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This year, designer Rick Owens and his partner Michèle Lamy went to Mexico for the first time. “I’ve never really explored my Mexican heritage, even though my mother was from there,” says Owens. “But I was thinking about using it for my next clothing collection.” He returned to Paris inspired by what he’d seen. “Not the piñatas and the Frida Kahlo Mexico,” he says. “More the hot colours that Luis Barragán used, and Aztec architecture, and the photographs that Josef and Anni Albers took there in the 1930s, which I saw at the Guggenheim in Venice last year. Loud colours. And sequins.” Sequins? Colours? From the man who loves grey? “Yeah! I’m a flashy guy!” he giggles.
Another, rather different, strand of influence emerged from the trip, seen in a new furniture collection that launched in London at Carpenters Workshop on 16 September. “We went to the cenotes in Tulum,” says Owens of the underground cave systems. “There was something about the enclosed spaces that felt insulated and grand at the same time.” Channelled through the designer’s brain, this culminated in a work called Glade – seating units that form an enclosed monochromatic landscape. “It’s like a hole in a forest,” says Owens, “which is what a glade is.” The seating, made with ply and covered in the grey vintage army blankets that have appeared in his work for two decades, comes fitted with internet and lighting connections. “I like the option of putting a hundred of them together,” he says. “You could fill a stadium with them. It’s like my version of wallpaper.”
Owens’ clothing designs and muscly-goth image might imply a certain transgressive darkness, but his conversation is sparklingly bright, and runs from Egyptian sarcophagi (a regular stop on Louvre visits) to Cher videos (his favourite is Hell on Wheels, in which the singer wears a zebra-striped leotard over cycling shorts and rollerskates to a truck stop full of drag queens). When we talk, he is in his office in Paris’s classy 7th arrondissement. (He chose the area for its “imperious” quality.) Lamy is in London, installing Glade at Carpenters’ Mayfair gallery.
While Owens comes up with the furniture concepts, it is Lamy – who cuts an equally unusual figure with her khol-rimmed eyes, dye-stained fingers and diamond-studded gold teeth – who carries them forward. “I do a few shapes, then she responds,” says Owens. “I might do sketches, maybe a cardboard sculpture. Then she goes to the workshop, which is an hour outside Paris, and works her magic. She likes constructing things – the bigger the better. Give her a crane, she’d be thrilled.” A series of eight Aztec-inspired crowns, which Lamy has also developed, cross the divide between the furniture and the clothes. They will be seen in the exhibition and on the catwalk in October. Owens describes them as “improbable and poetic”.
Owens considers the furniture to be his couture line. “It’s custom-ordered, it moves at a stately pace,” he says. “Me, I like the speed of fashion, though partly because I have the privilege of being in charge of my own company.” Owens is just about the only thriving fashion house in Paris not to have been subsumed by a conglomerate. “I don’t have the pressure of bosses observing what I’m doing. I don’t know how those guys do it. But it’s thrilling to watch as a competitive sport, the way the players are traded.”
Owens started his label in Los Angeles in 1994 and later teamed up with Lamy, who ran the Les Deux Cafe over the road from his studio on Las Palmas Avenue, first working as a pattern cutter for her fashion line. The pair moved to Paris in 2003 and married in 2006.
Owens describes his earlier aesthetic as drippy. “There was a collapse implied and a sense of melancholy,” he says of the draped clothing, the sleeves that extended beyond the fingers. By his own admission, there was a lot of partying and drugs back then. “But as I got healthier and happier, there was a joyfulness in working with shapes. When you drape it’s always about creating extensions and exaggerating lines. I still drape, but now there is more strength in what I do.” Owens, then as now, looks to fashion’s archetypes – armour, uniforms, T-shirts. “I want to be the Donald Judd of fashion,” he says, referencing the American minimalist master. “I have a very rigorous set of shapes and forms I keep going back to.”
When he started, his impulse was to think of furniture at its most reductive. “I thought [of] a fur on a rock in a cave,” he says. From this came the Prong stool. “It’s a boulder,” he says of the stool, which has been made in concrete, marble and now aluminium. “The facets are influenced by the old bunkers that stand on the Normandy coast. They look like futurist temples.”
Owens’ and Lamy’s furniture is often brutally restrained and bare. The materials are immutable – bronze and concrete, alabaster and marble. Kanye West has a table made in another favourite – petrified wood. “I love basalt and alabaster,” says Owens. “They’re almost biblical and primitive. When I’m making furniture I think of timelessness and I think of clothes that way too. The way they drape on the body has a classical influence.” The plywood of Glade, though, is its antithesis. “It’s opposite, transient. Like a Scotch Tape version of something.”
Their home decor is brutalist too, with concrete floors and raw walls in Paris. Their beachside penthouse in Venice is lined with pale Sardinian stone. “It was very World of Interiors when we took it on, with a patchwork of 1940s tiled floors and Scarpa-style doors,” says Owens. “We lived in it like that for one summer, then we ripped it all out. There are floor-to-ceiling mirrored doors – you slip in and out of them, as though they’re mirrored walls.”
The couple dine at the Aman Hotel in the 16th-century Palazzo Papadopoli. They travel by a water taxi that has been fitted out with a huge portable stereo, kept specially on charge for these journeys, that pumps out hard techno. Or Cher. “I’m not a foodie,” says Owens. “I don’t like those little places with low ceilings, where everyone tells you the food is wonderful but the bathroom is on the other side of a paper-thin wall. It’s disgusting.” In Venice he eats fish and vegetables. In Paris he eats cakes, because he likes the craftsmanship of their creation. “But really, I have cheap taste. I like cheese and ice cream. The sluttier the better.”
This tension between taste and tackiness, control and collapse, is encapsulated in his growing love of art nouveau. “We all strive to reach a higher level of serenity, and there’s always the danger of giving in to our id, our weaknesses,” says the regular gym-goer. “That’s what art nouveau is, a lugubrious collapse. So it’s super sexy, and ominous, and it’s the only stuff I buy. We all need a little disruption. Don’t we?”
Glade is at Carpenters Workshop until 25 October
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