Rick Owens is a famous fashion brand, established in 1994 and named after its founder, Rick Saturnino Owens. The brand is known for men’s and women’s collections in an avant-garde style, with the predominance of black color.
Rick Owens has made a name for himself as the creator of his clothing style called glange, a mix of glamour and grunge. Eccentric and original, the designer shares his unusual vision of fashion and style, offering in each of his collections something completely original and unusual.
Rick Owens launched his label in California in 1994, and today the fashion house is based in Paris. The collections of the brand reflect this international thing, combining both American and European approaches to design, and mixing them with Japanese motives.
Rick Owens was born on November 18, 1962, to a conservative Catholic family living in Porterville, California. After high school, he went to Los Angeles. Rick Owens graduated from Otis College of Art and Design, with a degree in drawing. This led to him making patterns for designers who semi-legally sewed designer clothes.
In 1994 Owens created his label, selling his creations exclusively through Gallay, known as the most advanced and avant-garde boutique in Los Angeles. The popularity came to the designer after the publication of his leather jacket in French Vogue.
Since 2001, the fashion brand signs a contract to sell its product around the world. From that moment the development of the brand follows the classic commercial way, the brand expands to include footwear and accessories lines. In 2003 Rick Owens launches a menswear line and moves to Paris.
What is Rick Owens?
Rick Owens is the name of a luxury American fashion house, which was established in 1994, and is known for its unusual silhouettes, and unique approach to the design of men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories in the avant-garde style.
In terms of visual identity, the Rick Owens brand has always been loyal to the original badge, created at the very beginning of the fashion house’s history, and based on the signature of its creator.
The iconic Rick Owens logo is a sharp cursive lettering with the name of the brand’s creator and inspirer, which fully repeats the signature of the designer. The letters in the logotype feature thick and thin bars, slightly softened angles, but very edgy silhouettes of the title case characters. The first letters of the words are slightly slanted and drawn with thin sophisticated lines while the lowercase characters are straight and stable, and executed with thicker bars. This balanced contrast brilliantly represents the core of the brand and its uniqueness.
The designer often uses expensive materials in his collections, including leather, cashmere, sable, and chinchilla furs. And this affects the prices of Rick Owens garments. So in the 2000s, Owens began to make similar aesthetics to his main line, but from denim, one of the most practical materials, which made the clothes more affordable. This line got named Dark a shadow, and stylized as DRKSHDW.
The logo of this line features the cursive Rick Owens signature placed above the heavy uppercase DRKSHDW logotype in a geometric sans-serif font, close to such types as Old Miami Beach Night JNL, or Silver Streak Extended.
Sometimes the designer uses a graphical emblem, which is a hand-drawn five-pointed star, with the peak pointing down elongated. Both the text and graphical logos are executed in a black-and-white color palette.
The unique script lettering from the primary Rick Owens badge is set in a custom font, repeating the real signature of the fashion house’s founder. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Charme Com Roman, or Monoment Thin, but with significant modifications of the characters’ contours.
As for the color palette of the Rick Owens visual identity, almost all the garments, created by the brand, it is based on a timeless combination of black and white, the favorite shades of the designer, and the shades, instantly associated with the label.