A Guide To Rick Owens (4/5) 2019-2021
Karsten Kroening
5,400 views
Head to https://gamma.yt.link/azFPFhl to check out GAMMA and start designing today!
https://www.karstenkroening.com/
Instagram:
Instagram: karsten_kroening
0:00 Intro
7:03 AW 2019 Larry
14:59 SS 2020 Tectual
18:05 AW 2020 Performa
20:35 SS 2021 Phlegethon
28:03 AW 2021 Gethsemane
This series aims to be one of the most detailed retrospectives on Rick Owens available — covering every era, collection, theme, and evolution across nearly 30 years of work.
*Part 4 focuses on:*
*The Glam Era — Desire, Distortion & the Rockstar Body*
In this fourth episode of my comprehensive Rick Owens series, we explore one of the most disruptive and unexpected transformations in Rick Owens' career: the Glam Era. After moving from the glunge of Hollywood Boulevard, to post-apocalyptic uniforms, to increasingly abstract and severe explorations of the body, Owens suddenly turns in a completely different direction. Guided by his newfound muse Tyrone Dylan and a renewed fascination with the glam artists and costume designers he admired in his youth, Rick begins to dismantle many of the visual codes that had defined his work up to this point.
Instead of the monastic, brutalist, and severe world that had come to characterize Owens' collections, Glam introduces something much more lighthearted, flirtatious, theatrical, and deliberately excessive. The world of Rick Owens begins to resemble less a brutalist avant-garde opera and more the wardrobe of a 1970s or 1980s rockstar. Glam rock, stage costumes, exaggerated proportions, sexuality, and performance become new tools through which Owens can interrogate the body.
The episode examines why this sudden shift was so disruptive to Rick Owens' evolution—and why it challenged many of his longtime followers. The Glam Era represents almost a complete 180-degree turn from the aesthetic and philosophical language that had defined the previous decade. Yet underneath the glitter, exaggerated silhouettes, and theatricality, Owens is still wrestling with many of the same philosophical questions surrounding desire, the body, and transformation.
A major focus of this episode is the continued influence of Gilles Deleuze on Owens' design philosophy. But rather than attempting to abstract the body or suppress desire, Rick begins to explore what happens when desire is embraced and then distorted. The natural proportions of the body become raw material for exaggeration, enlargement, and sculptural transformation. Shoulders expand, hips become monumental, legs stretch into strange architectural forms, and familiar anatomical relationships are pushed toward the grotesque and the fantastical.
In this sense, the Glam Era becomes an important maturation of Owens' Deleuzian thinking. The body is no longer simply something to abstract away from or reconstruct into an alien form. Instead, desire itself becomes a force of deformation. The body is exaggerated precisely because it desires to become something else. Owens' experiments with proportion and silhouette begin to approach the Deleuzian concept of the **Body without Organs**, where the body is liberated from its conventional organization and opened to new possibilities of becoming.
The episode also explores the importance of Tyrone Dylan as a muse and how his presence helps redirect Owens toward a more youthful, sexual, flamboyant, and performative understanding of masculinity. Through this new perspective, Rick begins reconsidering ideas of gender, beauty, seduction, vanity, celebrity, and the spectacle of the male body.
At the same time, Owens looks backward. The Glam Era reconnects him with the artists, musicians, performers, and costume designers who shaped his imagination long before he became one of fashion's most recognizable avant-garde designers. Glam rock and the theatricality of rockstar culture provide a new vocabulary for expressing ideas that previously existed within a much darker and more austere framework.
This era ultimately becomes less about abandoning Rick Owens' previous philosophy and more about finding new ways to express it. The severity remains, but it becomes playful. The abstraction remains, but it becomes seductive. The sculptural impulse remains, but the body itself becomes the sculpture.
From exaggerated proportions and rockstar silhouettes to Tyrone Dylan, glam rock, theatrical masculinity, Deleuzian desire, and the transformation of the natural body, this chapter examines how Rick Owens' most seemingly radical departure ultimately becomes an artistic renaissance—one that expands his design language while laying the groundwork for many of the ideas that continue to define his work today.
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A Guide To Rick Owens (4/5) 2019-2021
Karsten Kroening
5,400 views
Head to https://gamma.yt.link/azFPFhl to check out GAMMA and start designing today!
https://www.karstenkroening.com/
Instagram:
Instagram: karsten_kroening
0:00 Intro
7:03 AW 2019 Larry
14:59 SS 2020 Tectual
18:05 AW 2020 Performa
20:35 SS 2021 Phlegethon
28:03 AW 2021 Gethsemane
This series aims to be one of the most detailed retrospectives on Rick Owens available — covering every era, collection, theme, and evolution across nearly 30 years of work.
*Part 4 focuses on:*
*The Glam Era — Desire, Distortion & the Rockstar Body*
In this fourth episode of my comprehensive Rick Owens series, we explore one of the most disruptive and unexpected transformations in Rick Owens' career: the Glam Era. After moving from the glunge of Hollywood Boulevard, to post-apocalyptic uniforms, to increasingly abstract and severe explorations of the body, Owens suddenly turns in a completely different direction. Guided by his newfound muse Tyrone Dylan and a renewed fascination with the glam artists and costume designers he admired in his youth, Rick begins to dismantle many of the visual codes that had defined his work up to this point.
Instead of the monastic, brutalist, and severe world that had come to characterize Owens' collections, Glam introduces something much more lighthearted, flirtatious, theatrical, and deliberately excessive. The world of Rick Owens begins to resemble less a brutalist avant-garde opera and more the wardrobe of a 1970s or 1980s rockstar. Glam rock, stage costumes, exaggerated proportions, sexuality, and performance become new tools through which Owens can interrogate the body.
The episode examines why this sudden shift was so disruptive to Rick Owens' evolution—and why it challenged many of his longtime followers. The Glam Era represents almost a complete 180-degree turn from the aesthetic and philosophical language that had defined the previous decade. Yet underneath the glitter, exaggerated silhouettes, and theatricality, Owens is still wrestling with many of the same philosophical questions surrounding desire, the body, and transformation.
A major focus of this episode is the continued influence of Gilles Deleuze on Owens' design philosophy. But rather than attempting to abstract the body or suppress desire, Rick begins to explore what happens when desire is embraced and then distorted. The natural proportions of the body become raw material for exaggeration, enlargement, and sculptural transformation. Shoulders expand, hips become monumental, legs stretch into strange architectural forms, and familiar anatomical relationships are pushed toward the grotesque and the fantastical.
In this sense, the Glam Era becomes an important maturation of Owens' Deleuzian thinking. The body is no longer simply something to abstract away from or reconstruct into an alien form. Instead, desire itself becomes a force of deformation. The body is exaggerated precisely because it desires to become something else. Owens' experiments with proportion and silhouette begin to approach the Deleuzian concept of the **Body without Organs**, where the body is liberated from its conventional organization and opened to new possibilities of becoming.
The episode also explores the importance of Tyrone Dylan as a muse and how his presence helps redirect Owens toward a more youthful, sexual, flamboyant, and performative understanding of masculinity. Through this new perspective, Rick begins reconsidering ideas of gender, beauty, seduction, vanity, celebrity, and the spectacle of the male body.
At the same time, Owens looks backward. The Glam Era reconnects him with the artists, musicians, performers, and costume designers who shaped his imagination long before he became one of fashion's most recognizable avant-garde designers. Glam rock and the theatricality of rockstar culture provide a new vocabulary for expressing ideas that previously existed within a much darker and more austere framework.
This era ultimately becomes less about abandoning Rick Owens' previous philosophy and more about finding new ways to express it. The severity remains, but it becomes playful. The abstraction remains, but it becomes seductive. The sculptural impulse remains, but the body itself becomes the sculpture.
From exaggerated proportions and rockstar silhouettes to Tyrone Dylan, glam rock, theatrical masculinity, Deleuzian desire, and the transformation of the natural body, this chapter examines how Rick Owens' most seemingly radical departure ultimately becomes an artistic renaissance—one that expands his design language while laying the groundwork for many of the ideas that continue to define his work today.