The renowned international Fashion designer Rick Owens, Porterville’s most gifted native son, a 1979 Porterville High graduate, is considered across the globe to have established a luxury artistic brand with vision. Fashion designs by Owens stands for uncompromising bold aesthetics through innovative visionary forms. Few know the depth of his expressive inspiration or more so his historical sources as a look you want to know better. 

Today, Owens’ runways have continued to capture a worldwide audience with his outstanding collections and displays, such as his SS16 women’s runway cyclops and the bold yet sleek looks of his Gary jackets from his 2021 fall winter runway titled Gethsemane. Owens’ fashions are sought after across the world due to their neo-mannerist forms which reference obscure visual art, literature, performance, theater, music, and or architecture. Using a unique lexicon that derives from art historical antecedents, Owens resurrects the dead language of the past, brought from the present into the future. 

Fashion history can be so unkind with its inventions and contrived histories and embellished narratives which can be conjured within minutes. Many designers are impoverished and without corporate financial backing or high-end, luxurious, in-the-house contracts, which can easily be omitted in historical footnotes, and long forgotten like the Proustian remembrance of past things on Paris runways, or extravagant international museum shows and exhibitions across the globe. 

Men of letters along with Literary authors throughout history have defined the flaneur as not only a 18th century movement with its distinctive behavioral trait, which called attention to itself. The flaneurs gave birth to contemporary fashion as a brilliant business concept that designers who shared their modus vivendi first celebrated its sidewalk along its arcades before fashion was ever fashion. Inspiration was the sole raison d’etre for the flaneur. 

History shared the flaneurs first began as literary figures evolving into an ideology that shaped thought and perceptions, directing fashion to become a philosophical practice to which Owens has today renewed in our lives. 

Flaneurs liberated the creative practice, where becoming was as creative as being, cultivated through new philosophical methods of seeing and new way of thinking. 

Like Owens, the flaneur was the connoisseur of the street, best represented by individuals who were born with a visionary power of observation, urban wanderers who celebrated not only seeing but being seen, as the essence of their beings. 

In retrospect, what the world needed now was more flaneurs like Owens. Owen’s continued in the tradition of the flaneur through his celebration of many obscured artists and designers who have influenced his fashion through performative acts in history. 

Let’s not forget the imperishable vision of Leigh Bowery who first inspired Owen’s collection. The contemporary dandy   was born in Australia in 1961, and became a performance artist, club promoter, and fashion designer. Bowery became renowned for his marginal staged acts, costumes and makeup, and site-specific performances. Bowery was based in London for much of his career and became a model and muse for the British painter Lucian Freud, as well as Owens. 

 Few knew that Owens’ SS16 internationally renowned Paris show in 2016, which featured models with gymnasts who were strapped and harnessed to their bodies, was first inspired by Leigh Bowery, who previously explored its strapped languid physical form in performance. Rick Owens’ use of gymnasts harnessed to the models on the runway explored new shapes and forms previously made by the contorted and layered bodies Bowery once explored. 

In an interview with The New York Times, Owens admitted to the public that a portrait of Bowery by Annie Liebovitz, which depicted his performance act, greatly inspired Owens’ Paris 2016 fashion show. 

 In 2019, Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times, “Growing up in dusty, dry Porterville, Calif., without a television, and with little access to news from a faraway world populated by oddballs like himself, Rick Owens fell upon the creations of Larry Legaspi.” 

It was long ago in Portervilleyouthful ingénue Owens would passionately study Legaspi’s subversive punk aesthetic on culture. Legaspi inspired Owens to become the fashion designer he is today. After receiving international recognition, Owens would respectfully dedicate his world-renowned collection to the man whom he considered his creative fashion forefather, Legaspi. Owens celebrates Legaspi through the retro-chic recreation of the Kiss Boots, which became an overnight success in the fashion world thanks to the marginal tastes of Legaspi. The high heeled rock star boots were first worn by Kiss in the 1970s and 1980s, having been styled by Legaspi and reincarnated by Owens. 

Owens recalls, “When I was 13, Kiss blew up and news of them spread even to tiny Porterville, California, where I lived a very timid and bullied adolescence. They were unprecedented and menacing and depraved, and we were all absolutely convinced Gene Simmons was vomiting real blood. Looking back, I can see how the beautifully graphic balance of their getups was what helped make them so authoritatively convincing.” 

Owens wore this boot made for flaneurs walking in his FW2019 collection, appropriately named “Larry.” His feverish gait emphasized the chunky platform sole and the 4.5-inch-tall heel. Owens developed the Kiss Boots in later seasons by adding a bolted-on grilled platform and a see-through Plexiglas heel. 

Vogue detailed Owens’ fantastic modern dandy journey, “It was a few years ago, around the time that Cunningham passed away, that Owens first reached out to Val (Legaspi) over email. Val wrote, “When I was looking up who Rick was, I saw an Instagram of Rick and Bill. Larry and Rick never met, even though they were in L.A. at the same time.” Shortly thereafter, Owens and Val started discussing a potential book on Larry’s work. “Rick sent me his book so I could see his work,”Val said. “I was blown away. I loved his work, and I really felt good about him. I said, ‘When are you coming to New York?’” 

In the winter of 2016, Owens made a rare trip stateside to visit Val on Long Island. “He had never seen a Legaspi in person,” Val said. “He was blown away because Larry’s construction is incredible. He went right to the clothing racks. 

I think it blew Rick’s mind when he walked into the studio, I set up downstairs. Suffice to say, the feeling was mutual. “Rick has every right to be the most jaded man, with the empire he has built, but he is just such a wonderful human being,” Val added. 

Soon after, Owens’ concepts for the book idea turned into a retrospective collection and idea. “Rick surprised me with wanting to do the show in Larry’s name and pay homage to him,” Val continued. “It just blew me away. He’s so deep and so sensitive; he really gets it. I just love this man!” 

 The designer’s new book is a racy, leather-clad ode to fashion’s unsung iconoclast Larry Legaspi who dared to craft a style that defined a generation of designs for musicians in the 1970s with its radical period of social unrest. 

 Through self-declaration, the modern fashion designer Owens has reappropriated the motifs of Legaspi: Larry Legaspi, the 70s, and the Future of Fashion, a publication in which he shared Legaspi’s influence in the fashion world. Owens worked for years on this book about his inspired muse, which was released by Rizzoli. Owens found inspiration in Legaspi’s alternative lifestyle, emulating his gay iconic visions and sensibilities through fashion commentary on the spectacle of runways across the world. Furthermore, Owens wasn’t only inspired by Larry Legaspi expressive forms, but he also sourced the controversy of Larry’s romantic relationship with Val. Today the Legaspi non-traditional relationship has been marketed as a motif across the fashion world through the celebrated polyamorous coupling of Lamy and Owens. Confirmed by Val Legaspi who stated, “There are a lot of parallels between Michèle (Lamy, Owens’s wife) and Rick and Larry and me.” 

In affinity, Owens as a post-flaneur has retrospectively directed the FW21 runway titled “Gethsemane,” which referenced and paid homage to English singer and artist Gary Numan. Owens’ Gary Jacket is a stretch-grained lambskin jacket with raw edges throughout that’s inspired by the jackets and jumpsuits Numan would wear during his performances. With asymmetrical zippers jutting across the tight leather jacket, Owens pays homage and nods to Numan’s sound and vision as his appropriated signature style. Eventually, Owens developed The Gary Jumpsuits, taking further inspiration from Numan’s look. A look, “You want to know better, the look that all together. Laughing, Playing. Day or Night, The Owens Look.” 

Today Owens’ genius is referenced through a look that continues to source obscure cultural inspiration like a post mannerist who’s inspired by our society of spectacle, now authored and marketed by an intelligent aesthete from the age of the kalosopriast with a public relations form that’s celebrated with celebrity as its key being.