Man and Superman: Rick Owens on his designs for Moncler and building the perfect “fortress of solitude”.

Rick Owens is fashion’s beloved rebel. As he steps out in front of Alasdair McLellan’s lens for Perfect Issue Five, Jo-Ann Furniss speaks to her long-time friend about his designs for Moncler and the highly personal ways in which they relate to his ‘fortresses of solitude’ - the private environments he has built around himself.

Images by Alasdair McLellan.

So would you say you are a genius?

‘No,’ says Rick Owens, ‘but I’m open to it.’

It is early evening and we are sitting in an antechamber to Rick Owens' bedroom in his Paris home. In all of the years I have been coming here to interview Owens, we have never sat in this most private of spaces of the home he shares with his wife, Michèle Lamy. This is his Paris sanctum sanctorum, adjacent to his bathroom, where he reads and lounges on rough wool military blankets – the same kind so favoured by Joseph Beuys – on furniture of his own design. At the moment, he’s sipping a cold ginger beer. 

‘There’s a minibar here,’ he proffers. ‘Yeah, I can lock the door and just survive here for a while. I don’t have a glass,’ he says, offering me a ginger beer.

‘If it’s in a glass bottle, that’s fine,’ I respond.

‘Oh, yeah, we’re not savages,’ replies Owens. ‘Well, we are. Is it time? Yes, it’s time for my second cup of espresso after a nap, and that’s my last one of the day.’

Owens is a creature of habit, or rather ritual. He ritualises everything. He has defined his living and working spaces just so. So too his drinks and their containers. His snacks and his naps – nothing comes between him and his afternoon naps, he’s positively Churchillian about them. His gym routine and his work. Owens’ design studio is actually comprised of Rick Owens, so there isn’t delegation, only precision where the ritualised routine is all. As Gustave Flaubert said: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’

Earlier in the afternoon, Rick Owens presented his latest violent and original menswear collection in Paris, with a violent and original show outdoors at the Palais de Tokyo. A torrential downpour had mercifully stopped while the show went on, with wet pyrotechnics booming intermittently, exhaling coloured smoke and spitting hot ash and metal onto the crowd. All was accompanied by an obnoxious techno soundtrack by Lil Texas.

‘Did you actually want anyone to like that show?’ I ask. ‘It was like ’Nam.’ Although I had actually loved it in all of its obnoxious glory.

And Rick Owens grins his Cheshire Cat grin. 

Somehow, all that Owens does, no matter how challenging and sometimes downright insane, seems to work out. His diverse following takes a leap of faith and is richly rewarded, because the thing about Rick Owens is that he is absolutely sincere and serious in what he does – while not taking himself so absolutely seriously. His work is a true portrait of who he is and how he lives his life. At this point, he has the most rabid fanbase of anyone in Paris and quite possibly the entire fashion world. I have witnessed at first hand his teenage and somewhat Dickensian fans circling the designer outside after a fashion show, hyperventilating, moulting, tattooed with his signature and declaring: ‘He is the king of Paris!’

Remarkably, this is not hyperbole. It’s all quite frightening. 

And yet Rick Owens himself is still somewhat private, and enjoys his silent, controlled personal spaces that I have often referred to as his various ‘fortresses of solitude’. We are sitting in one right now, and it is the first of his fortresses that we discuss today.

Two others feature heavily in his work for Moncler – hence the genius question at the beginning. Although, as he points out, he isn’t strictly part of the brand’s ‘Genius’ umbrella. As always, he goes his own way, and has his own distinct imprint for Moncler, as he succinctly and not so seriously sums it up: ‘I’m petty and egotistical. I’m Papa McPetty.’ 

Then again, that’s not to say he isn’t petty and egotistical – he just presents it with his usual wit, candour and desirable outrageousness in the work itself. Take the shining, gull-winged bed that is part of the present Moncler project, adjacent to the clothing collection and echoing its padded construction in its interior. The bed is in fact a mini fortress of solitude, a place for the mirrored metal gull wings to close and for Rick Owens to become hermetically sealed from the world. It’s a glamorous padded cell/coffin, soundproofed, with air con and a state-of-the-art internal entertainment system, that Owens himself might rather more poetically refer to as a ‘jewel box’ where nobody can get to him.

Another of his distinctly revelatory personal projects for Moncler is his tour bus. This is his moving fortress of solitude, one that also accommodates the creative force of nature and frequent Owens foil, his wife Michèle Lamy. His circuitous telling of this tale says much about his life past, present and future – from his upbringing in Southern California to Paris, on to his factory domain, Concordia, and his ultimate fortress of solitude, on the Venice Lido.

‘At a certain point, my dad started being ill… and then mom’s health started changing, and I realised that I would have to start going there,’ explains the designer, on his decision to begin visiting Porterville once more after years of his parents visiting Europe. ‘Anyway, I thought, “OK, this is going to be a life change. How can I celebrate it?” I thought about my first art hero Joseph Beuys and his ‘I Like America’ performance from the 1970s. It was where he was taken from Europe to New York, and at JFK he was put in an ambulance, wrapped in felt, and then he was driven to his gallery where they took him into the space that was caged, and he lived there for a few days with a wild coyote. And so the whole performance was his interaction with the wild coyote in this space. When the show was over, they put him back in an ambulance and took him to JFK and back to Europe; that was his only experience of the United States during that period. That was my art awakening. The romance of that story just made me fall in love with Joseph Beuys and that kind of art.’ 

Hence the reason we are sitting on itchy grey, woollen blankets right now. He continues: ‘Anyway, with this thing, I was thinking, “I'm going to get a tour bus that can pick me up at LAX that can drive me to Porterville.” My parents had a house but I was a little hesitant about going back to this environment that had frustrated me so much, something that was so domestic and suburban that I was dying to get away from when I was young. So I was thinking, “I don't want to get that feeling that I’m going back to that. I want to go and I want it to be on my own terms.” That’s when I thought, “OK, I’ll create this wonderful tour bus. I want this to be fun, and for me to control it my way. The interior will be this jewel box, it will be felt-lined, it’ll be my Joseph Beuys insulated protected interior, as aesthetically pure and perfect as possible.” Then Moncler suggested doing a project together, and I said, ‘Oh, we can do this.’ They think outside the box and, I mean, they have a collection of that kind of art, they’re not going to blink an eye – and they didn't blink an eye, we just did it.’ 

Unfortunately, Owens’ father died before the tour bus was realised. But there was one documented Moncler tour just prior to the pandemic with Owens and Lamy on the road together. ‘I wanted to document Michèle and me in the clothes, in the collection, ostensibly in this matching bus. We went from LAX, through Las Vegas, through Nevada, to Michael Heizer’s ‘City’, because that was the end goal, then to Porterville and then back. It was beautiful. But it’s all that Joseph Beuys story. It’s all about that. Every environment that I have is insulated with felt, in those colours, and I live that Joseph Beuys’ first action…’

 ‘But without the coyote?’ I proffer, before realising: ‘Or is Michèle…?’

‘Michèle is the coyote!’ he confirms with some glee. ‘Because it's very much about him and the coyote, the interaction and him standing still with the coyote sniffing around and pulling at things and growling. It is my life.’ 

At some point during this conversation, Michèle Lamy saunters in – sauntering is in fact her natural gait – announcing herself with a ‘cuckoo’. Later she will be wearing some of the collapsed, quilted denim degradé from the current Moncler collection. For now, like Owens, she is more casually attired – although neither of them ever really looks ‘casual’.

 Michele is the more sociable of the two, cultivating connections far and wide. At one point their conversation turns to an unexpected Rick Owens devotee in the shape of racing driver Lewis Hamilton.

‘Oh, Lewis Hamilton – you met with Lewis Hamilton? He is a real cutie and very sweet,’ says Rick.

‘So Lewis Hamilton’s wearing your stuff as well?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. We actually did a custom purple sequin jumpsuit that he wore at a race that was kind of scandalous, and he looked fantastic,’ confirms Rick.

‘Fantastique. Yes. Formidable,’ adds Michèle.        

Rick: ‘He’s really sassy. But he’s very sweet and very gentle and, kind of, soft, nice.’

Michèle: ‘Yes, he has to be, like, vroom!’  

Rick: ‘That’s a scary business. We’re going to go to Monaco to see him at some point.’

Going from one hermetically sealed environment to another. 

Then it is back to more tales of the tour bus, or rather how its use was never fully realised by Rick Owens. A combination of Covid and his mother developing cancer put paid to that. And this becomes more a tale of farewell, for Rick’s mother died last year in Venice after a brief sojourn in Concordia with the designer. Undoubtedly, it has affected him deeply.

‘Anyway, to finish that story, I go, “OK, well, I’m going to move mom to Italy, to Concordia, because that is the centre of all of our life survival.”’ Owens had spent much of the pandemic at his apartment at his Concordia factory, where he literally lives for making his clothes. ‘“Michèle, me, Tyrone, we all survived because of Concordia, so that’s where I’m going to be, and that’s where mom’s going to be because that’s where we can take care of her and we’re going to have that house. We’re going to fix it.’ So, I moved mom there. That was last summer. And then mom goes, “I want to go to Venice when you go to Venice.” I go, “Mom, you're afraid of water. You hate the sea.” She would be afraid to walk on a beach because she was afraid the ocean was going to come and pull her in and take her far away.

‘Anyway, she goes, “No, but I really want to go.” And I’m going, “We can do this. We’ll figure it the fuck out.” So I take her and I put her in a suite at the Excelsior overlooking the sea. And actually, she got in this beach wheelchair with big rubber bumper wheels and we took her to the water, and she was screaming and giggling, and it was the cutest thing, it was fun. She dipped her toes in the water. It was like, the most thrilling thing ever for her. Then after that, she just kept declining. Finally, she passed and she was there in a suite at the Excelsior, overlooking the sea, and it was, kind of, the perfect thing.

‘We had her cremated at San Michele, where we went’ – we had visited the beautiful island cemetery together some years ago, to see Diaghilev’s and Stravinsky’s graves. ‘We had a mass for her in a beautiful little chapel. And rode the boat with the casket to San Michele. It was the perfect end. I felt like we really did it right.’

Before adding in that typically Owens gallows way: ‘So that's the story of the bus.’

Over the years I have spoken to Rick Owens during many important stages of his life and career, and this seems to be another one. He is happy in Paris, wandering its streets and embracing the communal atmosphere of his Parisian residence. He has a well-honed mind and an immense talent, with a body to match – although as he clarifies, on the subject of his shirtless appearance here:

‘It’s not that I’m proud, it’s not that I think it’s sexy, but I do think that there’s a power to it. There’s also a rawness to it. I feel like it’s almost grotesque. And Iggy Pop, he’s been performing shirtless – I don't know if you’ve seen him recently, he is an older man now. His body is totally different, and all of the wrinkles show, it’s changed, it’s an old man's body, and he doesn’t give a fuck. And that is, I think, what I’m going to be.’

‘The luxury of not caring,’ I say.

‘The luxury of not caring,’ repeats Rick. It is his phrase after all.

At the same time, there is the continuous pull of Concordia and the Venice Lido, where he will depart to in a few days. Here, ‘Beach Rick’ emerges, a kind of dissipated surfer dude melded with Death in Venice’s Aschenbach; the Apollonian and Dionysian in one at his ultimate fortress of solitude. 

From his jewel box black marble bathroom next door: ‘It almost feels like, you know, a crystal energy, which I don't really believe in, but I like the idea – it feels like a crystal fortress, a precious fortress.’ To the ultimate Superman-like fortress on the Lido: ‘The Lido is more of the fortress of solitude because it feels like it’s glowing and you don't really see that in the others… It feels like it’s glowing. It’s a chilly, severe jewel box.’ 

From one hermetically sealed world to another.