Rick Owens' Stone Boudoir

“I was thinking Sleeping Beauty’s coffin and Christ’s empty tomb,” says fashion designer Rick Owens of the inspiration behind Pavane for a Dead Princess, a site-specific installation of his latest furniture creations currently showing at New York’s Salon 94. (His popular 2009 show, Evolution, at Sebastian + Barquet in London, was a similar art-design hybrid). Pavane is named after a Ravel piano piece that Owens’s parents used to play when he was a child, and the composer’s mysterious, fictional Spanish heroine provides the starting point for the designer’s “romantic and dramatic” imaginings. In the gallery space, behind a floor-to-ceiling shaved mink curtain (sold made-to-measure, price upon request), Owens has created a boudoir for his own conjured princess. Loosely modelled on his personal sleeping quarters in his home off the Place du Palais Bourbon, it was executed by a team of artisans from Paris to Poland, overseen by his wife, Michele Lamy. Here, the elemental Bauhaus bunker style of the Evolution collection has developed into works that wouldn’t be out of place in a pharaoh’s temple or Papal chamber. The truly monolithic king-size bed ($220,000), decadently outfitted in translucent Spanish alabaster, is formed from a towering, two-meter-tall headboard atop a 3-meter-square platform, while the luxurious daybed wrapped in a curved alabaster vice ($98,000) sits atop a Luigi Moretti-inspired jagged reef of bronze. The world Owens has manifest—equal parts medieval, Art Deco and sci-fi—extends to smaller-scale items, including bronze side tables and stone lamps, adding to the feeling that the designer occupies and creates in his own, fully realized world. Today we present a portfolio of images of Owens at the installation, shot exclusively for NOWNESS by Max Farago.

Read our interview with Rick Owens about the exhibition, which runs through June 25.