On a dreary November day in Paris, the soft morning light
is creeping into the American fashion designer Rick Owens’s 18th-century mansion, just south of the Seine in the Seventh Arrondissement, where he and his French wife and business partner, Michèle Lamy, 80, have lived for 20 years. One of the few truly independent creative heads of a major brand, he’s built an improbable empire by making clothes as grotesque as they are glamorous. But three decades into his career — and a few days after turning 62 — Owens finds himself at a crossroads. He’s just returned from a birthday trip to the Pacific Coast of Jalisco, Mexico, where he rode horses with his muse, design assistant and frequent travel companion, the towering 30-something Australian model Tyrone Dylan Susman, whose Instagram feed has also shown them among Greek ruins, in the Dubai desert and on beaches around the world (where they’ve been known to wear matching caps with each other’s names on them). Now that Owens is back, he and Lamy, a 5-foot-2 agent of creative chaos with kohl-rimmed electric blue eyes, gold-plated teeth and two young grandchildren, have been overseeing their latest project: relocating the Rick Owens men’s and women’s runway shows, normally staged in the monumental courtyard at the Palais de Tokyo, a Neoclassical-style structure housing two museums with stone colonnades and a large reflecting pool, to their living room.
“I think it’s become too bombastic,” he says of the Palais de Tokyo shows as he scans the gutted first floor of what was once the French Socialist Party headquarters. (When he and Lamy arrived in 2004, the five-storey townhouse had been sitting empty for two decades; today, its chalky walls and floors — not part of an ongoing renovation but the finished product — conjure a squat more than a residence.) “Subliminally, I think I’ve been designing collections to match [the Palais’s] grandeur.” His extravagant productions, often presented against a sky of colourful smoke bombs or amid flame-engulfed pyres for hundreds of “freaks”, “weirdos” and “messy queens”, as he affectionately refers to his loyal followers, have incorporated step dancers (spring 2014), exposed penises (autumn 2015) and women harnessed to each other (spring 2016). The new location, though smaller, isn’t without its own sense of spectacle: near where the former French president François Mitterrand’s desk used to be is a big stack of felt made from human hair by the Serbian artist Zoran Todorovic; two black plywood chairs with antlers from the Rick Owens furniture line; and, atop a plinth in a plexiglass case, a 5-litre aluminium tank containing the sperm of the Estonian rapper Tommy Cash. “It’s empty now,” says Lamy, in an off-the-shoulder black Rick Owens dress that matches her ink-dipped fingers. “We’re waiting for him to drop some more off.”
Owens is wearing a black skullcap, black slouchy cotton shorts and black leather sneakers with thick white rubber soles, all designed by him. The platform heels he often wears make him seem much taller than 5-foot-10. When the couple’s French architect, David Leclerc, tells him it’s likely not possible to switch out a white enamel radiator for a stainless-steel alternative, Owens agrees to settle for something equally “delicious”. (He uses the same word to describe the nightly footfalls of the guards — “Daddy”, he calls them — patrolling the Ministry of Defence next door.) Leclerc frowns: It’ll be difficult enough to install the mirrored walls and indoor rock garden in time for men’s fashion week in January. (Their exchange recalls the 1966 “Addams Family” episode in which Morticia Addams, having insisted on decorating her neighbours’ home, talks about adorning the walls in salmon. “Pink?” they ask hopefully. “No,” Morticia replies. “Scales.”) But construction sites merely make Owens nostalgic for his early days in Paris, when he and Lamy worked out of “a filthy barn kind of thing” with a single Turkish toilet in the Bastille area. “Everything was covered in concrete dust. Remember, Hun?” he asks Lamy. (He calls her that, not unfondly, because, like the Huns, he says, “she’s a marauding, axe-wielding primitive force of nature who takes what she wants and then throws a lit match behind her.”) “It was looking so good,” she replies with a grin.
Despite their many similarities, Owens and Lamy are also very different. The English fashion designer Gareth Pugh, Owens’s former protégé, says, “Michèle has this nomadic hustling mentality. Rick’s very happy to keep his head down and do the work.” Owens appreciates conventional beauty, if only for the thrill of perverting it; Lamy rejects it altogether. His dressing room is appointed with mimosa-scented candles, fresh-cut hortensias and throw pillows; hers has a pile of wet towels on the floor. Their other two residences — a minimalist apartment in Concordia sulla Secchia, Italy, near the factory where Owens’s clothes are made, and an equally austere beach house on Venice’s Lido — are too bourgeois for Lamy. “She’s like, ‘I don’t understand who these are for. Who are you?’ ” says Owens. “She’s offended that they refute our story together.” Their life does look quite different than it did in Los Angeles, where they met in the 1990s. They no longer reside in a former discount store, what Owens describes as “a hovel”, off Hollywood Boulevard. Nor does he put bleach powder around their bed to keep away cockroaches, as he’d done when he was single. At 40, Owens stopped drinking and taking hard drugs. Still, he doesn’t regret having committed “temporary suicide”, as he calls it; in the darkness, there were often bursts of beauty — something that could also be said of his clothes. In 2003, a year after winning the CFDA Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent, he became the artistic director for the centuries-old French fur company Revillon Frères and the couple moved to Paris. In 2006, he left that company and opened his own boutique in the Palais Royal arcade, where there’s now an anatomically correct wax sculpture of him behind the cash register. Even in fashion, an industry with no shortage of outsized personalities, Owens stands alone. There’s something genuinely subversive about how he’s been able to navigate extremes: as an iconoclast who also happens to be a shrewd businessman; a California native who’s become a beloved fixture in Paris without rejecting his Americanness; a sweet boy with a leather kink; and an elder statesman who nurtures younger talent and supports the competition. The fashion designer Daniel Roseberry, 38, a fellow American expat in Paris, says that Owens was among the first to congratulate him following his 2019 debut at Schiaparelli.
“There’s a general frigidity in the way designers relate to each other, especially across generational divides,” says Roseberry. “Rick has such a unique warmth, which is disarming because, of course, from the outside, the world that he’s built with Michèle is so intimidating.”
