cult of personality

Rick Owens Is Too Cool for L.A. Fashion Week, Young People With Cute Haircuts, and Publicists

Rick Owens doesn’t have a press office, but he’s been awfully chatty with the U.S. media lately. We used to feel like we read an in-depth article about Marc Jacobs every other day. We felt like we knew him better than we knew ourselves, having memorized everything about him, from what kind of tattoos he had to what exercises he did at the gym to what he ate for breakfast. Now we feel like we come across an in-depth piece on Rick Owens every other day. Rick is terribly cool. He’s from central California, but moved to Paris because he’s too cool for his home state. In a video interview for Hint mag, he explains the other things he’s too cool for. He is so cool, in fact, that we’re not even annoyed by how cool he is. Herewith, a list of what he’s too cool for.

L.A. and what that city calls Fashion Week.

They do LA Fashion Week, which is incredibly arrogant and demanding. I mean, these editors have been all over the globe for a couple of weeks [for Fashion Month] and then LA is saying ‘Okay, now you have to come here.’ Please, I mean, get off your ass and go to Europe. I mean, that’s what I did and you just have to go where you have to go … [W]hy do they have to be a fashion capital? They’re the movie capital of the world and they’ve always been that, can’t they just be satisfied with that?


Staying awake all day.

I take a nap every day, partly just to recharge, but also there’s a little bit of escape in it. I get oversaturated having to communicate with a lot of people all day … It’s kind of a mini suicide.


Working with young people.

I’m a terrible collaborator. I can only be completely passive or completely dominant. I can’t be in between. I’ve tried things where I had a lot of energy around me, young people with cute hair cuts and stuff, and I just can’t deal with all that excess energy. And all of that desire and all of that ambition and everybody’s needs. So I kind of have to be really spoiled and be by myself. Not to put young people down but I get portfolios and I get applications and C.V.s that have images and like collages and stuff. And what the fuck am I going to do with a collage? I know how to make a collage. I need old people who know how to make things.


Trying to get publicity.

Now everything is so celebrity based. There’s five things in London happening that night and it’s a competition, and if you don’t have the right celebrities at your function it automatically becomes kind of the failure of the night. And why would I put something that I’m doing — because that’s not me and that’s not my customer — so why would I put us in that position?


Having a press office.

I had had a press office and I decided to disengage from that because having a press office became something I didn’t like having in my life. I didn’t like paying someone to remind me every day that I had to get more attention for myself. That started feeling icky. I thought, ‘I’ve gotten this far without that much press anyway so why all of a sudden do I want to join into this thing I don’t really believe in?’ At that point I thought, ‘Why do I have to do this? I can just eliminate this.’ I mean there’s no rules. So I cut that out and to compensate for it I thought, ‘Well, we’ll open a store, and that’ll be an expression that people can see, like, the Rick Owens world.’ And I thought it would be kind of an expensive — it would be a luxury for us to open that store. But it wasn’t — it made money. And no one was more surprised than I was. And after the success of that we were like well this is kind of a great thing let’s open another one. And we’re on a roll now.


Speaking French.

I decide I have enough lawyers now that I don’t have to speak French ever. Let the lawyers do it.


Hint Video: Rick Owens [Hint via Fashionologie]

Rick Owens Is Too Cool for L.A. Fashion Week, Young People With Cute Haircuts, and Publicists