Rick Owens Is Flying High in Paris

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Just about everywhere Rick Owens goes, cameras follow. It comes with the territory as an internationally famous fashion designer who wears a darkly alluring uniform of platform boots and large dark cloaks. On Thursday morning in Paris, in fact, an entire documentary film crew is on Owens' tail backstage at the Palais de Tokyo, where he’s making final preparations for his Fall-Winter 2025 men’s runway show. “Why don’t we get some fresh air,” the designer says as he slips out a side door. A black trucker hat covers his shiny raven mane of hair. Outside, on a sunny balcony with a magnificent Eiffel Tower view, Owens takes a deep, satisfied breath while a guy with a handheld video camera observes through a window.

It’s no wonder Owens likes to regularly escape Paris for Concordia, Italy, where he keeps an apartment across the street from the brand’s factory. He’s been going to the small industrial town for 22 years to focus on making his brilliantly ghoulish clothes in what an accompanying statement described as “STUDIOUS ISOLATION. ALMOST BLEAKNESS.” (All caps Owens’ own.) It’s his isolated creative retreat, where the designer and his team withdraw to “try and create something weird and wonderful,” he says.

Owens takes a sip from a ginger beer. “Do you remember ‘Benny and the Jets’ by Elton John?” he asks. “I always loved that song. Like, Oh, but they're weird and they're wonderful. When I was young, I loved hearing that. I loved hearing that that was desirable. That was one of the few places that told me weird and wonderful was a desirable thing.”

His work has been superlatively weird and wonderful of late, but this season Owens deflated the blobs, focusing instead on the fundamental components of the Rick Owens aesthetic. Owens gazes at a man loitering on an adjacent balcony—he’s a model taking one last smoke break before hitting the runway, but you almost wouldn’t have been able to tell he’s about to walk for fashion’s god of glamor and sleaze. “Look how great that silhouette looks,” Owens says of the guy’s dark leather jacket, which by his standards looks satisfyingly straightforward, from the severe high collar—Owens calls it a “Dracu-collar”—on down. “It’s just a hip leather jacket,” he adds. “It's not cropped. It's not oversized. It's just kind of like a really normal leather jacket with a big dramatic collar that a lot of guys can get away with.”

Later that day, Owens will debut a suitcase he designed for German luxury luggagemaker Rimowa. Owens doesn’t actually particularly like traveling: “With the disappointing aesthetics and inconvenience of getting someplace, rarely is it really worth it,” he says. “I only want to travel to places that I've already set up to be as perfect as possible for me personally. And the other thing is, I fucking live in Paris. Paris is the ultimate destination. Why do I need to be running around when I haven’t completely explored my own house yet!”

But he explains that the luggage collaboration became an exercise in refinement, and as he designed the Fall collection he considered what he packs for his missions to Concordia. (“It's not about private jet traveling, which I'm not the guy to promote,” he notes.) As any smart commuter on inter-Europe airlines knows, you check trunks of clothes at your own risk. Owens makes do with just a carry on. “I love packing and figuring out what's the least I can get away with,” he says. “What is the least I can survive on? How do I make my choices count more?”

So, what is Owens throwing in his new Rimowa, which he designed (in an edition of 500) with a rusty-Richard Serra-like bronzed shell? “For me, long johns,” he says. “I learned that when I came to Europe. At first, I would hate winter.” (Owens has said he doesn’t wear underwear.) “And then all of a sudden I go, well, what if I wore long johns every day? I love winter now.” Inside, models are pulling on black thermal underwear with a distinctive pentagram design across the crotch—a signature of the designer’s mirthful provocation. “I use the pentagram as a little bit of a heckle to conservatives,” he explains. “There's a stone-throwing energy in the world right now. And when I use pentagrams, they are a vote against that. They're a vote for tolerance and otherness.”

“Then beyond that, what do you need?” Owens muses. “You need a beautiful, perfect melton coat.” Owens designed several in heavyweight traceable wool: bomber, hooded zip-up cloak, top coat. Check, check, check. “And you need a beautiful, perfect black leather coat. With a statement collar.” Also some oversized bootcut jeans encrusted in waxy bronze foil and a new platform boot lifted by a wedge of sturdy rubber—a nod to the industrial footwear worn in his factory. Card-carrying Rick Owens cult members can also pack breathtakingly insectoid boots and mini-skirts fashioned from flares of painstakingly braided leather, a collaboration with the Parisian designer Victor Clavelly.

Owens has always taken a 30,000-foot view of the industry, and his emphasis on reduction is as much a political as a practical matter. Before the designer whirls back inside to check on his troop of goth frequent flyers, he mentions the mountain of clothes and accessories luxury houses have unveiled this week. “It’s impressive,” he says. But as a luxury fashion designer himself he’s well aware of the sinister side of the insatiable demand for new stuff season after season. He calls it “voracious fashion.” “There are people like me that are kind of horrified by that,” he says. “We are making things that are non-essential, but aesthetics have always been an important part of culture. So we want to fit into that part. We don't want to fit into the disposable consumption part.”

Though he has no true aesthetic peers, Owens says he appreciates the work of designers like French menswear minimalist Christophe Lemaire and the quiet luxury-leading Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Rick Owens, even at its most pared-back, is not quiet luxury or quiet anything. But Owens seems to recognize in them a mutual monk-like devotion to creating beautiful clothes. “When I look at a Lemaire collection, that's soothing and that's nice,” he says. “And I like what The Row does. The values that they're talking about are not voracious. They can still be a little bit private jet-y, but at least it's a little bit of another option.”

As for the collections he panned? For that, you’ll have to wait for the documentary.

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