A mugging in Los Angeles helped push Rick Owens to build his empire in Paris
Rick Owens grew up in a conservative Catholic home in small-town California, learned his trade copying designer clothes, and became famous when Kate Moss wore one of his leather jackets in Vogue Paris. His label later reportedly earned $120 million a year while staying free of corporate investors.
Owens was born in 1961 and raised in California, the son of John and Connie Owens; his mother is Mexican. After high school in Porterville he spent two years studying art at Otis College of Art and Design, then took courses in pattern-making and draping at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. That practical training landed him in the garment trade, where his job was knocking off designer pieces. Through his boyfriend of the time, Rick Castro, he met Michèle Lamy, a fixture of Los Angeles nightlife with her own sportswear label. The two married in 2006.
He started his own line in 1994 from a shop on Hollywood Boulevard. The breakthrough came when the photographer Corrine Day shot Kate Moss for Vogue Paris wearing one of his signature jackets, a choice Owens credits to the stylist Panos Yiapanis. American Vogue then paid for his first runway show, Sparrows FW02, in New York; it had been meant to show an earlier collection, but the September 11 attacks forced a delay. He won the CFDA Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent in 2002.
In 2003 he and Lamy relocated to Paris, partly because he had been mugged in Los Angeles. Home and studio went into a five-storey building once used as offices by François Mitterrand, and in 2004 the couple founded Owenscorp. His shows grew theatrical: a 2006 presentation in Florence ended with a life-sized wax figure of Owens urinating onto mirrors and sand, now kept in his Paris flagship, and in 2014 forty step dancers from college sororities replaced catwalk models after six months of rehearsal.
That 2014 show also launched a long Adidas footwear partnership that carried him further into the mainstream. Later tie-ups ran from Birkenstock and Veja to Moncler, Champion, Dr. Martens and Converse. Recognition followed, including the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, a retrospective at the Triennale di Milano that December, and a 2025 exhibition at the Palais Galliera titled after the Sisters of Mercy song Temple of Love.
Source: Rick Owens
