Six p.m. in paris. Second floor of the Palais Bourbon. The designer Rick Owens, dressed in a black tank top, black wide-cut pants, and calf-high sneaker boots, puts on a pair of eyeglasses and leans toward a large screen. His raven-colored hair flows over his shoulders, which are pinched forward. It is December, and a cool night presses on French windows near his desk.

“I was thinking on the toe, so it almost extends the toe and the sides of the foot are straight,” he says slowly. He is Skype conferencing with his head men’s patternmaker and studio coordinator in Concordia, in Italy, where he spends every third week draping garments. They are studying the prototype for a shoe in his upcoming collection: bootlike and narrow with a structured platform element coming off the toe. His brow is furrowed; the detailing isn’t quite right. “It’s more a fan shape than I was thinking,” he explains. “And remember the plastic elements with the hole you put the screw in? I would love to duplicate that so the screws will be visible.”

It is an unusual request, but Owens pioneers an unusual sort of luxury, as captured in his office decor: the walls raw and mostly bare, the floor concrete, the gray cushions lived-in and pilled. Since soon after he moved to France from California, in 2003, this has been Owens’s unlikely version of a palace. There are lamps shaped like chemistry equipment, a Horst Egon Kalinowski sculpture. Opera—one of his few indulged passions—soars in the background.

Given such mixed signifiers, Owens can seem as much a cipher now, at 57, as during his first, Vogue-sponsored 2002 show, which earned him the CFDA Perry Ellis Award. With his headbanger hair, sinewy torso, and all-pervading underworld palette (Owens, finding color a distraction, edits even color designs in grayscale), he is the weathered image of a goth-rocker Adonis—one known for eerie cultural prescience. Owens’s spring 2016 collection famously featured runway models bound to other models, whom they carried over their shoulders—an almost oracular window into women’s growing solidarity and strength—while his spring 2019 show, held during the Kavanaugh hearings, centered on a witchy pyre. “I don’t follow politics specifically, but who can not be conscious of cultural discomfort? Clothes are about communication and how people are getting along with each other, how they want to say what they are,” he says. “We’ve all been feeling women’s frustration.” Even so, he resists programmatic readings of his work. “When you see those garments in a store, are they going to express women’s frustration?” He laughs. “It’s all more vague than that.”