His brutalist furniture has been inspired by rocks and bunkers. But the designer known for his gothic aesthetic has created a new range with a warmer influence – his mother’s homeland of Mexico. Has the ‘Donald Judd of fashion’ gone soft?
This year, designer Rick Owens and his partner Michèle Lamy went to Mexico for the first time. “I’ve never really explored my Mexican heritage, even though my mother was from there,” says Owens. “But I was thinking about using it for my next clothing collection.” He returned to Paris inspired by what he’d seen. “Not the piñatas and the Frida Kahlo Mexico,” he says. “More the hot colours that Luis Barragán used, and Aztec architecture, and the photographs that Josef and Anni Albers took there in the 1930s, which I saw at the Guggenheim in Venice last year. Loud colours. And sequins.” Sequins? Colours? From the man who loves grey? “Yeah! I’m a flashy guy!” he giggles.
Another, rather different, strand of influence emerged from the trip, seen in a new furniture collection that launched in London at Carpenters Workshop on 16 September. “We went to the cenotes in Tulum,” says Owens of the underground cave systems. “There was something about the enclosed spaces that felt insulated and grand at the same time.” Channelled through the designer’s brain, this culminated in a work called Glade – seating units that form an enclosed monochromatic landscape. “It’s like a hole in a forest,” says Owens, “which is what a glade is.” The seating, made with ply and covered in the grey vintage army blankets that have appeared in his work for two decades, comes fitted with internet and lighting connections. “I like the option of putting a hundred of them together,” he says. “You could fill a stadium with them. It’s like my version of wallpaper.”
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