For most of us, ’DISTURBING’ is an adjective used to convey a sense of anxiety and upset; to RICK OWENS, ‘disturbing’ invokes an instinctive THRILL - the starting point of exploration.

In the bottom of a Porterville K-MART bargain basement, OWENS dug up David Bowie’s DIAMOND DOGS. The ‘excitement, disturb, confusion and guilt’ that album cover evoked in him became a self defined SELF DEFINING moment. Though it wasn’t until years later that he heard the album, the MIXTURE OF GLAMOUR AND THE GROTESQUE stuck with him and became a part of his perspective forever. There’s something exciting about the way that Owens describes how he actively searches for music, ‘taking one pathway that leads me to another, that leads me to another, and another, I keep going and going.” It’s this insatiable curiosity that transfixes the material mundane with meticulous detail and travels beyond a limited “I” view. Through his RESPECT FOR THE RAW gesture in one’s career that catapults it to wider success, Owens RELINQUISHES CONTROL. Knowing that the response to what he puts into the world is not always as important as it’s made out to be is an act of faith that Owens reveres with a refreshing humility: “I DIDN’T SET OUT TO BE REMEMBERED FOR SNEAKERS AND DROP CROTCH SHORTS, BUT THAT’S WHO I’M GOING TO BE FOREVER.”

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Ep 64 // RICK OWENS