Visitors to the Rick Owens retrospective currently on at the Palais Galliera in Paris eventually arrive at a darkened room with a sensitivity warning, for it shelters a life-size statue of the designer relieving himself into a steel trough — and video footage of far naughtier acts. And a conversation with the designer about his penchant for provocation ultimately alights on his infamous “free willy” men’s show for fall 2015, whose main feature was a visible penis, often peeping through portholes in cutaway outerwear. Rick Owens Kuba Dabrowski/WWD Owens notes the spectacle riled Karl Lagerfeld, who denounced it as “disgusting” on French television. “I was delighted, because that’s exactly the kind of uptight white guy I wanted to provoke,” Owens recalls. “The world is such a judgmental place, filled with judgmental people like Karl Lagerfeld, that I feel my role is to playfully taunt them and promote my cheerful degeneracy to balance things out. “I don’t want people to think there’s anything malicious in what I’m doing,” he stresses. “It’s just teasing, and it’s just kind of trying to balance out all this judgment.” Owens confesses that some casting staff misconstrued his intention with that Full Monty show, expressing some remorse that “some of the members were

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