BODY OF WORK

On the eve of a major retrospective in Paris, Rick Owens talks with Sally Singer about mortality, belonging, legacy—and the kindness and gentleness he hopes his work embodies.

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FOR THE RECORD
Owens-videotaped by Kembra Pfahler, a.k.a. Karen Black-photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, 2001.

On the day after his elegant and wonderfully accessible fall-winter 2025 women’s show in March, Rick Owens could be found walking home from the Basilica of Saint Clotilde clutching some fragrant white jasmine he had plucked from nearby bushes. This is a church he visits often—alone, or with his longtime assistant Anna-Philippa Wolf (a.k.a. AL) and her baby—and that he considers “an extension of my house, part of my life here in Paris...a perfect little place.”

Owens himself is not religious, but he likes a church, or the idea of a church. “At its best, it is a place where people come together to form a system of living for taking care of each other,” he says, and then repeats: “At its best.” He specifically loves Saint Clotilde because it is where he and his parents would discuss cremation and burial and have all those hard end-of-life conversations when they would visit him during the show seasons. (“Dad was not religious—he never was—but Mom was Catholic.”) Now that his parents have passed, Owens’s mind inevitably turns to mortality as he walks the few blocks of the 7th arrondissement between the church, his home-slash-HQ on Place du Palais-Bourbon, and, à travers la Seine, the Louvre and the Palais Royale. “I guess I kind of belong here now,” he says. “This is the street I am going to get old on, where the waiters are going to get tired of me ordering the same thing all the time.” After more than 20 years, the California native and Venetian Lido-loving Owens has adopted Paris as his own.

And the City of Light has re-sponded in kind, with uncharacteristic