Late Bloomer on the Cutting Edge
Piles of fabric drift across the raw concrete floor like sand dunes, their flow impeded only by a few spare pieces of furniture, a stuffed monkey on a pedestal, a skull perched on a lamp and a gleaming black grand piano. Paint flakes from rough walls in the intriguingly decaying work space that designer Rick Owens also calls home. In a trio of disheveled storefronts off Hollywood Boulevard, the designer lives and works in a seamless aesthetic that melds dingy luxury with gothic glamour.
Here, behind dusty windows and mysterious gates, is the future of American fashion. It was so declared by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a New York-based trade group that two weeks ago handed Owens its Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent. Though he’s been working as a designer for nearly 10 years, six under his own label, it took two New York fashion shows, an endorsement by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, raves from retailers and celebrities and a few compelling photos to grab fashion’s attention.
As a congratulatory bouquet of lilies scented a corner of his apartment atelier, Owens still basked in winning the equivalent of a fashion Oscar. “It was pretty heady,” he said. His well-wishers have included the likes of David Bowie.
“At the beginning I was a little embarrassed,” said the designer, 40, of his nomination along with decades-younger Zac Posen, Behnaz Sarafpour and Peter Som. “I felt I was a little old for that. Like I was this old vampire with all these other young nominees. But I have to admit that it’s nobody’s fault but my own, because I never let myself be visible until fairly recently.”
His potential was obscured by his lifestyle. Owens matter-of-factly calls himself “a skinny, white, vodka-swilling Goth” who realized that being drunk every night hindered his progress. His desire for all-night parties went away when his self-abuse got ugly some years ago. Now he’s a muscled picture of health, and his clothes are firmly on high fashion’s radar.
“It’s very elegant, but it’s street,” said Maxfield buyer Sarah Stewart, who has bought his line for five years and appreciates how Owens pulls from the gritty side of Hollywood. Though his $500 to $800 crinkled silk skirts, $1,200 washed leather jackets and $200 overdyed cotton T-shirts have been a fixture at Maxfield, Henri Bendel in New York and Maria-Luisa in Paris, Owens is the glamourista’s secret.
That changed just a year ago, when he signed with Eo Bocci Associates, a Turin-based sales agency that has arranged his manufacturing at a nearby family-run factory, Olmar and Mirta, and within a year boosted his distribution from 10 stores to 90, including Barneys New York. “If it took a while, it was only my own natural reticence,” he said, while settling into a lunch of salmon and buttered bread at Les Deux Cafes, the Hollywood hot spot that faces his studio and is operated by his muse and partner of 13 years, Michele Lamy, who is 17 years his senior.
“I think there were people who were interested, but they didn’t detect a level of commitment in me,” he said. Now he spends weeks at a time in the remote Italian village of Concordia, overseeing production and designing until midnight. “I’m taking it super seriously,” he said. “This is life and death for me.”
He knew that showing in New York would be like stepping over a divide. “I was intimidated by the whole lifestyle issues it entailed,” said Owens, dressed in his signature shadow-gray tank top, overdyed slashed pants and high-tops.
“Once you start, you can never stop. You’re looking at this financial burden for the rest of your life.” Worse, he sacrificed a contained life that he called idyllic. Working and living across Las Palmas Avenue from Lamy’s restaurant has helped create a comfortable nucleus that includes Lamy; her ex-husband and business partner, filmmaker Richard Newton; and their daughter, Scarlett Rouge Newton, 20.
“He’s very family-oriented,” said friend Anne Crawford, an L.A. publicist. “When he’s here, his time is really precious. He’ll be at the restaurant every night because that is kind of their cafeteria, and that’s their family time.”
It’s easy to see Owens as a gentle, shy artist, but that image is incomplete. He’s also the provocateur who grins when he shows you a self-portrait that he sent to several publications as his press portrait. It shows a naked Owens urinating toward a kneeling man. That was just one picture that he sent as an introduction to photographer Annie Leibovitz, who later shot him for a Vogue photo essay. The other showed him in bed with the scoliosis-afflicted dwarf transvestite Goddess Bunny.
“When people are a little too prim, I get impatient,” he said. “And there’s something wonderfully adolescent and rebellious about doing things like that.”
The self-described late bloomer has lived a fantasy bohemian life that once had him and Lamy living at Chateau Marmont. In his 20s, he sported a nose ring, got his first tattoos and lived like a squatter in a Culver City warehouse space that was reachable only by ladder. “I was so delusional in those days,” he says with a measure of disbelief.
It’s been a long journey from Porterville, a town of 30,000 north of Bakersfield where Owens was the only child of a social worker father, John, now 86, and a teacher’s aide mother, Connie, 70. After high school, Owens studied painting for almost two years beginning in 1979 at the Otis Parsons Art Institute in L.A. He learned pattern making at Trade Tech College. He spent six years applying those skills in the garment district, including two years for Lamy, a former defense lawyer who was a clothing designer when they met. Now he draws for pleasure, or to sketch a new collection.
“It’s such a personal thing doing painting and stuff,” he says of his decision to abandon fine art. “It would have been hard to, like, hustle that. I can totally hustle clothes.”
To create what he calls “vintage clothes, but from what planet?” Owens cultivates living fashion history. He’s a regular visitor to the home of Eleanor Lambert, 98, a pioneer New York fashion publicist. And when he lunches with famed couturier James Galanos, Owens admits to pumping him for stories.
“There’s a sense of history in everything that I do,” he said. “Since my clothes are autobiographical, there is a certain element of dissolution. There’s always a bit of naughty and nice that makes things a little more realistic.”
It’s not unusual to find an unfinished hem on an item that might also sport a French seam that hides raw edges. “People say I’m edgy or rough,” he said, “but everything I do is sort of classical. It’s almost textbook.” With their intricate drapes, folds and delicate seams, his clothes seem like sensual modern togas. Unlike many designer neophytes who jumped into today’s asymmetrical silhouettes, Owens’ abstractions fit.
“The clothes are sexy,” said Ed Burstell, vice president of Bendel, where Owens is a top-selling designer. “And they are extremely flattering to different body types.”
Owens’ clothes are different because they’re not made for an 18-year-old supermodel. “I’m making clothes for people of my generation. I’m 40, and I think my clientele is 40 and around there. They’re not completely starry-eyed,” he said. “I like those really strong, sensitive, artsy women in their 40s and early 50s.” And he knows that they still like to impress their husbands, without resorting to tawdriness: “I think my clientele can look sexy without looking ridiculous.” As proof, there’s Lamy in two gray-toned tank tops over a flowing white silk skirt topped with a washed leather jacket that fits like a second skin.
Dressed in his clothes day and night, she personifies Owens’ philosophy of timeless clothing. Crawford, the friend and publicist, once asked Lamy what she wore to the beach. “Rick Owens,” came the answer. “But I didn’t know he made swimwear,” Crawford replied. He doesn’t.
“It’s like out of a Fellini movie,” Crawford said. “She’ll emerge out of the water in a full-length dress with the train dragging in the sand.” Lamy wears the clothes wherever she happens to be, as other women do jeans and T-shirts.
Both Owens and his muse understand the importance of the dramatic gesture, the commitment to living life as an ongoing artistic enterprise. That shiny black grand piano is not only the sole important, grown-up piece of furniture in their living quarters; it’s a symbol of the kind of cultured, educated life that inspires both of them. Neither one can play a note.
