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I mean, I was a sissy boy in an intolerant conservative community. Intolerance is never going away, but we can balance it out, and that has been what the role that I've taken upon myself to do. I want to balance out intolerance by promoting alternatives to what are the standards of beauty, what are the enforced standards of beauty.
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” “No, it’s a homosexual practice.” “Well,” said the sales guy, “I’m homosexual and it’s not an exclusively gay practice.” It’s actually kind of affectionate, his reaction. Electric wires are plaited into impromptu three-pronged chandeliers in Rick and Michele’s dressing room, full of racks of clothes in the same grey, green, black tones lifted by the occasional muddy brown. In the all-but-deserted third-floor bedroom, the bed dominates the space, like an alien monolith fallen to earth onto a giant fur rug. They're just an affront to common good taste. They're a protest, and they're a protest against intolerance. I don't mean it to be bitter, but I had experienced intolerance in Porterville.
A house as a creative oasis
Near the disused elevator, one of Owens’s Pedalo chairs, an arced seat and back carved from a single form, it’s base an inverted arc of resin. I cross the Seine, walk through the Jardin des Tuileries and go to the Louvre, and then I have lunch at Le Café Marly with friends a lot. There's a church over here called the Basilique Sainte-Clotilde. I'm not religious, but I stop by there a lot because that's where I used to go with my parents when they were alive, and that keeps me connected with them. It really feels like an extension of my house.
Early life and education
I mean, nothing's authentic anymore, so to be able to provide that, that's a special thing. In 2014, Owens bought a condominium apartment on the top floor of a building just a few blocks from the Excelsior and proceeded to renovate it into a beach house version of Superman’s fortress of solitude. Basically, all that remains of the old apartment is the view—360 degrees of the sea and the lagoon and Venice itself—from the wide, wraparound marble terrace.
Like a Russian doll, the Owens-designed bed contains a shell within a shell. Set in the middle of the fourth floor, curtain-less bedroom, it is a felt-lined shelter from prying eyes. I like fashion, so I like seeing what people are doing.
For my first Paris showroom I needed benches, and a friend said, “I have a friend working with Gaetano Pesce. He can make you 50 benches in two days.” And that guy — Jacek Nowak — is still here, working away upstairs in what would have been the ideal guest room, but he insisted he couldn’t work in any other space. From producing quite utilitarian pieces for the showroom, we just naturally moved into making more statement pieces. Then when we were doing the men’s collection showroom we thought, “Hey, let’s show the furniture too.” It was like putting a show on in the backyard. But it was meant to be a one-shot thing, then it got bigger and I wanted to keep Jacek so I thought we should get serious.
At Home in Venice With Rick Owens - Vogue
At Home in Venice With Rick Owens.
Posted: Tue, 31 Aug 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]
In addition to his main line, Owens has a furniture line and a number of diffusion lines. I tease Owens that, while it is easy to mistake the all-mirror gym in the apartment as a kind of church of vanity, it is precisely the opposite. “You see every flaw,” he says, agreeing with a smile, as if he has any flaws to see.
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When we moved in, it had lowered, acoustical tile ceilings. It was inhospitable, so we ripped everything out and left it very raw. Our first seasons, everybody would come out of here covered in dust because the concrete was not sealed.
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The same dimensions as the bedroom, but playing Mike Kelley to the bedroom’s Joseph Beuys. Unlike the other sparse spaces, it’s a riot of sculptural furniture and objects. A wall-length bookshelf is full to overflowing. A freestanding room-divider provides a backdrop to of Owens’s monumentally phallic floor lamps.
A fourth-floor private study looks out over the garden of the French Ministry of Defense. The top-floor entertaining area of Rick Owens’s Paris townhouse.
As a fashion designer, you refer to yourself as a “Scotch-tape Vionnet.” As a furniture designer I’m thinking of you as a staple-gun Eileen Gray.I love Eileen Gray. But then I’m inspired by a lot of different designers, like Le Corbusier, Joe Colombo, Jacques-Emile Rhulmann. I really liked the old Art Deco pieces that I saw in pictures as a kid, they appeared so stoic and monumental. But when I saw them in real life, they were actually so small, like teeny doll furniture. My furniture takes that base, but supersizes everything.
When we think of where we are right now, wars are based on intolerance. Intolerance is the seed of war, intolerance and greed. With the permission of another young Londoner, Leo Rothman, who had made a DIY version of the infamous Kiss platform boot, Owens constructed his own version with crafty heel shanks.
I kind of like that monumentalist, rationalist Italian fascist look, but a skate park reduction of that aesthetic. Like my clothes, everything is reduced, cartoon-ish, almost dumbed-down. When you move from sophistication to crudeness you generate a kind of internal energy along the way. Rick Owens is one of fashion’s true renegades; since 1994, when the American designer launched his first store on Hollywood Boulevard, he has carved a singular path with collections that defy categorisation. His collections are shown each season at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where he has erected vast scaffold structures on the exterior – sometimes on fire, other times disappearing into clouds of fog. The show’s location – with guests sworn to secrecy in the run-up – was Owens’ current home on Paris’ Place du Palais Bourbon, which he purchased alongside his wife, Michèle Lamy in 2014.
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