The California-born and Paris-based designer, famous for his signature long dark hair, has held his past three seasons’ shows at Venezia di Lido, close to his Italian team and factory, rather than his usual Palais de Tokyo venue. “We needed to improvise a little bit on how we were moving forward in reaction to the coronavirus, the depravations and limitations,” says Owens.

Appropriately, the autumn/winter 2021 fashion show on the waterfront in Venice had a gloomy, foggy atmosphere that hinted at apocalypse. Both the men’s and women’s shows were titled Gethsemane, after the garden outside Jerusalem mentioned in the Bible’s verse Mark 14 as the scene of the agonies and arrest of Jesus.

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The shows were held in January and March 2021 respectively, channelling the same noir aesthetics. Dressed largely monochromatically, in black, white or dark purple, the models were universally masked. Deconstructed silhouettes, exaggerated shoulders, puff jackets with ruptured sleeves and over-the-knee boots were juxtaposed, no matter how much they clashed.

“Anybody that creates anything is just creating new compositions of things that have existed before. We’re all creating something, we’re all creating our own personal works of art in ourselves. So you just build up a library in your head of all of your favourite influences, and you prepare it like an omelette, you just add a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and you end up with something. And if you do that often enough, you end up finding your own voice. And I think that is pretty much how it works for everybody,” explains Owens.

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Verging on modern art, his works have been exhibited in museums and galleries, including Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne in the Pompidou Centre, as well as his furniture designs at The Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.

“Art is supposed to be some kind of transcendent moment. Fashion has sometimes done that. Fashion today has to respond to an audience so much more quickly than it ever had to and more quickly than art has to respond to an audience. So fashion has, I think, become more relevant to people’s needs and people’s desires, and people’s urgency for transcendent moments. I think fashion has exceeded art’s power in this generation. Maybe I will [get there] someday, but I am just not there yet. I might look back on my life one day and think of it as a performance,” Owens says.

In recent years, the designer has partnered with high street brands including Dr. Martens, Adidas, Veja and Birkenstock. His most recent design for Converse, dubbed Drkstar, and following on the heels of Turbodrk, marks a reconstruction of the classic Chuck Taylor 70 trainers.

But experiments in the space have opened up different perspectives for Owens, who connects his former attitude with being a reclusive designer focusing on survival.

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“Once I felt confidence that my survival was fairly established, I was able to look around and engage with other people, and doing it professionally like this has been really fun. You get to see how other people run their businesses. You work with people that are strong and powerful at what they do. And they have achieved a certain level of expertise and refinement. And so it’s a very interesting dynamic and I’ve been enjoying it and I intend to do it more. It brings a breath of fresh air to my basement and to my corner of the world, and I feel like I’m engaging more and fulfilling some kind of potential circulating current,” he says.

Stepping into the wholesale realm of trainers, the designer admits that there is a risk that some of his clan will be disappointed that he is getting too commercial. “But you gotta move forward. You have to grow and you have to expand and you have to explore. You can’t just rest on your past triumphs and successes. You have to take risks,” he explains.

Owen’s most recent spring/summer 2022 homecoming show in Paris in September, opened by his life and business partner, as well as eternal muse, Michèle Lamy, struck a more promising and positive note. In contrast to the usual apocalyptic tumult of his shows, Owens, who turned 60 this November, says his own life is quite the opposite: non-chaotic, controlled and very sedate.

“I used to enjoy the romance of losing control,” he says. “Then after I did that for a while, I became attracted to the romance of having control. And they’re both fantasies. My whole control thing is a total fantasy because it has something to do with trying to hold on to immortality and youth or something that inevitably is doomed. We all get to live our fantasies.”