Rick Owens on Airport Cake, Life-Changing Hotels, and Watching ‘Lord of the Rings’ on a Plane

It’s hard to picture Rick Owens—the fashion designer best known for his starkly alien, Brutalist-meets-Gothic aesthetic sensibility—in someplace as mundane as, say, a Delta Lounge. His attenuated frame, draped in gauzy layers of black and balanced on his teetering platform boots, grabbing some yogurt at a Marks & Spencer in Charles de Gaulle? Unthinkable! And yet, the man has to travel, doesn’t he? “Oh, I don’t like to travel,” Owens told GQ from Paris on Thursday, just hours after unveiling his fall-winter 2025 collection on the runway. “Especially long flights. Luckily, I don’t have to travel as much as other people do.”

So perhaps it’s somewhat surprising that Owens' latest collaboration—following linkups with everyone from Moncler and Champion to Aesop and Converse—has travel at its core. For his new partnership with Rimowa, Owens has recast the German luxury brand’s iconic roller suitcase in his own freaky image. That meant bronzing the familiar ribbed aluminum exterior by hand through a painstaking pigment application process, leaving each of the 500 limited-edition models with a wholly unique rusted veneer. Owens was inspired by the bronze sculptures of artwork greats Richard Serra, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantine Brancusi, but one can also see in their turgid, muddy coloring a flash of Owens’s love of all things sordid and earthy.

“The moment I got mine, with its leather-lined interior and matching toiletry bag, I thought, ‘How did I last so long without this?’” said Owens. To finish things off right, the designer crafted severe and sumptuous baggage tags from calfskin and coarse hair—which his models also wore around their necks as accessories during today’s fashion show.

The suitcases, which will retail for $3,525, are scheduled to hit Rimowa’s online store and select physical locations on January 30. GQ spoke exclusively to Owens—after his post-show nap and before he went downstairs for a warmed-up cookie—about the collaboration, his travel habits, his favorite hotels, and much more.

Matteo Carcelli

Rick Owens: Oh yeah, I’ve been using a Rimowa for … not quite 20 years, but definitely more than 10 or 15. I bounce between Italy and Paris, so it’s a constant fixture in my life, like a phone or a toilet—they’re essential. I think about essential things all the time, because I like reducing my life to essential things, and not needing a lot.

I believe in having—needing—less things, but making each thing count more. And it is an attitude that is about non-disposability and permanence. I make very conscious choices. Someone once asked me, “Isn’t that very OCD?” And I thought, not really. I think everybody would want to customize everything around themselves if they could.

Oh yeah, they’re functional sculptures.

It made me think like a 1930s movie star like Marlene Dietrich—she would've had a leather-lined carry-on.

I was just trying to think of a way to be able to talk about Rimowa as being part of the show, but the whole project ended up being so profoundly part of the collection. Because [I was] working with Rimowa and thinking about it—about reducing, and making choices count more, and traveling for all of the years. I travel to this little town [Concordia, Italy, where Owens owns an apartment across the street from his factory] to try and craft something as magical as I could in this austere isolation.

This sounds douchey, but there's an element of self-deprivation when you are not living in the most glamorous place. You are there to work in a factory that is all functional, all industrial, and there's no beach, no nightclubs, no restaurants. It's all work. And I love it. It's monastic.

Matteo Carcelli

Not really. Especially long flights. Thankfully, I don't have to travel much, [or at least] as much as a lot of people do. My job isn't dependent on making personal appearances or going to dinner parties. But speaking of Marlene Dietrich—she's another one of my touchstones—I think about her famous feather coat and Jean Louis dress. That coat was really in swan’s down, which is really compactable. She could have fit that into my Rimowa collab! That and one Jean Louis dress, and she could tour for five years. I also think of Edie Sedgwick because supposedly, in her prime, she toured Europe with two mink coats, a T-shirt, and a pair of tights.

I always travel wearing platforms and a coat—that’s my silhouette. In the summer the coat is in chiffon. But I always wear the platforms because I feel like if anybody sees me, I want them to know that I mean what I say, and that everything I put on a runway, it's for real.

Also, the platforms are ridiculous—and that's the appeal. They're kind of a statement against good taste. And when I'm wearing platforms, I'm thinking about some 10-year-old sissy who's out there, and I want them to see that they can do anything they fucking want.

I always go to Marks & Spencer. There's one at Charles de Gaulle. When I return back to Paris, I always stop there to pick up a cake because they usually have either a chocolate cake or a lemon drizzle cake. And they're really good. I always get those and I always get scones—I like scones for breakfast—so I get three packs of scones and yogurt.

There's not much. It's usually stuff that I'm working on. When I do each collection, I do printouts of each garment made small, and then I tape them together to create looks. And then I end up with a whole line of these looks with fabric swatches. And that's how I work on collections. So I fold that up and I usually have it in there. I usually have some books and my beauty case. I still carry a toothbrush, for some reason.

Matteo Carcelli

I used to get these bone toothbrushes with natural bristles, but then I started getting toothbrushes from Officine Universelle Buly—they're tortoise looking. I have toothpaste from Selahatin because the graphics are very beautiful and it's in a white metal tube.

Well, I’ve been using Aesop for ages, because it smells good. It feels good. There’s this Neroli aftershave that I love, and this vetiver hand cream I use for my body—but not my face, because it gives me pimples. Oh, and a lip balm. And I put on a perfume before I go to bed, and I wash it off in the morning.

I just take a pill. My last flight, though, was to Mexico, and I watched one of the Lord of the Rings movies that I hadn't seen before. The visuals were so beautiful and it was really kind of intense. It was very much about death and loss and hope and the transcendence of doing the right thing. I was really impressed. I was thinking, “Wow, this is a great movie.”

Yes.

Should I say? I don’t want it to get too crowded.

My favorite hotel in the world is the Al Moudira in Luxor, Egypt. I love Egyptian things, [like the] pyramids. It is a bit remote, but it recently got bought. It used to be privately owned. I hope they didn't zhuzh it up too much. I hope it didn't get too bougie.

I love the rooms at the Villa d’Este. Just the paintings in the halls and the flower arrangements and everything. That's kind of fancy and I don't really like a jet set kind of world or a private jet kind of world. But you’ve got to respect a hotel like Villa d’Este. Also because of all of the history with all of the Helmut Newton photo shoots there. I love walking through Newton-documented rooms. And I love the Excelsior, which is my second home in Venice. I've lived a lot of my life in that hotel.

Oh! Wait a second. I was just in Asia a couple of months ago, and the Amans there—they are incredible. The one in Kyoto, it used to be some kind of private estate, and it's just these different bungalows, but the gardens are just so beautiful. And then the one in…I think Hangzhou. It used to be part of the summer palace, and they used to be reception rooms for dignitaries waiting to talk to the king or something. But they're all wood and they're kind of like barns with wooden pillars and super simple and monastic. But they’re the perfect portions with stone floors and they each have a little garden at the front entrance. Those were magic. That changed my life. Those hotels will ruin you.

Not really. I’m not that inviting and I don't look around that much. Although the last time I was in the Bologna airport there was this gang of college soccer players. And the younger sissy me would've been threatened. But now they want selfies. And it's the cutest thing because, just thinking of all these straight guys, they would've beat me up 40 years ago!

There's a part of me that likes corrupting contemporary culture with my aesthetic. And I like simple things. My life is full of simple things. When I started out, the way a T-shirt was cut and could be elevated into something special and architectural and unique—it’s so great.

I think of Larry LeGaspi. He was a designer in the seventies, and he did kind of this camp, Space Age, Busby Berkley, futuristic kind of thing. He designed for LaBelle and Kiss, So there’d be soul women or a metal band wearing silver space suits and feathers, or kabuki makeup and 1930s glamour. So it’s this gay guy, this queen, who infiltrated soul culture or stadium rock culture, and it was beautiful. That thrills me.

So if I can do that in my own little way—if there's this guy who's a 60-year-old sleazy queen, wearing platforms at an airport, making stuff that high school kids in the Midwest are wearing—I love that. It's an opportunity to talk to more people about tolerance and condemnation. Encouraging people not to be so condemning, to not be so intolerant and to think outside the box and be more inclusive. I mean, I represent the freaks everywhere.