Rick Owens answers questions on queer culture, punk gigs and sex clubs | i-D Asks

Source: Rick Owens answers questions on queer culture, punk gigs and sex clubs | i-D Asks, i-D, 20:32, uploaded 2024-03-07, Watch Later position 978.

i-D gives Rick Owens a stack of questions from people around him. Friends, collaborators, family, and younger artists ask about work, sex clubs, food, style, ageing, and sobriety. The film opens with Owens describing a scene in which Christeene and Michèle Lamy kiss above him whilst he kneels below them, then moves into the format’s gentler version of the same intimacy: each question makes a small part of his life public.

Work as a way of living

Kris Van Assche asks how Owens works with a partner who is also his stylist and consultant. Owens says that his work has always been his life, so he does not keep a firm line between the two. The lack of separation makes the work feel honest, sincere, and pure to him. He does not even know whether the activity deserves the name work because he experiences it as life.

Danielle Levitt asks why Owens writes in capital letters. He calls the letters a proclamation with a built-in artifice, like a child speaking too loudly in church. The effect feels loud and cheerful to him. He also chooses capitals because moving between upper and lower case feels tedious. Picking one form settles the matter.

Matt Lambert asks whose bedroom Owens would visit as an invisible observer. Owens recalls a story he attributes to a book by Angie Bowie, in which she enters a bedroom and finds David Bowie and Mick Jagger in bed together. He says that he would have wanted to be there to learn what had happened. The film gives the anecdote as a recollection of the book, without naming its title or establishing the story beyond Owens’s account.

Clothes, collaboration, and the erotic charge of objects

Owens found Sissy Misfit through Instagram and says that he watches for the vulnerability young people can feel when they work with an established designer. He knows that feeling from his own experience and hopes that Sissy enjoyed the collaboration as much as he did. Her question about the Dr. Martens project lets him describe the boot’s older charge. He remembers wearing the shoes in his youth and associating them with masculine vitality, flying bodies, and the smell of piss and beer. The dirt made the scene more exciting because he sensed a homoerotic quality in it.

Sissy’s second question asks Owens to spend one day in an imagined dystopia without getting hurt. He chooses the middle of nature, perhaps the ocean or the sea. The thought of becoming a speck reminds him that his private troubles have a small scale. The scenario answers the question through proportion. Nature would give him a way to step outside the tight circle of his own problems.

Stephen Jones’s hats have marked the periods of Owens’s life with Lamy. He says he can look at photographs and identify an era from the hat she wore. One memory joins a black Comme des Garçons garment that made her look like a black beetle to a large black bow by Jones. Owens liked the perversity of placing a bow on someone he describes as a barbaric little animal. He adds that Lamy chose the hat herself.

Jones then asks about Owens’s relationship with Dr. Martens. Owens returns to the image of a male corset. The laces gather the boot around the ankle and lead the eye towards the swell of a well-defined calf. The boot becomes effective through the way it shapes a leg, so its history and its construction meet in the body.

Jobs that sit beside fashion

The Clermont Twins ask about the hardships of being Rick Owens in the present. Owens says that he is having a great time and does not identify any particular hardship. When they ask about a second dream job, he chooses head gardener at the Vatican.

Gwendoline Christie asks which film he would have liked to star in. Owens names Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, then The Night Porter. He searches for the actress from the latter film and arrives at Charlotte Rampling. He also names Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith, saying that he would have wanted to play any of their roles. The answer wanders through actresses and characters rather than settling on one performance, which suits a question about an imagined career.

Rickey Thompson asks about Owens’s most unusual design. Owens remembers a pair of platform boots with a pocket for a handheld fog machine. The object pleased him because it turned a shoe into a small stage effect. He says that unusual products require research and persuasion, which can leave the designer with an expensive whim. The detail gives a practical cost to his taste for theatrical objects.

Los Angeles, queer memory, and the family kitchen

Owens has known Rick Castro for around forty years. In Los Angeles, their friends called Castro Bad Rick and Owens Good Rick. Castro asks whether Owens remembers their lost nights at the Meatrack, an S&M club on Santa Monica Boulevard in Silver Lake, and asks what he thinks of the Spotlight Bar reopening as a hipster DJ club.

Owens does not remember the Meatrack nights as shared events. He remembers going there alone and with another friend, although he may have encountered Castro there. He describes the club as a concrete bunker beside a Safeway, built from rooms and corners for sex. It had a distinctive smell, a good soundtrack, and a broad mix of people. The memory remains clear enough for him to say that it was not much of a haze, whilst he leaves the smell to the viewer’s imagination because i-D is a family magazine.

The Spotlight Bar opened at six in the morning for an early cocktail, and Owens witnessed fights there. He recalls one fight in which a man on top punched the man underneath whilst dragging him towards the door. Owens compares the movement to a double spider leaving the building and calls it one of the most beautiful fights he has seen. The description turns a violent memory into an image of movement without hiding the violence that made the scene memorable.

Vaginal Davis asks whether Owens will make a collection based on the persimmon cookies baked by his late mother, Connie. Owens says that he had published the recipe online and could imagine a collection built around either the persimmon or lemon cookies his mother made. His parents grew persimmons in their back garden in Porterville and sent the cookies to the Los Angeles showroom. The showroom still makes them, following the family tradition with vegan and gluten-free versions.

Bruce LaBruce asks about punk venues in Los Angeles during the late 1970s and 1980s, then asks whether Owens wore Doc Martens, slam danced, and became aroused in the mosh pit. Owens remembers a skating rink in the Valley and a place called the Starlight. He did slam dance and still carries a scar on his nose from someone else’s boot. He says that, for the sake of mythology, he is almost sure it was a Doc Martens boot. He answers the final question directly: yes, he did get an erection.

History, food, and the space around a personal statement

Owens introduces David Hoyle as a figure in queer history. He praises the episodes of Divine David that remain available on YouTube and remembers the programme’s delirious, reckless expression. For him, Hoyle offers a lesson in refusing to take a life or a self too seriously.

Hoyle recalls visiting Owens’s Paris house with the photographer Lee Baxter whilst wearing a sequined top. He remembers Owens asking, “David, sequins at brunch?” and asks whether Owens still follows that policy. Owens endorses sequins at brunch and reconstructs the earlier remark as admiration for someone bringing them into the house. He then reads a message praising him for helping artists who work underground or on the fringe, particularly artists with little money. His response is simple: David is a treasure.

Ludovic de Saint Sernin asks for a life lesson Owens wishes he had learned sooner. Owens offers three mottos: get over yourself; hope for the best whilst planning for the worst; and do not expect life to be fair. Saint Sernin then asks about food. Owens describes himself as less disciplined than Saint Sernin and names cakes, sugar, cheeseburgers, and milkshakes as his current obsessions.

Jon Gray asks whether he should bring truffle for the eggs after a show. Owens leaves that decision to Lamy, whose cooking he treats as her domain. He would not presume to suggest anything to her, although he wishes Gray luck if Gray has the nerve to ask.

Constantine Kaloutas came to Owens through Instagram. He remembers her work on masks and organic organisms, and says that he was taken by the way she turned personal discomfort into something poetic. When Kaloutas asks whether technology and social media would change the way he built his brand, Owens doubts that they would help. His work feels classical and almost primordial to him, so he cannot see how he would use the new spaces.

He says that he was lucky to make his personal statement when there was a small amount of room around him, enough for people to register who he was and what he was doing. He cannot see how a young designer can create the same space when so many voices compete for attention. The result depends partly on arriving at the right place and time, and he does not think a person can control that whole process.

A collection, a subculture, and the cost of being visible

Tommy Cash also came to Owens through Instagram. Owens first noticed the music’s pounding aggression, especially the song “Pussy, Money, Weed”, which he asked to remix for a show. He considers the result one of the best mixes they have made.

Cash then asks Owens to keep one collection whilst deleting the rest from history. Owens chooses the latest collection because it feels fresh and seems to summarise everything he has done. The choice troubles him because he would hate to lose parts of the earlier work. A question about an archive becomes a question about the emotional cost of selecting one version of a career.

Owens found Fecal Matter on Instagram and admires their commitment to an aesthetic. He calls them one of the closest things this generation has to a subculture, even though people often say that subcultures have disappeared. Steven asks whether hostile reactions and stares still follow Owens in public. Owens says that his life has grown out of a response to hostility and intolerance. His work tries to blur the lines of what people accept and to offer choices to people who do not fit narrow standards of beauty.

Age has changed the pressure. Owens assumes that he still receives stares, although he may be too old to attract many questions or may simply fail to notice them. When Hannah asks what part of fashion grinds his gears, he names phoniness. He also admits that every industry and every part of life contains it, and that he can be accused of it himself. His answer leaves room for self-correction rather than claiming a clean position outside the industry.

Sobriety and the present tense of desire

Dahc Dermur asks what sobriety means to Owens and what he sacrifices to sustain joy. Owens explains that he stopped drinking at forty, after a period in which he was a messy alcoholic. At the time, he felt intensely ambitious and frustrated by dead ends. He says that drinking helped him expose himself, push into public view, promote his work, and insist that people recognise its validity. He describes the alcohol as something he felt he needed in that period.

His life has changed, so he no longer needs the same aid and does not miss it. He still has dependencies: he smokes, drinks coffee, and needs a certain amount of cake each day. He has learned to accept these habits. The film ends with his thanks to i-D and his admission that the day felt like an unexpected blessing.

Limits

The interview is a sequence of personal answers rather than a documented history of queer Los Angeles, punk, fashion, or sobriety. Owens’s memories supply the film’s evidence. The account of David Bowie and Mick Jagger comes from a book by Angie Bowie whose title the video does not give. His account of the Meatrack is also qualified by his failure to remember shared nights with Castro. The captions sometimes misrecognise names, including Michèle Lamy, Christeene, and Dahc Dermur, so this note follows the identifiable names in the film and description.

The description credits OWENSCORP for imagery, names photographers and social accounts, and links to World of Wonder’s streaming service for full episodes of Divine David. Those production details explain the film’s references without turning them into evidence for Owens’s claims.

Further reading / references

• WOW Presents Plus, linked in the video’s description for full episodes of Divine David.