Rick Owens on the Factory Floor

This season, Rick Owens reminisced about his 22 years of traveling to his own factory in the small industrial town of Concordia, where he and his team live ‘in a kind of cloistered isolation, almost bleakness’ — where he was ‘able to focus on reaching for something weird and wonderful.’

Seven years ago, the American, Paris-based designer acquired an apartment in a building across from the factory, but before that he stayed in a ‘no-frills serial killer room’ in a local hotel for ten years, and that came after five years of sleeping on a couch in his office at the factory to immerse himself in the rhythm of an industrial production that was new to him.

These days, Owens travels with a limited edition Rimowa suitcase from a collaboration with the German LVMH-owned brand that was unveiled during his men’s show in January. His version of the carry-on is customized with a bronzed exterior and is fully lined inside in black leather. Owens wanted the material to look like the bronze of a Richard Serra sculpture. The models in the show wore necklaces made with cow fur luggage tags, included with each of his Rimowa cases. Seen from the front row, they all looked extremely tall, with limbs that went on for days.

The show took place, as usual for his winter collections, in the Palais de Tokyo’s biggest room. The set-up was less dramatic than for some of his outside summer shows, without fireworks or dayglo-colored smoke. Although the show did start off with a bang — a very loud remix of three versions of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, in French, German and English versions. ‘We won’t be legally able to use the music on YouTube, but it is the constant subliminal soundtrack to a lot of our lives. What you listen to on your earbuds in an empty village train station on a cold foggy night on your way somewhere to work on a weird and wonderful future.’

Most looks in the show were shown with thermal long johns which, Owens wrote in his press notes, ‘changed my whole attitude about winter when I moved to Europe from California,’ which was more than twenty years ago.

The designer collaborated with Parisian designer Victor Calvelly on chain-linked skirts and boots made from laser-cut cow leather, and with ‘rubber mistress’ Matisse di Maggio on tops and hoodies with frilling in natural rubber. There were ‘dracucollared’ — a reference to Count Dracula’s horror movie wardrobe — jackets and coats in heavyweight, vegetable-tanned calf leather, and flared jeans in bronze ‘megacrust’ — layers of bronze foil and wax pressed onto heavyweight denim and washed to create a crusty surface texture. The denim is treated by a company in the Veneto area of Italy that uses smaller-than-usual treatment baths to reduce water waste and a water purifying process that makes it possible to recycle a portion of the water used. Jackets and coats were cut in a British mélange wool felt blended with kemp fibers. Also known as ‘dead hair’, these are natural to some sheep breeds.

Courtesy: Rick Owens

Text: Jesse Brouns