Rick Owens is a world builder, a creator with the self-assured authority that allows any item or idea to be Owens-ified. It’s best evidenced, of course, in his fashion and furniture design—but those are just the two most readily available products that he makes. Think bigger; think of Owens’s entire life, a place where sphynx cats roam a brutalist palace in Paris, where platform disco boots are worn on the metro, where dyeing one’s own hair is a trancelike ritual. Owens’s latest endeavor sees the designer offering a whole new way to enter his universe: via a tour bus.

The Rick Owens express will be rolling into Milan Wednesday as a part of a collaboration with Moncler that includes ready-to-wear pieces designed for Owens and his wife, Michèle Lamy, as well as a custom bus. While the project will launch at the same time as Moncler’s 2020 edition of its Genius Project, Owens’s collaboration is totally separate. “I’m not sure I’m really a group person,” he slyly says over the phone from his home in Paris, where he’s just risen from his daily afternoon nap and will soon head to Milan to prepare his presentation.

Still, when Moncler came calling Owens chose not to resist. “Collaborations, under the worst of circumstances, are all about sensation and hype. There’s no one more conscious [of that] than I am.” he says. “I mean, I’m the first to roll my eyes about the collaboration thing, but the other side of me thinks that any excuse for people to intersect, especially in the fashion world—and especially somebody like me—to go out and kind of intersect with other fashion bubbles, is something I really approve of. I also thought it would be fun to take the whole collab dynamic and instead of making it all about being outward and all about display—I mean there’s plenty of display here, obviously!—to turn it around and make it a story about intimacy, about authenticity, and about a relationship. It’s an insular story about privacy, about personal intimate space.”

Michèle Lamy wearing Moncler x Rick Owens Photo: Courtesy of Owenscorp Michèle Lamy wearing Moncler x Rick Owens Photo: Courtesy of Owenscorp

The personal motivator for Owens to accept Moncler’s offer was an invitation from the artist Michael Heizer to see his monumental land art piece, City, in the Nevada desert. He and Lamy had been wondering how and when to make the trip out West to see the piece. “It’s spooky and it’s eccentric and it’s extreme and it’s heroic and it’s kind of an underground thing—and I just couldn’t resist. I mean, I jumped at the chance,” Owens says. Where does Moncler come in? The Italian outerwear brand worked with the designer on a collection that re-fabricates some of his and Lamy’s most-worn garments into high-puff Moncler down. It also facilitated Owens’s collaboration with a tour bus company, creating a brutalist bus to transport Owens and Lamy from Los Angeles, where he would be signing his latest set of books, to the desert.

“So it all came together and I thought, Okay, well, we’ll do this,” he continues. He arrived in Los Angeles in October, his first time in the city where he started his career in 18 years, and embarked on the ride to Garden Valley, Nevada, with a stop in Las Vegas along the way. “Going to L.A. actually ended up being a lot better than I thought it would be. I thought that I would be a little uncomfortable retracing the steps of where I had been unformed: growing pains and frustrated and struggling,” he says. “But actually it was really lovely. Going back to your origins stronger than you left them is a very profound thing. Not in a gloating way, of course, but I mean the circumstances are way different and that was moving.”