love (“You’re just a buddha, and it’s wonderful,”) kicks things off, followed by a “Manifesto for Subversion” from former Arena Homme+ editor-in-chief Jo-Ann Furniss (“[Rick Owens] is the lifestyle brand of the sick, twisted pervert”). In another essay, fashion journalist Angelo Flaccavento writes, “He certainly loves a weirdo, almost in a juvenile, provocative kind of way with a very LA brand of camp to it.”
Then we get to the juicy bits: the clothes.
Some images are photographed by Owens himself while others are borrowed from his label’s archives, such as a Fall/Winter 2001 look where a tank top littered with rips is tucked into an elegantly draped satin skirt trailing along the ground. Another standout look, from the FW15 menswear collection, is quintessential Owens, showing flowing tunic-like layers fitted with holes intentionally placed to expose the wearer’s genitalia. Other photos show mannequins dressed in a hodgepodge of designs from different seasons, including a late-’90s upcycled canvas army jacket with long strands of loose thread hanging over a silk-wool skirt from FW05. Rather than being organized chronologically, Temple of Love follows themes like “Sculptural Confrontation” and “The Joy of Decadence,” the latter chapter predominantly dedicated to photos of Owens urinating.
On the whole, the book is best thought of as a diary of Rick Owens until this point — a travelogue of sorts from someone still on their journey. Owens loves looking back. He’s dismissive of fashion’s constant demand for newness, an ill he associates with the late Karl Lagerfeld. Lagerfeld “would consume, throw away, consume, throw away… everything that’s wrong in our world,” Owens says dismissively. The Chanel creative director “was promoting voracious consumption.” Owens much prefers to “wallow in nostalgia because that’s when you learn,” he says. “Instead of just wanting new things all the time like a child.”
He admits that all this reminiscing has pushed him to reconsider the present day, and to realize anew how much there is to be done. “Everything I’ve done has been a protest against judgmental condemnation. People judge each other so harshly and so maliciously,” he says. “There have always been opposing forces that have supported and promoted otherness. That is what I can put all of my energy into: promoting otherness. That is my purpose. And the way I see the world now, supporting that kind of energy is essential. So I have plenty to do. I’m not tired.”
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