Reading Rick Owens' style commandments nowadays It was way back in 2009, why should we still care?

2009 was a year of major upheavals. The world is still in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, Barack Obama becomes the first African American President of the United States, and Satoshi Nakamoto creates Bitcoin. In that eventful 2009, the fashion world received its very own version of the Ten Commandments, curated by one of the most avant-garde figures in the industry. At this point, you should make an effort to set aside the classic religious iconography: the Moses of fashion has long raven hair, a toned physique, and is used to wearing vertiginous heels with nonchalance. His name is Rick Owens.

It is within the glossy pages of Details, the monthly magazine dedicated to men's fashion published by Condé Nast until 2015, that his style secrets are revealed, secrets that, even today, continue to circulate undisturbed across the web. And it’s no surprise that, sixteen years later, these rules are rediscovered, reread, and revisited regularly (often around his birthday).

Rick Owens’ style rules, a designer who has always been nonconformist and provocative, although dated and perhaps not even updated, speak of a dissolute yet coherent creativity, seemingly detached from the profit-driven logic that governs the fashion industry, of a true lifestyle rather than a passing trend, of an aesthetic world that blends visual arts and fashion:

1. I’m not good at subtlety. If you're not going to be discreet and quiet, then just go all the way and have the balls to shave off your eyebrows, bleach your hair, and put on some big bracelets.

2. Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead.

3. I've lived in Paris for six years, and I'm sorry to say that the Ugly American syndrome still exists. Sometimes you just want to say «Stop destroying the landscape with your outfit.» Still, from a design standpoint, I'm tempted to redo the fanny pack. I look at it as a challenge-it's something to react against.

4. When a suit gets middle-of-the-road it kind of loses me--it has to be sharp and classicand almost forties.

5. Hair and shoes say it all. Everything in between is forgivable as long as you keep it simple. Trying to talk with your clothes is passive-aggressive.

6. There's something a little too chatterboxy about color. Right now I want black, for its sharpness and punctuation.

7. Jean-Michel Frank, the thirties interior and furniture designer, supposedly had 40 identical double-breasted gray flannel suits. He knew himself and is a wonderful example of restraint and extravagance.

Never before in the past two years has there been such rapid and frequent shifting of chairs, a frantic succession of goodbyes and appointments that have inevitably shifted attention to the role of creative directors within fashion houses. After the initial excitement that usually accompanies explosive news, it became clear to everyone the strategic nature of these movements. Creative directors chase one another, replacing each other, making it almost impossible to believe in the existence of coincidences (just think of the trio consisting of Pierpaolo Piccioli, Alessandro Michele, and Demna Gvasalia, who have alternated between Valentino, Gucci, and Balenciaga). Furthermore, considering the economic and reputational situation of the fashion system, it's not difficult to deduce the importance of media resonance for these appointments.

The current context, in fact, includes: continued decline in sales (in the first half of 2025, the turnover of the Italian fashion industry experienced a 4.3% drop compared to the previous year, the result of negative trends in both core sectors and related industries such as beauty, costume jewelry, eyewear, and jewelry), a general increase in prices that poorly justifies the use of satellite companies for exploiting low-cost labor (for example, under investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, Loro Piana, Giorgio Armani, Valentino), and, dulcis in fundo, worker revolts. Not exactly a rosy scenario. That being said, who can save fashion's reputation, if not those who create beauty and instill desire? "Not all heroes wear masks," and indeed, fashion's champions wear designer clothes.

Although creative directors are merely the tip of an iceberg, professionals who represent a brand's creativity and stylistic vision, their role has already taken on the contours of a martyrdom. Currently, in this whirlwind of chair switching, they are expected to possess an unrealistic plethora of skills, including being creative geniuses, business and marketing experts. A bit like Jonathan W. Anderson: Designer of the Year twice in a row, Midas of fashion, and a professional generator of viral content.

The crucial role played by virality in the market affirmation of a brand introduces a further, dangerous antagonist: social media. “Social media has turned fashion into the Hunger Games,” said Belgian designer Glenn Martens in a recent episode of the Business of Fashion Podcast, “We are just consuming visuals and we don’t really have the time to go deep into the clothes, the storytelling, the construction, where it comes from. It just needs to be like a hit. It gets a bit more superficial.” The superficiality with which the work of designers is conveyed and often received becomes the natural consequence of a system that no longer knows how to truly value its creatives.

The same frustration with a hasty and devaluing speed emerges from a recent interview with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, published by Interview Magazine last September: “Everything has sped up and our attention spans are much shorter, which is something I disagree with. People don’t even listen. [...] If you have a collection which is more doable in terms of form—it wasn’t like a big shoulder and a narrow waist and strange lengths—you could think, «Ah, it looks so easy,» because you didn’t really pay attention to it,” said Raf Simons.

This is the new paradigm of the fashion system: a single individual is tasked with quickly reviving the fortunes of a brand with sky-high profits and winning over the critics with sensationalism, skillfully fed to social media, or risk immediate termination of their working relationships (a bit like what happened to Sabato de Sarno at Gucci). A somewhat simplistic reasoning.

Creative directors are not just creative directors

In the hands of brands, creative directors are real celebrities to be snatched up to create hype first, then desire. Choosing the most talked-about one for a future succession becomes crucial to generating interest and, hopefully, record-breaking sales. However, in the eyes of the public, despite the attempts to democratize fashion, they remain mythological figures far removed. In this context, Rick Owens' rules are like a small peephole in a lock, through which we can peek into the aesthetic and moral dictates of the avant-garde icon, cult figure, and inhabitant of an inaccessible golden Olympus. As if, for a moment, through these intimate revelations, we could take part in his creative process and see the world through his eyes.

Finding such statements interesting after sixteen years shows that the public doesn't really care which brand the creative directors will go to, except for a few minutes. The public cares about what they will wear, what they will still say about themselves. And it’s reassuring that this thirst for knowledge about their creative world, beyond the structures of the brands, still exists: perhaps, the overwhelming power of social media hasn’t yet triumphed. Perhaps, content still matters more than the noise.