Death: So as you were born from the body of my mother, it would be right and proper for you to help me in some way with my business.
Fashion: I have already done so in the past, more than you imagine. In the first place, I who continually annul or distort all other customs, have never allowed the practice of dying to fall anywhere into disuse, and you can see this is why it has universally endured to this day…
— Leopardi, The Dialogue of Fashion and Death, 1824
As with all things Fashion an analysis of a fashion designer effaces every word the moment it hits the page. Fashion wants nothing more than to churn out its signs without capture. Its designers dress up in its thick nexus of inexplicable statements. Their riddles walk down the runway and into the streets. Rick Owens is a quagmire. To penetrate his surfaces, to peer into his world, is to wrestle a smooth tarbaby. One could begin in all sorts of ways: an account of his personal history, an analysis of the materials in his works, a close read of major shifts — or, one could begin by running the tip of their finger down his firm, solid sternum, continuing over his sculpted abdominals, wrapping around his pelvis. Together we could caress his long, lustrous, pitch black hair. His hair is a wonderment. How does he do it? Each morning does he dab japanese dyes onto a black toothbrush and meticulously run it through his hair? Does opera music play lightly all the while? Yes to both of the above. We can witness the entire affair in the Rituals section of the New York Times website.1
In 1994 Rick Owens launched his own brand. In selecting a name he continued a long fashion tradition and named it after himself. A practice that goes back to one of the first to identify as a fashion designer, Charles Frederick Worth, who strove to be recognized as an artist, and even dressed himself, and some of his clients, in the likeness of Rembrandt and his sitters. Artworks, with some exceptions, are associated with the name of their producer. Yet artists are seldom seen as brands. This is perhaps because in fashion pure individuation is more difficult to feign when the production process is known to incorporate a great many people - and it is therefore more important to feign individuality through naming. With the fashion designer the name becomes a brand, and brand becomes the name as it subsumes a group. When groups are subsumed they rightly demand exchange. They require sacrifice.
The ritual sacrifice of Rick Owens for Rick Owens erects a screen between the individual and the group. Yet this screen carries some of the self along with it. With the sacrifice of one’s own name, the subject comes to mimic an amorphous realm. The self-repudiation of branding widens the gap between the subject and their name, a gap to be filled only by an object. The primary object of the fashion designer is, of course, the garment. The garment is an ideal object for anthropological inquiry. After its long journey, from the cloth in the hands of the artisan, it comes to rest as the material barrier between the self and the world — yet remains only partly visible to the wearer. Without a mirror the wearer can never see exactly what they are wearing.
Rick Owens wears his own clothing. In a sense he models his line with each public appearance. As with any model, he aims to seduce the viewer. As owner, however, his seductions take on an extra dimension: he serves as model and also regulator of signs as they pass through the screen of the brand and expand out into the marketplace. He is able to celebrate the sacrifice of his subjectivity as the return of the self to its original body.
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From the start, Rick Owens was drawn to black garments: “In the ‘90s I wore tight black jeans, black platforms, a black T-shirt and a leather jacket. That was my uniform then. After that I wore army surplus shorts over sweatpants with a t-shirt and a leather coat for a long time...”.2 For most of the 19th and 20th centuries European fashion presented uniformly black outfits as a form of oppositional dress. Baudelaire wore black in protest against the sartorial vulgarity of French Bohemian circles. Djuna Barnes and Baronin von Freytag-von Loringhoven wore all black to rail against bourgeois life. The beatniks inherited their black dress from post-war left-bank Parisian circles.3 As Existentialism took hold of Paris, and puzzled over the concept of the individual, its followers wore uniforms of black clothes. Simone de Beauvoir’s frustrations with Existentialism led her to write: “Sartre’s petit bourgeois readers had lost their faith in perpetual peace, in eternal progress… they had discovered History in its most terrible form. They needed an ideology which would include such revelations without forcing them to jettison their old excuses.”4 For these petit bourgeois readers wearing black would have read differently to their parents and grandparents. Before its rebirth as oppositional dress, black was worn by those in mourning. This practice was conserved in the twentieth century by the bourgeois class. As mortality rates fell, mourning held the potential of a public display of wealth. A wealthy widow could remain in mourning for years, repudiating the surrounding libidinal economy. Wealth mixed with death could aid in the formation of a fortress from society, and it was big business. Even during the First World War, most department stores had large mourning sections.
Rick Owens’ garments recall that time when mourning was public practice. A time before death and its rituals were banished from everyday life. They pull this ritual from the past, dragging it through the language of oppositional dress, and into the present. But when someone dressed in Rick Owens drifts through contemporary life in a chic state of oppositional mourning, what do they oppose? What do they mourn?
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In recent years, after moving to Paris, Owens has been designing more than just clothes. His way of life has come to resemble the uniformity of his early dress: “Owens is somewhat reclusive: He doesn’t go out much, his life revolving around his home, the gym and a couple of nearby restaurants. He lives and works in a single building, the former headquarters of the French Socialist Party, on a grand square opposite the French parliament. The only windows in his studio overlook the quiet, deserted garden of the former Ministry of Defense.”5 Owens and his wife, Michele Lamy, completely renovated the building, and in the process turned their attention to furniture and interior design. Their furnishings offer a litany of moribund tones and textures: ox bone, camel hair, concrete, styrofoam, and plywood stained dark black. In modern design functionality is set in opposition to sensuousness. Function, the holy word, appears stark and abhors ornament while the sensuous gives itself over to body’s constant effort to avoid pain. The Rick Owens atmosphere sits heavily between the two — its dark, thick air acquaints two words: Minimal Gothic.6
In the early era of Gothic architecture, the Bishop of Rome’s moral code professed abstinence and forbade those under him from employing the seductions of flesh. Both the insides of bodies and buildings were commanded to maintain moral purity. For this reason, ornament was all but banished from the Cathedral interior. Outside the Cathedral ornamental work flourished freely, liberated for advertising purposes. The ornamentation for the colossal Gothic Cathedral rendered images of Christianity for all to see, and these depictions propagated from the center of the city to the surrounding towns. This ideology helped drive the townspeople to work to provide the raw materials for the Cathedrals, accelerated by new standardized techniques for the cutting and mounting of blocks of stone.7
Similarly, the anti-ornamental impulse that inspired Minimalist artists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris in the 1960s was passed down from turn-of-the-century architecture. Much of what stands behind their obsession with clean lines achieved by industrial machines was ignited by Adolf Loos’ essay Ornament and Crime (1913), in which freedom from ornament comes to symbolize an uncorrupted mind. What these moments share is a crisis brought on by the formal subsumption of the aesthetic sphere by advancements in mass production. Both Gothic and Minimalism, in their own ways, absorbed their crisis through the repression of ornamentation.
Owens and Lamy’s foray into furniture is larger than life. Their pieces can accommodate many bodies. Almost like public furniture, they suggest the assembly of a group. Unlike the cathedrals of the Gothic era they are not ornamented with images. The furniture of Owens and Lamy resurrect the Gothic, but as an abstraction without origin, combining it with the Minimal — the current sovereign of distinctive taste. Here, Gothic is the fetid reformed into the crisp. The ornamented surfaces of the Cathedral are transformed into expansive flatness. They make this combination work through the language of fashion. For Fashion, above all other forms of culture, possesses the potential for the “enjoyment of a spectral and cyclical world of bygone forms endlessly revived as effective signs.”8
Ornamentation is an externalization of the self. It holds the capacity to individuate, not merely through sleight shifts of materials and processes in the production line, but as a release from the experience of mechanization.9 To work a material into something unique requires the inward focus of an individual. The repression of ornamentation amounts to something similar to the denial of the self, for the ornamented self never feels homogeneous with an other. Along the lines of the self-named brand, a lack of ornament presents, instead of an individual, a smooth, hard surface for the group to encounter.
Rick Owens clothing and furnishings both cost a fortune—a bulk release of funds. Whether through credit line, private wealth or careful saving, fashion always proposes the release of unproductive expenditure. With the accumulation of great wealth follows the social pressure to ostentatious loss. In the twentieth century, with the rise of bourgeois customs and the solidification of immense wealth among a small elite, this loss has grown more and more private and individuated. Yet it still seeks a cultural form through which it can express itself. Today this form is called Fashion.
The desire named Rick Owens is this continuous release, these projections of the self by the individual into darkened, coolly formed garments and interiors, wishing to prepare the subject for a true moment of individuation, which remains, for now, veiled. To let go of precious money for a garment retains the scent of sacrifice for the community, a scent trapped in the glass cloche of economic domination. Rick Owens mourns the dissolution of self into signs as preparation for its ultimate dissolution in death. While its full effects may not be realized in this society, for it may be too long of a step into the void, Rick Owens remains a desire to recognize that the self is dissolving all the while—until the very end.
