ON A DREARY November day in Paris, the soft morning light is creeping into the American fashion designer Rick Owens’s 18th-century mansion, just south of the Seine in the Seventh Arrondissement, where he and his French wife and business partner, Michèle Lamy, 80, have lived for 20 years. One of the few truly independent creative heads of a major brand, he’s built an improbable empire by making clothes as grotesque as they are glamorous. But three decades into his career — and a few days after turning 62 — Owens finds himself at a crossroads. He’s just returned from a birthday trip to the Pacific Coast of Jalisco, Mexico, where he rode horses with his muse, design assistant and frequent travel companion, the towering 30-something Australian model Tyrone Dylan Susman, whose Instagram feed has also shown them among Greek ruins, in the Dubai desert and on beaches around the world (where they’ve been known to wear matching baseball hats with each other’s names on them). Now that Owens is back, he and Lamy, a 5-foot-2 agent of creative chaos with kohl-rimmed electric blue eyes, gold-plated teeth and two young grandchildren, have been overseeing their latest project: relocating the Rick Owens men’s and women’s runway shows, normally staged in the monumental courtyard at the Palais de Tokyo, a neo-Classical-style structure housing two museums with stone colonnades and a large reflecting pool, to their living room.

“I think it’s become too bombastic,” he says of the Palais de Tokyo shows as he scans the gutted first floor of what was once the French Socialist Party headquarters. (When he and Lamy arrived in 2004, the five-story townhouse had been sitting empty for two decades; today, its chalky walls and floors — not part of an ongoing renovation but the finished product — conjure a squat more than a residence.) “Subliminally, I think I’ve been designing collections to match [the Palais’s] grandeur.” His extravagant productions, often presented against a sky of colorful smoke bombs or amid flame-engulfed pyres for hundreds of “freaks,” “weirdos” and “messy queens,” as he affectionately refers to his loyal followers, have incorporated step dancers (spring 2014), exposed penises (fall 2015) and women harnessed to each other (spring 2016). The new location, though smaller, isn’t without its own sense of spectacle: Near where the former French president François Mitterrand’s desk used to be is a big stack of felt made from human hair by the Serbian artist Zoran Todorovic; two black plywood chairs with antlers from the Rick Owens furniture line; and, atop a plinth in a plexiglass case, a 1.3-gallon aluminum tank containing the sperm of the Estonian rapper Tommy Cash. “It’s empty now,” says Lamy, in an off-the-shoulder black Rick Owens dress that matches her ink-dipped fingers. “We’re waiting for him to drop some more off.”

Owens is wearing a black skullcap, black slouchy cotton shorts and black leather sneakers with thick white rubber soles, all designed by him. The platform heels he often wears make him seem much taller than 5-foot-10. When the couple’s French architect, David Leclerc, tells him it’s likely not possible to switch out a white enamel radiator for a stainless-steel alternative, Owens agrees to settle for something equally “delicious.” (He uses the same word to describe the nightly footfalls of the guards — “Daddy,” he calls them — patrolling the Ministry of Defense next door.) Leclerc frowns: It’ll be difficult enough to install the mirrored walls and indoor rock garden in time for men’s fashion week in January. (Their exchange recalls the 1966 “Addams Family” episode in which Morticia Addams, having insisted on decorating her neighbors’ home, talks about adorning the walls in salmon. “Pink?” they ask hopefully. “No,” Morticia replies. “Scales.”) But construction sites merely make Owens nostalgic for his early days in Paris, when he and Lamy worked out of “a filthy barn kind of thing” with a single Turkish toilet in the Bastille area. “Everything was covered in concrete dust. Remember, Hun?” he asks Lamy. (He calls her that, not unfondly, because, like the Huns, he says, “she’s a marauding, ax-wielding primitive force of nature who takes what she wants and then throws a lit match behind her.”) “It was looking so good,” she replies with a grin.

Despite their many similarities, Owens and Lamy are also very different. The English fashion designer Gareth Pugh, Owens’s former protégé, says, “Michèle has this nomadic hustling mentality. Rick’s very happy to keep his head down and do the work.” Owens appreciates conventional beauty, if only for the thrill of perverting it; Lamy rejects it altogether. His dressing room is appointed with mimosa-scented candles, fresh-cut hortensias and throw pillows; hers has a pile of wet towels on the floor. Their other two residences — a minimalist apartment in Concordia sulla Secchia, Italy, near the factory where Owens’s clothes are made, and an equally austere beach house on Venice’s Lido — are too bourgeois for Lamy. “She’s like, ‘I don’t understand who these are for. Who are you?’” says Owens. “She’s offended that they refute our story together.”

Their life does look quite different than it did in Los Angeles, where they met in the 1990s. They no longer reside in a former discount store, what Owens describes as “a hovel,” off Hollywood Boulevard. Nor does he put bleach powder around their bed to keep away cockroaches, as he’d done when he was single. At 40, Owens stopped drinking and taking hard drugs. Still, he doesn’t regret having committed “temporary suicide,” as he calls it; in the darkness, there were often bursts of beauty — something that could also be said of his clothes. In 2003, a year after winning the CFDA Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent, he became the artistic director for the centuries-old French fur company Revillon Frères and the couple moved to Paris. In 2006, he left that company and opened his own boutique in the Palais Royal arcade, where there’s now an anatomically correct wax sculpture of him behind the cash register.

Even in fashion, an industry with no shortage of outsize personalities, Owens stands alone. There’s something genuinely subversive about how he’s been able to navigate extremes: as an iconoclast who also happens to be a shrewd businessman; a California native who’s become a beloved fixture in Paris without rejecting his Americanness; a sweet boy with a leather kink; and an elder statesman who nurtures younger talent and supports the competition. The fashion designer Daniel Roseberry, 38, a fellow American expat in Paris, says that Owens was among the first to congratulate him following his 2019 debut at Schiaparelli. “There’s a general frigidity in the way designers relate to each other, especially across generational divides,” says Roseberry. “Rick has such a unique warmth, which is disarming because, of course, from the outside, the world that he’s built with Michèle is so intimidating.”

IT’S RAINING AS we wander the grounds of the Rodin Museum, where Owens likes to admire the sculptor’s idealized bronze studies of the human form. The designer, who dyes his white hair black and straightens its curls, has been preoccupied with getting older. In his 50s, he felt at the height of his power; now that he’s become aware of his looming 70s, he’s confused about how best to “corrupt the world,” as he puts it. “How do I want to play this so that it’s elegant and convincing and it doesn’t get silly?” he says. “I’m observing myself, thinking, ‘At some point, I’m going to have to make a choice: Am I going to accept or resist? Am I going to pull back or become even more extreme?’” There are, he adds, some designers who didn’t know when to rein it in. “They’d reached a peak they couldn’t maintain without becoming a caricature.”

He mentions an idol of his, Thierry Mugler, the French couturier who, before his death in 2022, underwent multiple surgeries to resemble a superhero; and Alice Cooper, the rock star whose stage act, with pyrotechnics and rumored poultry sacrifices, now seems quaint. But in the mid-1970s, when Owens first discovered Cooper’s music, he was spellbound. “He was scary, and I loved that,” he says. “And now, of course, he’s comical.” Marlene Dietrich offered another road map. “After the war, she went from being this glamorous, objectified thing to a socially conscious activist to a refined entertainer,” he says. “Her cabaret act was as calculated and controlled as a Donald Judd installation.”

For 30 years, Owens’s creations — from the machine-washed asymmetrical leather jacket he’s been iterating since the beginning to a more recent black cashmere crop top with shoulders as pointy as devil horns — have been as much about semiotics as status; to put on a Rick Owens sequined cowl (fall 2023) or knee-high leather stocking boots (spring 2024) is to express oneself in a language not everyone understands. More than anyone in contemporary fashion, he has emerged as the head of a tribe — not just a cult designer but a cult leader. Some of his more dedicated clients and fans include the former C.E.O. of Twitter, Jack Dorsey; the musician Lil Uzi Vert; and Constantine Kaloutas, a posthuman artist known as ἄnthromorph. A divinity in drop-crotch pants, Owens has shown people another way to exist: as an exaggerated version of their truest selves. “There’re designers who wake up in the morning and passively absorb the world around them and then respond. But then there are a few designers like Rick, who wake up and think, ‘This is what I stand for,’” says Roseberry, who compares Owens to the similarly mythologized Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese founder of Comme des Garçons. “It’s so wildly take it or leave it.”

Despite his dedication to the unorthodox — or maybe because of the freedom such an existence entails — Owens seems more confident, with fewer neuroses, than most other designers. His friend Shayne Oliver, the American co-founder of the streetwear brand Hood by Air, believes that wearing Rick Owens offers a fantasy of collective nonconformity — “the black picket fence,” as he calls it. “Rick speaks to another version of the American dream, the same way Ralph Lauren created a country club obsession,” says Oliver. “People of color, people of different sizes: Everyone’s in Rick because he’s always been there for them. A lot of other brands are obsessed with the main character. In Rick’s world, everyone’s a main character.”

One wonders how differently today’s avant-garde might dress if Owens had never made it to France. His clothes reflect a confluence of ideas and influences — the detached ease of grunge; the brutal restraint of the American artists Michael Heizer and Richard Serra; the romantic drapery of the 1920s and ’30s French designers Madeleine Vionnet and Madame Grès; the flamboyance of Larry LeGaspi’s costumes for 1970s musical acts like Grace Jones and Kiss — and have inspired, consciously or not, a new generation of experimentalists, including Dilara Findikoglu, Duran Lantink and Dion Lee, as well as more established designers such as Haider Ackermann and Fear of God’s Jerry Lorenzo. Owens laid the groundwork for a more inclusive and audacious manner of dressing, and a new type of uniform, too, as strange as it is versatile: clingy, languid or sculptural, largely gray-scale garments made from unexpected fabrics such as shredded denim, nylon duvets and wool blankets, all of it durable and surprisingly wearable. For all their peculiarities, the garments are impeccably constructed. “In shadow, it could be the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga,” says Oliver. “But then you turn on the light and it’s Rick.”

RICHARD SATURNINO OWENS was born in Porterville, Calif., a conservative town at the edge of the Southern Sierra Nevada 160 miles north of Los Angeles. His father, John Owens, didn’t allow a TV in the house. Instead, he introduced Owens to Aristotle and the music of Richard Wagner; he also taught him fear and shame. “I am karma,” he says. “I’m the opposite result of my dad’s force in the world.” At Catholic school, he relished the stories of the saints and their vestments. They were, along with his mother’s Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie catalogs, among his only sources of exoticism. And, of course, “this hot, naked guy on a cross,” he says.

Owens has taken me to the church of St. Clotilde, a Gothic Revival basilica close to his home where he and his late mother, Concepción Owens, a former teacher’s aide, would come to talk; and where Connie, as she was known, prayed for her son’s happiness. John, a social worker, died in 2015. When Owens called to say goodbye, John, who hadn’t spoken to his son in four years after Owens had described him as bigoted in an interview, yelled, “It’s too late!” and hung up. (Owens later got him back on the phone for what he describes as “a soft ending.”) In every story he shares about his father, the designer describes a mortal enemy who could have been his best friend.

“When your parents die, there’s a primal acknowledgment that you’re next,” says Owens, who flew his mother to Concordia when her cancer worsened. “I thought, ‘I have to get her to Europe before she gets stuck in a hospital.’ Concordia is our center of survival, all of us,” he adds, settling into a pew. A week before her death, in 2022, Connie asked to accompany Owens, her only child, to Venice. “I want to go into the water,” she said. Owens replied, “Mom, you’re terrified of the water.” But she insisted. “I got her in this inflatable wheelchair, and she was squealing. It was the cutest thing,” he says. “She declined shortly after that.” A moment passes as we sit in silence. When he glances at me, Owens looks like he’s been crying. He asks if I’ve read anything by the late 19th-century French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a member of the Decadent literary movement who later converted to Catholicism. “Is that going to happen to me?” he says. “Am I going to find spirituality at the end?”