THE PROVOCATEUR

As Rick Owens celebrates 30 years, the designer can still shock and awe with the best of them.

- Véronique Hyland

You can't go home again, but Rick Owens tried to. A few years ago, he returned to Porterville, California, the town where he grew up, and for fall 2024, he brought Porterville to his current home of Paris-as in, he literally invited show guests over to his house, a 19th-century townhome-meets-Brutalist bulwark that once served as the headquarters of the French Socialist party.

The fashion was, as it always is at a Rick Owens show, a melding of the sublime and the perverse: sculptural, wirelike tangles of cotton voile and mesh; spiky, reptilian boots. Named for his hometown, the collection "was kind of a celebration," he says in his California inflection, his syllables flat and dry as the Mojave Desert. "I was able to create the world I was yearning for in Porterville. It might not have worked out, but it did."

That might be the thesis statement of Owens's career. In Porterville, which he portrays as Main Street, USA, he felt "oppressed and afraid and ashamed." There was his queerness (he identifies as bisexual), his self-described "sissiness," his general quality of not belonging. One portal out was Frank Frazetta, whose fantasy art decorated the paperbacks his father read to him, and featured "the most glamorous, heroic, sexy-looking people who were pursuing a next level of living," he remembers. Another was Catholic school, where he learned that everyone had a higher purpose, a concept that intrigued him. "It was all about studying these creatures wearing long robes that dragged on the ground," he says, "saints and nuns and priests pursuing a higher spiritual level."