Rick Owens

Original New York City icon Kembra Pfahler has terrorized and tantalized audiences since her arrival in the Lower East Side in the early 1980s. Originally associated with Cinema of Transgression, Kembra supported her films with work at an independent porn studio. In the 1990s, she launched The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a rock band associated with Kiss, Alice Cooper, and White Zombie. Nude and covered in paint, with blackened teeth and bouffant hair, Kembra developed a reputation for wild performance that reached far beyond the Lower East Side. Elements of Kabuki theater, surfing, bugs, and giant sharks from her legendary shows were later repurposed for performance art. Beginning in the early 2000s, Pfahler titillated gallery-goers with openings featuring dozens of painted women, butt-prints, and performances involving endurance and strength. With galleries including Real Fine Art, Deitch Projects, and The Hole, Kembra created a visual lexicon incorporating occult imagery, bondage, and challenging forms of femininity. Through teaching, activism, and performance art, Pfahler serves as a mentor to students, and in recent years, muse to designers including Rick Owens and Casey Cadwallader of Mugler. Collecting four decades of ephemera, performance documentation, road pictures, and more, the book celebrates Kembra Pfahler as counter-cultural star.

Rick Owens remains one of the most daring and influential fashion designers working today. Often described as 'a-grunge-meets-glamor' aesthetic, Owens has cultivated a devoted international following. In his creations, grace and grit are paired with an obsession with structural transformation and movement, where diaphanous, flowing shapes contrast with opaque forms and sharp edges, an approach to formal invention that is complimented by a mania for new and often exotic materials. Timed to coincide with the first comprehensive show of the designer s work taking place at the Palais Galliera in Paris in summer 2025, the scope and breadth of this exhibition promises to be a treat to both longtime fans and the uninitiated. Owens will reimagine the grand 19th-century palace housing the museum, with temporary installations that will serve as vitrines to his many creations. In effect dividing the book between the conception of showcases, and the precious objects that they display within, the curatorial essays bookending this visual narrative will attempt to describe the multidisciplinary, even architectural approach Owens has to his creations.

Rick Owens remains one of the most daring and influential fashion designers working today. Recently experimenting with new shapes, the application of new materials, and an unprecedented use of color, this book of entirely unpublished photographs will surprise and delight his legion of devoted fans. Lavishly documenting men s and women s collections and featuring Owens s continuing collaboration with the photographer Danielle Levitt, this book is an unabashed love letter to one of the most devoted followings in contemporary fashion. Picking up where Rizzoli s previous monograph on Owens s work left off, looks from his critically lauded homage to the rock-and-roll designer Larry Legaspi set a frenzied visual pace that never lets up right through the pandemic, when Owens memorably staged shows on the Lido di Venezia. Here, the continued evolution of nearly three decades of Owens s 'grunge-meets-glamour' worldview is seen close up. Grace and grit are paired with an obsession with structural transformation and movement, where diaphanous, flowing shapes contrast with sharp objects. This formal invention is matched by a mania for new and exotic materials. The use of translucent bovine leathers, brightly dyed snakeskin, and the hide of the pirarucu, a massive Amazonian fish, are applied to old and new icons of the brand. Color is now firmly part of the Owens legendarium, and a profligacy of pink, orange, blue, green, and iridescent hues now vie with trademark black, oxblood, and dust that have been part of the palette since the inception of the brand. Owens s newest provocations, grounded by the portraiture of Danielle Levitt, achieves a sublime unity in this essential volume.

Since the establishment of his label in 1994, Rick Owens has transformed global fashion with his provocative clothing and subversive style. Distinguished by his grunge-meets-glamour aesthetic and defiant anti-fashion stance, Owens created a dark fashion empire that has accrued a devoted international following which gravitates toward the brand s sublime tailoring, somber palette, mystical layers, and gritty elegance. Filled with photographs of Owens s most impressive looks from the last decade, this volume is conceived as a celebration of the Rick Owens aesthetic, approximating with printing effects some of the mystery and detailing associated with brand. Iconic imagery taken from Owens s seminal lookbooks provides a unique look at the output of design from an artist who is at once comfortable with developing technologies and respectful of traditional approaches. With principal photography by Danielle Levitt who achieved considerable acclaim for her social-realist images this book is essential for lovers of avant-garde fashion, photography, and design.