We meet in Paris to discuss his men’s wear which, perhaps even more so than his women’s wear, is revolutionary, and has proved groundbreaking in its influence. In a soupy sea of mediocre suiting and sportswear, he offers something entirely different from other designers. He boldly experiments with fabric and silhouette, pushing boundaries of sexuality and gender. Owens is as likely to propose a dress for a man as for a woman, but without sacrificing manliness in favor of runway novelty. “My stuff seems to attract guys that I think might want to consider themselves some kind of heroic lone wolf, kind of playing by their own moral codes,” Owens says, slowly. “I was thinking about men’s fashion, I was thinking in the ’80s Calvin Klein, he promoted male sexuality ... males as an object of sexual attention. That was what happened then, and then in the ’90s men’s fashion was a reaction to that and it became about youth. It became skinny and slim and young and introspective and vulnerable. Now, what is now?” He stops. “If the last cycle was vulnerability, the obvious reaction would be heroism.”

Heroism for Owens isn’t about the barrel-chested jacket or thigh-gripping pants. It isn’t about any cliché of dressing. Owens has created collections inspired by Nijinsky’s performance in “Afternoon of a Faun,” and by the athletic silhouette of Fred Astaire. In both he used drapery instead of tailoring, garments twisted and captured in motion, seemingly frozen in frenzied, balletic movement. He also jokingly stated a collection was inspired by “tops” and “bottoms” — not the garments, but rather the words denoting sexual preference in the gay vernacular. (Owens is bisexual.) For spring, Owens produced a remarkable collection, pumped with eye-socking colors of putty pink, peppermint and sulfuric yellow. But it was the silhouette that made the strongest impact: jackets abbreviated high on the torso, pants billowing organically around the leg, like a fusion of languid ’30s styles — Owens loves that period — and wide-cut skater trousers. It seemed totally out of place at a moment when other men’s wear designers showed either generic sportswear or predictably straight suiting.

Owens isn’t overtly interested in tailoring, the linchpin of the masculine wardrobe since the early 19th century. You seldom see anything approaching a suit jacket in his shows. “I’m not going to be [who] somebody trusts for tailoring over Dior,” Owens says. “Even one of my partners. For his wedding, he wore Dior!”

What he does offer is an alternative to the general thrust of fashion. And it’s seductive. His business is relatively small. His turnover is approximately $140 million, paltry when compared to the billion-dollar luxury behemoths. But it’s perfectly formed. “My mantra for everybody is better, not bigger,” he says. “But it’s hard. When there’s a group of people together, they’re thinking of the team, and you want to win. Sometimes commercial success is a little bit more tangible than aesthetic success.”