I don't really agonise over collections. You know, my father once asked me a while ago: 'Don't you ever worry that you're going to run out of ideas?' And I said, 'Not at all because all the collections and everything that I am ever going to do are already inside of me' ... and all I have to do is rationally untangle that ball of string.'
And what a ball of string. Rick Owens' androgynous models shocked many of his followers with an ethereal runway makeover. For the spring-summer 2011 menswear and womenswear collections, Owens cast off his usual brooding palette of black, black and more black to, dare we say it, embrace a stark minimalist white.
We had seen greys, olives, nudes, even slivers of acid orange and mossy green before, but never so much pure white. Along with 'the exaggerations of volume and proportion' that are defining of Owens, hard edges were complemented with soft, sensual, sweeping lines in floor-length dresses and monastic, aerodynamic men's outfits.
Has the American, famed for his cultish Gothic Futurism, gone soft?
'To me it was a very natural evolution,' he says of his latest collection. 'I've heard from other people that people said it was a departure, but I didn't feel that. I always liked modernism. I always wanted be a modernist.'
The usual rage was flattered by something calmer and almost feminine. The move into Grecian draping wasn't intended - 'well, maybe only subconsciously' - to be a diversion of principles.