Rick Owens – författare

With his provocative and subversive approach to design, Rick Owens has been a transformative force in fashion since he founded his label in 1994. This essential volume is the first critical appraisal of Owens’s work, documenting the evolution of nearly three decades of the designer’s inimitable worldview.Owens remains one of the most daring and influential fashion designers working today. Often described for his “a-grunge-meets-glamor” aesthetic, Owens has cultivated a devoted international following. In his creations, grace and grit are paired with an obsession with structural transformation and movement, where diaphanous, flowing shapes contrast with opaque forms and sharp edges, an approach to formal invention that is complemented by a mania for new and often exotic materials.Timed to coincide with the first comprehensive show of the designer’s work taking place at the Palais Galliera in Paris in summer 2025, the scope and breadth of this exhibition promises to be a treat to both longtime fans and the uninitiated. Owens will reimagine the grand nineteenth-century palace housing the museum, with temporary installations that will serve as vitrines to his many creations. In effect dividing the book between the conception of showcases and the precious objects that they display within, the curatorial essays bookending this visual narrative will attempt to describe the multidisciplinary, even architectural approach Owens has to his creations.

Rick Owens remains one of the most daring and influential fashion designers working today. This new book of photographs describes an exceptionally fertile and transformational period in his career, one that saw him experiment with new shapes, the application of new materials, and an unprecedented use of color.Lavishly documenting men’s and women’s collections and featuring Owens’s continuing collaboration with the photographer Danielle Levitt, this book is an unabashed love letter to one of the most devoted followings in contemporary fashion.Picking up where Rizzoli’s previous monograph on Owens’s work left off, looks from his critically lauded homage to the rock-and-roll designer Larry Legaspi set a frenzied visual pace that never lets up—right through the pandemic, when Owens memorably staged shows on the Lido di Venezia.Here, the continued evolution of nearly three decades of Owens’s “grunge-meets-glamour” worldview is seen close up. Grace and grit are paired with an obsession with structural transformation and movement, where diaphanous, flowing shapes contrast with sharp objects. This formal invention is matched by a mania for new and exotic materials. The use of translucent bovine leathers, brightly dyed snakeskin, and the hide of the pirarucu, a massive Amazonian fish, are applied to old and new icons of the brand. Color is now firmly part of the Owens legendarium, and a profligacy of pink, orange, blue, green, and iridescent hues now vie with trademark black, oxblood, and dust that have been part of the palette since the inception of the brand.Owens’s newest provocations, grounded by the portraiture of Danielle Levitt, achieves a sublime unity in this essential volume.