The California-born designer’s latest monograph chronicles his recent daring designs
Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL
Photography by DANIELLE LEVITT
RICK OWENS.
Four years ago, Rick Owens and film director and photographer Danielle Levitt published a first book of photographs taken from their semi-annual collaborations. In the initial volume, Levitt expertly captures stark images of the designer’s bold pieces and produces crisp, unvarnished portraits of models in Owens’ collection looks. Upon its publication, the innovative Porterville-raised designer, who learned pattern cutting in Los Angeles, ended a 16-year hiatus from his home state by returning to the city where his career began for a book signing. The event drew an endless line of ardent supporters to his La Brea boutique.
Now Levitt and Owens are releasing a second book, More Rick Owens (Rizzoli, $65), documenting the evolution of his aesthetic in the years since the first monograph arrived. From Owens’ obsessive homage to Larry Legaspi (who designed for Grace Jones, Kiss, and Labelle) to his colorful Spring/Summer 2023 offering (titled Edfu after the site of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus in Egypt), the striking new directions of his singular silhouettes emerge across the pages.
Levitt captures the dramatic shoulders, voluminous proportions, trailing hems, mile-high platform boots, and Owens’ perfectly measured draping and sharply original angles in all their subversive glory. She also gives a firsthand look at the pieces comprising four shows he held for no audiences — Owens calls them the label’s Covid Quartet — on the Lido di Venezia, where he spends his summers. The improvisational aspects of these presentations drew Owens’ team even closer, leading his casting director of the past decade to wield a trash can lid as a wind machine so Levitt could get her shots.
Feature image: Signature looks from Rick Owens’ past collections.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of C Magazine.
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