Elegant Monsters.(Rick Owens)(Interview)

One Friday morning last September, Valentine, a tall blond Dutch model, arrived at the studio of Rick Owens, the American fashion designer, who lives and works in a five-story mansion on the Place du Palais Bourbon, in central Paris. It was two days before the beginning of Fashion Week, and Valentine, who had been selected by Owens as a fitting model, would spend the morning trying on garments from his Spring 2008 collection, which was to be presented at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts on Sunday. Owens has been showing his label on the runway for just six years, but since the late nineties stylish women--including Helena Bonham Carter, Ellen Barkin, Angelina Jolie, and (lately) the Olsen twins--have been wearing his long, clingy T-shirts, elegantly asymmetrical dresses, and skinny-armed leather jackets, which are in constant demand at Barneys. Owens, a forty-six-year-old California native, whose deceptively casual designs combine luxury fabrics--ostrich, gazar, organza, and pleated eelskin--with meticulous, highly unconventional construction, has become the foremost purveyor of what he has called "glunge" (grunge plus glamour). He has acquired a following that could be described as cultlike or exclusive, were it not for the fact that he sells tens of millions of dollars' worth of clothes each year, in more than two hundred and fifty high-end fashion stores around the world. This summer, he will open a boutique in downtown Manhattan, his first in the United States.

Valentine glanced around nervously as she entered Owens's building, a staid, neoclassical pile that he and his wife, Michele Lamy, who is French, bought in 2004. Francois Mitterrand once had an office on the first floor. The interior, however, suggests a gut demolition in progress, though it has already been given as much of a makeover as Owens intends, since he likes to work in surroundings that reflect his aesthetic of--as he has put it--"broken idealism." Except for some wedding-cake moldings in a few rooms, including Mitterrand's former office, he has stripped the place of its original details. The walls, shorn of wallpaper, are crumbling; the floors are dusty concrete slabs; and the ceilings are a tangle of ducts, wires, and pipes. On the top floor are Owens and Lamy's living quarters: a cavernous room furnished with an armchair, a TV screen mounted on a black plywood cube, and a bed, designed by Owens, with a U-shaped, six-foot-high headboard upholstered in brown wool felt--a sample from his furniture collection, which he would be presenting to the public at a Paris art gallery the following week. At the entrance to the room was a shower: a concrete platform with a drain in the center and no walls.

Valentine met Owens in his third-floor studio, a long, low room with windows covered by Swiss Army blankets, broken ceiling beams, and five racks of clothes, which had arrived that morning from the factory in Italy where Owens's label is produced. On a table at one end of the room, a laptop was playing the Ramones song "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." Owens, who was eying the racks when Valentine arrived, was dressed in clothes that he had designed: a sleeveless black T-shirt made of fraying silk (exposing gym-pumped arms, adorned in tattoos), baggy black shorts, and, beneath the shorts, gray sweatpants with inside-out seams, the ragged ends tucked into unlaced, hand-sewn, leather high-tops, which sell for twelve hundred dollars. Long straight hair, dyed black, framed his face, which is dominated by large dark eyes; he looks uncannily like Iggy Pop. Once, when he was asked by an interviewer to name his "teenage desire," Owens, who is bisexual, replied, "To fuck Iggy Pop." Having failed in that goal--"I met Iggy only once," he told me, "in a tacky Mexican drag bar in L.A.: a little, shrivelled, ugly guy on the dance floor with an Asian woman. But that's the way to meet him"--Owens did his best, he explained, "to turn into Iggy Pop." This ambition extended beyond straightening and dying his hair, which is naturally curly and prematurely white. Like Iggy, for many years Owens indulged in drugs and alcohol (mostly speed, cocaine, and vodka), in amounts that, before he stopped cold turkey, in the early nineties, nearly killed him.

He immediately put Valentine at ease. "Is this your first time doing the Paris shows?" he asked. She said that it was.

"Are people nice to you?" he asked.

"Well, the designers tend to be awfully busy and they see a lot of girls," she replied.

"Yeah," Owens said. "They can be so dismissive."