Rick Owens has been one of the few designers capable of turning his personal aesthetic into a true global trend .
Very long black t-shirts, irreproducible garments, shoes, boots and the color black as a sign of identity. The American designer has not only established himself in fashion as one of the most relevant designers of the moment , but he is one of the few proper names that have fully established themselves in fashion Olympus.
Rick Owens’ beginnings in fashion
Contrary to what often happens when we review the careers of some of the best designers in the world, Rick Owens’ professional career was not exactly a bed of roses. After leaving, without having finished, the design school in which he began his training, Owens found one of his passions in a tailoring degree at the Trade Technical College in Los Angeles.
However, his first job was far from expected , dedicating himself to work for a company that was dedicated to copying clothes from some of the most prominent designers in the world. It was not until 94 when the designer was able to start alone with the brand that would bear his name . And this time, contrary to what normally happens in this type of situation, it did so in a delicate situation, contributing its own capital, without the support of any of the large financial groups that are dedicated to injecting money into the fashion sector. .
Leather, knitted sweaters and deconstructing garments were some of its identity since its first steps as a designer. As he himself affirms, “I feel that I need to propose grace and experimental form as a gesture to get away from the common thread. Not as a form of escapism, but as a fashion of rejection ”And if something characterizes the work of Rick Owens in his firm commitment to get away from everything that surrounds mainstream trends.
The last years in the work of Rick Owens have served for the designer to experiment with forms and sensations. Even creating the Rick Owen DRKSHDW collection in collaboration with adidas. So much so that it is common that in his latest fashion shows we have been able to see models acting as if they were accessories, hanging from the back of other models, or women wrapped in pillows. We have also been able to see in parades, as in Paris, bodies with their genitals in the air, in the form of protest.
And it is that the fashion of Rick Owens can be of everything, less conventional.
The work of Rick Owens. Counterculture as a hallmark
Rick Owens is not exactly your typical industry designer who has focused his career on fashion design. Throughout his entire life as an artist we have been able to see how Owens’ concerns went far beyond this area . Even the products that it has designed in this area could be located in the area totally opposite to the current that dominates the fashion sector.
One of the first points in which we find the first divergence between the designer’s career and the rest of his professional colleagues is his ability to have managed to maintain the independence of his brand. Rick Owens has 80% of the shares of his firm, something unheard of in the field of which we speak . The remaining 20% does not have all of it, but is divided between him and two more people from his closest area.
His interest in architecture has also been one of the fields that has marked his professional career . The designer, as he himself has admitted several times, has considered architecture as one of the disciplines that has had the greatest impact on his work, having managed to capture in a multitude of works some of his greatest influences, such as Le Corbusier or Carlo Scarpa , among others, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright.
Rick Owens is the clear example of how a designer may have found his place in fashion from a position of complete rejection of it, having managed to position himself as one of the designers who has marked an era.
Without a doubt, the designer is one of the few names that has managed to bring the entire industry to his feet.
