Backstage With Rick Owens Before His Iconic 200-Person Fashion Show

Getty Images; GQ

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I find Rick Owens standing next to a sea of bodies. “Come walk with me,” he says.

It’s Thursday morning, shortly before the iconoclastic American designer’s Paris Fashion Week time slot. We’re backstage in a concrete wing of the Palais de Tokyo. It’s much more crowded than usual. This season, Owens cast exactly 200 models to walk in his show. Most are grouped together waiting to get Owens’s final approval, a sea of creamy gauze and pointy shoulders punctuated by strange headwear that brings to mind Star Wars and Dune. Owens wades in, stopping in front of a woman with bird-like bone structure whose head is framed by a crunchy leather hood.

“Are you a student?” Owens asks.

“No, but I’m a big fan,” she gushes. “You’re such an icon. You’re my favorite designer.”

Owens looks at her through sporty black reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. His black lacquered fingernails dance around her neck as he snaps a series of buttons together. He smiles. “Well, that is the right thing to say.”

Rick Owens shows typically feel like open- air rock concerts, with his cult of black-clad devotees lined up outside the gates for hours beforehand to catch a glimpse of their fashion god and his pyrotechnic-fueled productions. But in January, citing the “barbaric times” we live in, Owens decided to move from his traditional Palais De Tokyo show location to the Paris home he shares with his wife Michèle Lamy. The models stalked through his living room before an intimate crowd of editors who sat on Owens’s furniture. “I felt a festival atmosphere was not appropriate for this moment in time,” he told me at the time.

But Owens felt guilty for excluding his community by moving to a more exclusive scale. Says Owens, “I thought, Oh, I have to rectify this. And how do I rectify it? Invite them all to be in the show!” It’s about 45 minutes before what is clearly shaping up to be one of his most unforgettable spectacles in a career full of them, and Owens has a lot of models to get through. He looks around for more dark fashion druids and wraiths that he hasn’t zhuzhed yet. “I just had them change the music to make it harder,” he says over the hyper techno track blaring in the background.

Owens planned a collection of ten looks that were repeated twenty times each, all in various shades of cream. (Owens figured his typically dark palette would look too sinister.) Backstage, I’m surrounded by airy chiffon capes, hooded biker jackets, denim textured with a crusty gold coating, silky vampiric coats and habit-like robes, and spidery knit bodysuits, all of which cling in various combinations to the 200 shapes and sizes of his cast, made up of some Rick Owens runway regulars but mostly by the local design students who idolize him and his avant-garde citadel of righteous independent fashion. “It was an exercise in figuring out how to accommodate every single body type and how to make, but how to make it a Rick Owens look,” he said later.

“Are you a student?” he asks another hooded figure. The baby-faced model, who sounds a bit more nervous than he looks, says he goes to the Institut Français de la Mode. “I’ve never visited IFM, I probably should at some point. Excuse me, I’m going to be a little rough.” Owens grabs his hood with both hands and crushes it around the young man’s collarbone.

The title of the collection is “Hollywood,” the place where Richard Owens of small-town Porterville, CA reinvented himself as Rick Owens. I note his shows have been autobiographical of late—January was an angsty ode to his hometown. “That’s right,” he says. “The more I see the fashion world evolve and how impossible it is for anyone to have a singular voice, the more I realize that that’s our strength. Our strength is that this is a one- man show instead of a committee decision, and so I emphasize that and I celebrate it. And I feel like that’s why people come to me, because it feels personal. They know that it’s not strategy or calculation or… um… do I want to use the word ‘falseness’?”

He’s prepping the models to walk in regimented formation around the Art Deco courtyard outside in his interpretation of the title character’s entrance into Rome in pioneering black-and-white auteur Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 film Cleopatra. “If you watch that movie, which I do a lot, it is so sumptuous, you can even see the way the fabrics fall that they don’t make fabrics like that anymore. It’s just opulence, opulence, opulence. That was my fantasy in Porterville, that was where I wanted to end up,” he says. Propelled by DeMille’s allegories of “lurid sin” and “moral redemption,” Owens ended up living in seedy circumstances off Hollywood Boulevard.

“That’s where I invented myself,” he says. “Hollywood is really that mix of ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ by Lou Reed and glamor and sleaze. Hollywood was where I became me. I just jumped into a life of decadent hedonistic sleaze, because my youth had been so protected. And I wanted to live!” This show, he continues as he firmly fixes another hood, is “Hollywood Boulevard and Cecil B. DeMille at the same time.” “Beauty is pain,” he assures the model he’s got by the throat.

Since his cast is made up of huge Rick Owens stans, many begin lightly quivering as he approaches for a final up-down. “Beautiful!” Rick declares one look. “Thanks so much,” the model says. “No,” replies Owens, “thank you.” One man asks him a question in French. “Oh I don’t speak French, but thank you! Thank you for being with us,” says Owens, who moved to Paris in 2003. “I’m learning French actually,” he tells me. He began around Christmas. “I’m flabbergasted at how much I cannot retain. It’s kind of humiliating, but I’ve told myself that I don’t ever have to learn French, it’s just for the exercise of learning something.” Another model asks Owens to pretend to adjust the collar of his silk habit so his friend can take a photo. “Alright!” the designer says. “C’mon, let’s go.” He is clearly having a blast.

I tell Owens that I’m picking up on what’s been a common theme this fashion week: the impending Paris Olympics. Is this the Rick Owens opening ceremony? “It did seem like an appropriate thing to do, that was in the back of my mind,” he says. In a moment of signature Owensian theater, the flag of the Rick Owens Republic is set to fly down the runway atop what Owens calls a “gymnast bouquet”: eight muscle-men bearing a framework that holds three contortionists, one bearing a flag of two sinewy arms clasping hands. (The arms belong to Owens and one of his friends.) “It’s dudeship,” he says. “Respect the dudeship.”

Of course, there’s always a crisis. Guests are filing in outside as a model taps Owens on the broad shoulder of his coat, as long and black as his signature hairdo. “What do you need?” Owens asks. The model points to a streak of tan makeup across his chiffon hood. “We’re going to have to live with it,” Owens says, moving on. “The eye will accept it!”

The Rick Owens brigades are starting to be sent to the lineup. Owens appears satisfied and totally relaxed amidst all of the chaos he’s created. “It’s a story about sharing and unity,” he says, looking for a few more stray hoods. “The times that we’re living in, the biggest problem on the planet is intolerance which is the basis of all war. That is the glory and the horror of human existence. But somebody like me, I’m able to introduce or to promote tolerance in certain ways by promoting aesthetics that aren’t necessarily standard. My role is to be part of the force in the world that promotes tolerance, and there’s another force that promotes intolerance, and it’s a constant struggle forever and ever. But so far, we’re still here.” He chuckles. “We haven’t been nuked yet.”

He fixes the snaps on one last hood, crushing the leather between his hands until it crumples into a perfectly tortured halo around the model’s head. He pats her on the shoulder. “Yes!” he shouts. “Have fun!”

Originally Appeared on GQ

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