Can a Designer Be Successful and Subversive? Rick Owens Walks the Line.
ON A DREARY November day in Paris, the soft morning light is creeping into the American fashion designer Rick Owens’s 18th-century mansion, just south of the Seine in the Seventh Arrondissement, where he and his French wife and business partner, Michèle Lamy, 80, have lived for 20 years.
One of the few truly independent creative heads of a major brand, he’s built an improbable empire by making clothes as grotesque as they are glamorous.
But three decades into his career — and a few days after turning 62 — Owens finds himself at a crossroads. He’s just returned from a birthday trip to the Pacific Coast of Jalisco, Mexico, where he rode horses with his muse, design assistant and frequent travel companion, the towering 30-something Australian model Tyrone Dylan Susman, whose Instagram feed has also shown them among Greek ruins, in the Dubai desert and on beaches around the world (where they’ve been known to wear matching baseball hats with each other’s names on them).
Now that Owens is back, he and Lamy, a 5-foot-2 agent of creative chaos with kohl-rimmed electric blue eyes, gold-plated teeth and two young grandchildren, have been overseeing their latest project: relocating the Rick Owens men’s and women’s runway shows, normally staged in the monumental courtyard at the Palais de Tokyo, a neo-Classical-style structure housing two museums with stone colonnades and a large reflecting pool, to their living room. “I think it’s become too bombastic,” he says of the Palais de Tokyo shows as he scans the gutted first floor of what was once the French Socialist Party headquarters.
