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Essay: Rick Owens fashion designer

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Rick Owens was quoted saying, “My mantra for everybody is better, not bigger”.

A very fitting quote for how he runs his clothing business. He spends more time designing and constructing exquisite clothing instead of worrying about being a mainstream success unlike brands Dior or Chanel. His lines are not mass produced for everyone but is done on a small-scale production. Often called a “cult” designer, he does not run a huge company but he does have a following of customers and celebrities, like Kanye West, A$AP Rocky, Donna Karan and Vera Wang for instance. His designs are loved by men and women from all ranges of age. Anyone from a 17 year old model to a woman in her 70s loves Rick Owen’s pieces and he knows it.

Richard Saturnino Owens is an American fashion designer, originally from California. He is most known for his signature leather jackets, one of which gave him recognition when worn by Kate Moss on the cover of French Vogue in 2002. The Rick Owens brand is an international company, with store locations in many cities including New York, Paris and Tokyo. His pieces are sold in department stores like Saks, Barneys and Bergdorf as well as at online stores and his own company stores.

Owens started his career in the arts by studying fine art at Otis College of Art and Design, which he later dropped out of after two years. Following the drop out, he enrolled in a pattern cutting course at the Los Angeles Trade Technical College. With the pattern cutting knowledge under his belt, he started working for a company that created illegal copies of designer looks. In 1994, he launched his Rick Owens collection and sold exclusively to Charles Gallay, an avant-garde boutique in LA. In 2001, he expanded his brand internationally by partnering with Eo Bocci Associati, which moved his clothing production to Italy. After he gained recognition from the French Vogue cover, he worked with Anna Wintour at American Vogue who sponsored his first New York Fashion Week show in 2002. With his wife Michéle Lame, his business partner and muse, they relocated to Paris in 2003. While there he took the creative director position at Revillon, a French fur company that has been around since 1723. He worked for Revillon until 2007, when he started focusing solely on his own line.

Rick Owens often describes his designs as being “glunge” a combination of glamorous and grunge. Many of his designs over the years have utilized mostly dark colors, like black and gray. The way that Owens thinks about design is quite different than the way other designers approach it. “Your head will look more interesting on a monochromatic column, I always think of the line of a person standing with their head in a room and I always feel like a stalk or a stem or a pillar is nicer,” says Owens. This way of thinking can be viewed as an explanation for his monochromatic looks. He is often inspired by architecture, which is apparent in his very sculptural garments.

Femininity is not a design aspect that Owens likes to utilize. “I don’t sexualize my silhouettes, I don’t want to do miniskirts, or tight clothes that exaggerates a woman’s femininity.” The designer dislikes the fact that women have to worry about crossing their legs while wearing skirts in fear of giving someone a “show”. That being said, Owens often designs very covered pieces, nothing short. If he designs a dress is will almost always have a long skirt. Aside from his leather jackets, he is also a big fan of designing harem pants, and lots of them.

Rick Owen’s designs are typically monochromatic and very architectural. He designs for both women and men, and apart from his main brand, has two diffusion lines, a fur line, and a furniture line. His line Lilies, began in 2005 and is a jersey-focused womenswear line that is sold mostly online. His second diffusion line, Drkshdw was started in 2010 and began as a denim collection, later morphing into a unisex streetwear line. Drkshdw is sold both online and in Rick Owens stores and at Barneys. The fur line, called Rick Owens Hun, a nickname for his wife, utilizes luxury fabrics like alligator, snake, kangaroo, rare sable furs and mink, is sold online. As for his furniture line, the idea started when Rick and Michéle moved to Paris and needed furniture for their new home. The furniture pieces are about reductivism, all about simplicity and essentials. These pieces are sold at various fairs in Europe and are featured in Owens’s new furniture book. In 2013, Rick Owens began designing footwear. The designer paired up with Adidas to create one of a kind sneakers. Owens, who initially hated sneakers, decided to design ones for himself to go to the gym. He wanted to create a sneaker style that he would actually like to wear. The end result presented leather sneakers in blacks and whites that skew the usual proportions of an athletic shoe.

Rick Owens often draws influence for his collections from issues from the world. A few of the themes being extinction, environmental problems and climate issues. His Spring 2014 runway show was a very memorable one. His collection focused on rejecting conventional beauty, he utilized real women for the show instead of using runway models. The whole show was choreographed to a combination of dancing, cheerleading and military drill and the women all wore what they call “grit face” which is used to intimidate the competition. Overall the show was very fierce and empowering for women. One of his latest collections that he named Dirt, from what I understand was designed so that the models represented seeds that are to grow from issues that have arisen in society and climate issues on our planet.

I traveled to the Barney’s New York location on 7th Avenue to check out their display and array of Rick Owens clothing. All of the Rick Owens pieces were displayed on hangers hung on straight bar racks. The only colors that were offered for the pieces were either black, white or gray, which is the typical color palette for Rick Owens. For most of the pieces there were only two of each garment on the racks, so you would have to ask a sales associate if you need a different size than what is on display. The pieces that Barneys carried were very wearable, they had mostly t-shirts, jackets, coats, cardigan, pants, and sweaters. They had his pieces hanging in the same section as Maison Margiela. While in the store I saw about 90% of the customers were white, and about 10% were African American. About 40% of the customers were in their 40s, 30% were in their 20s and about 30% in their 30s. As for the sex of the customers I saw about 50% men and 50% women throughout the store. I was at the store around 5pm on a Friday so the customer range probably would be different if I had gone many on the weekend when more people were not at work.

I then traveled down to the Rick Owens store on Howard Street. The first floor displayed all accessories and footwear, the second floor displayed clothing and accessories. The garments were displayed on both straight bar racks and mannequins. There were stone pedestals throughout the store that displayed accessories like shoes, keychains, handbags, hats, scarves. They also had a glass display case for flat wear. The setting of the store was very industrial, lots of stone that gave it a very unfinished look. The whole store had only one sample of each garment out for display, so no matter what, you had to talk to a sales associate for help. They carried lots of the wearable pieces like leather jackets, pants, sweaters, cardigan and t-shirts. They also carried very avant-garde jackets, coats and other pieces that a typical Barney’s customer would not wear, but a diehard Rick Owens customer would. The color ranges for the garments in this store were a little different from that of Barney’s. There were a lot of black and white pieces, typical of the designer, but there were shades of dark purple, army green and tan. 60% of the customers in the store were Caucasian and 40% were Asian. There were about 40% of the customers in their 20s and about 60% in their 30s. As for the sex of customers, about 80% were men and 20% were women. I was at these store at around 5pm on a Friday so the customer range probably would be different if I had gone on the weekend when more people were not at work.

References

  • Alcala,N. (2015, July 22). Why Rick Owens Owes His Success to LA. Retrieved from
  • Diderich, J. (2017, June 5). Rick Owens on Legacy, the Met Ball and the Enduring Appeal of Kiss. Retrieved from http://libproxy.fitsuny.edu:2362/fashion-news/fashion-features/rick-owens-cfa-lifetime-achievement-award-10897260/
  • Fury, A. (2017, March 02). The Lighter Side of Rick Owens. Retrieved October 28, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/t-magazine/rick-owens-fashion-designer.html
  • Jones, T. (2013). Rick Owens. Köln: Taschen.
  • Owens, R. (2016, December 15). Rick Owens on What Makes a Man. Retrieved October 28, 2017, from https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/rick-owens-on-what-makes-a-man
  • Rick Owens is One of the 500 People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry in 2017. (2017, May 19). Retrieved October 28, 2017, from https://www.businessoffashion.com/community/people/rick-owens
  • Staff, H. B. (2017, October 05). My List: Rick Owens. Retrieved October 28, 2017, from http://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/a1075/24-hours-with-rick-owens-1013/

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