Rick Owens

Rick Owens learned to cut patterns in Los Angeles’s garment district, knocking off designs for small manufacturers before launching his own label in 1994. The early collections were produced in his apartment, sold to a handful of stores, and worn by the kind of people who sought out the margins. By 2002, when he showed his first collection in New York, the aesthetic had already crystallized: elongated silhouettes, heavy drapery, a palette that treated black as a spectrum. Owens moved to Paris in 2003 and has shown there since, building a world — clothing, furniture, architecture, performance — that operates with the internal logic of a complete cosmology.

His work draws from Helmut Lang’s industrial austerity but pushes it toward something more visceral and theatrical. Where Lang subtracted, Owens distorts. The proportions are exaggerated — dropped crotches, extended torsos, platform soles that add inches to the body’s height and strangeness. The Geobasket sneaker, introduced in 2007, became a totem for an entire subculture that didn’t exist before Owens created it. The Spring/Summer 2016 “Cyclops” show, in which models carried other models strapped to their bodies like human backpacks, collapsed the boundary between fashion show and performance art. It was absurd and moving and nobody else could have done it.

What makes Owens singular is not the darkness — darkness is easy — but the discipline. Every collection functions within the same vocabulary, yet each season finds new inflections. The brutalist concrete of his Paris store on Place du Palais Royal, the stepped furniture he designs in collaboration with his partner Michèle Lamy, the physicality of his runway presentations: all of it is the same project, expressed through different materials. He has said that glamour is a form of armor. His clothes function accordingly — protective, monumental, strange, and oddly tender beneath the severity.