From Paris to Shanghai, and in Hollywood, too: Rick Owens Still Turns Heads

Rick Owens, his wife and partner Michèle Lamy and a few members of his team were escorted out of Beijing’s Forbidden City earlier this week and asked to wear ‘normal’ clothes if they wanted to tour the imperial palace complex. It was proof that the American designer’s unique aesthetic still has the power to turn heads and, in some cases, derange. Just a few days earlier on their China tour, the Owens dynasty visited Shanghai for the Moncler ‘City of Genius’ event, held in a former shipbuilding works on the edge of town. 

Owens was one of ten creatives, including Willow Smith, Lucie and Luke Meier of Jil Sander, Nigo and Donald Glover, who unveiledcapsule collections for the Italian brand. Moncler launched Genius in 2018 as a dedicated platform for guest collaborations. According to local industry sources, ‘City of Genius’ was the biggest fashion event ever held in China, with a production budget rumoured to be around 30 million euros. Around 8.000 guests attended Rihanna among them. GQ described the soirée as “an entire fashion week hydraulically pressed into several hours of relentless sensory simulation.”

Owens had worked with Moncler’s billionaire owner Remo Ruffini twice before, on a customized Moncler tour bus lined with felt blankets four years ago at the inaugural Genius event in Milan and on a stainless-steel sleeping pod last year in London.In Shanghai, he introduced a self-sustaining living structure, also made from stainless steel, with advanced energy and waste recycling systems. It was inspired, he said, by a Charlotte Perriand-designed hut that is owned by Lamy’s family, in the French Alps. A matching collection of quilted Moncler sleeping bag clothes will be sold separately. 

Owens and Lamy have been busy lately. His recent Paris shows were among the highlights of the men’s and women’s fashion weeks, both with a cast of more than 100 models, many recruited from local fashion schools. His last two shows marked his return to the outdoor courtyard of the art deco Palais de Tokyo building, after relocating to his Place Bourbon living room for both men’s and women’s last year. Given the location, these shows were intimate, with a much-reduced audience.

Owens ended up regretting what arguably seemed like a good idea, as his “home show” “ended up being an act of exclusion instead of the observance of respect in the face of our current wars that I had intended.”

People sometimes tend to forget that, beyond his spectacular, often wildly unconventional shapes, Owens is now one of the most inclusive designers in the industry, especially with respect to the casting of his recent shows. He is also a leader when it comes to transparency and sustainability. Rick has his own factory, in Italy, and his show notes always contain information about the provenance and fabrication of his clothes.

Owens, who is 62, and Lamy, who is 80, met in Los Angeles in 1990. Lamy had her own line of dresses and tunics at the time and hired Owens as a patternmaker. A few years later, she closed her fashion line and was running a French bistro in Los Angeles while Owens developed his own brand, mostly T-shirts and skirts made from recycled cotton and silk. He won the CFDA Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent in 2002 and became the artistic director for the French fur house Revillon a year later. Owens and Lamy established Owenscorp in Paris in 2004 and opened their first boutique under the arcades of the Palais-Royal in Paris two years later. He left Revillon the same year and never looked back.

Over the years, Owens has become one of the most influential designers of his generation. His blend of goth, Hollywood glam and dystopian futurism remains avant-garde, but his clothes also have wide commercial appeal.  He is a showman, often using smoke, water jets and fireworks to bombastic effect. His menswear and womenswear Spring-Summer 2025 shows impressed with their huge casts, inspired by old Cecil B DeMille movies.

The women’s spring-summer 2025 show, in particular, had something of the supernatural: held outside on a very grey, wet day, the clouds departed, the rain stopped and the sun started shining moments before the first models appeared around the Palais de Tokyo fountain, marching to the sounds of Wagner, while a group of men and women on the surrounding roofs gently scattered flower petals over the catwalk and the audience.

He asked Paris fashion schools to send him students and faculty to walk, he wrote in the show notes, because “expressing our individuality is great, but sometimes expressing our unity and reliance on each other is a good thing to remember, too. Especially in the face of the peak intolerance we are experiencing in the world right now.”

Joining the casting were members of his team and friends “whom I admire for living their aesthetic so completely and generously”— like Allanah Star, one of the “grandes dames” of the international trans community. The models walked the catwalk in groups. Each group was dressed in similar, almost identical looks, proving that you don’t need to be tall and thin to pull off wearing Rick Owens.

The shows shared a title: “Hollywood”, named “after the boulevard of vice I gleefully ran to… to find my people… weirdos and freaks... living in a world Lou Reed described in Walk on The Wild Side.” Owens imagined the creatures he had seen in avant-gardemovies by Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and Ken Russell. He added that he always references the lost Hollywood of black and white biblical epics, “mixing art deco, lurid sin and redeeming morality.”It followed an Autumn-Winter 2024 collection which was equally autobiographical, named “Porterville” after his small California hometown.

These past years, Owens also turned out to be an accomplished furniture designer, working with the reputed Carpenters Workshop gallery, among others. Using raw plywood, marble, and moose antlers, his pieces recall anything from Brancusi sculptures to California skateparks. At last month’s Design Miami showcase in Paris, two 2023 “Tomb” chairs were sold for 48.000 euro each.  

Next year, the Palais Galliéra in Paris will organize an extensive Rick Owens retrospective, the first major exhibition in his adopted hometown.

As he gets older, Owens contemplates his next chapter. “How do I want to play this so that it’s elegant and convincing and it doesn’t get silly?’ he said in a recent profile in The New York Times. “I’m observing myself, thinking, “At some point, I’m going to have to make a choice: Am I going to accept or resist? Am I going to pull back or become even more extreme?”’ Some designers, he added in the interview, didn’t know when to rein it in. “They’d reached a peak they couldn’t maintain without becoming a caricature.”

And while the recent episode in Beijing’s Forbidden City might have hinted at the caricatural, Rick Owens seems to know what he’s doing.

Courtesy: Rick Owens

Text: Jesse Brouns