Rick Owens
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WfAmL-dIBQ
Richard Saturnino Owens, known as Rick Owens, is an American Fashion designer from Califronia. He studied fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles before taking a pattern cutting class which led him to abandon his fine art studies for a career in fashion.
He launched the Rick Owens designer label in the mid nineties but it was not until almost a decade later when a shot of Kate Moss wearing one of his fitted, distressed leather jackets appeared in Vogue Paris that he gained worldwide attention and the support of American Vogue’s Anna Wintour. His skill at mixing light and dark with hard and soft has earned him a cult-like following of faithful consumers and critics who avidly lap up every Rick Owens collection. Owens has become the industry go-to label for softly luxurious leather jackets, Cimmerian colours, sinuous drapery and fierce footwear. Owens’ clothing is as functional as it is visionary and costly. His atelier produces a large amount of separates, which are also accessible to those with non-model figures, This is proven in the you tube video link above of his s/s 13 Paris womenswear collection. In the video you will see non-model women dancing aggressively,it symbolises power and dominance within the woman. Typically Owens cuts with a narrow shoulder and longer sleeves creating the look of slimness and he often designs with an indentation in the lower back where the spine curves; as he says it “always makes your ass perkier”. He has never been a designer to manipulate or morph the shape of the body, choosing rather to embrace shape and use drape, bias cutting and jersey.
The reason I chose this designer is because again, Rick Owens experiments with the idea of Androgyny which links into a lot of soft grunge. I really like monochramictness of his collections, it makes the garments look elegant yet high end as well. He uses a lot of layering within his garments men and womanswear. I like the way Owens stick to basic shapes and drapes, this makes the fabrics and the garment look more high end and expensive.