Underground American designer Rick Owens gets his first retrospective in Milan

Steel thyself for the RICK OWENS Subhuman, Inhuman, Superhuman retrospective of radical chic in Milan

A VISIONARY AND an avant-garde peculiarity, American designer Rick Owens has said, and created, a great many things. And now a retrospective – the designer’s first in his 23-year career – at the Triennale di Milano until March 25 features more than 100 archival pieces comprising garments, objects, accessories, furniture and runway videos, under the appropriately Owensian title Subhuman, Inhuman, Superhuman. All is displayed through a spectacular site-specific installation created by the enfant terrible of the LA underground himself – Owens won the Fashion Group International’s Rule Breaker award in 2007.

Despite his more than 20 years in the business, the

South Carolina-born Owens – who launched his eponymous line in 1994 – has leveraged his oddity into an independent business with more than US$100 million in revenue per annum, along with nine flagship stores and more than 800 points-of-sale globally. He was recipient of the Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent in 2002 and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2017. An interesting result for a man who promised at his outset to “lay a black glittering turd on the white landscape of comformity” – which, among mannequins and other things, is precisely what he’s done in Milan. triennale.org

“The clothes I make are my autobiography. They are the calm elegance I want to get to and the damage I’ve done on the way. They are an expression of tenderness and raging ego. They are an adolescent idealisation and its inevitable defeat”