For the first time in 20 years, Rick Owens has recently been spending time in Porterville, California, the suburban town where he grew up. Ostensibly to care for his 88-year-old mother, inevitably, he’s also been confronting his sometimes troubled past, and perhaps coming to terms with what’s happened since he upped sticks and left as a young adult. In conversation with Tim Blanks he recounts the ensuing years: uncertainty, frustration, loneliness, self-destruction, graft, conviction, acceptance, wealth, influence, and ‘more success than, as a 19-year-old art student, I could ever have imagined.’ For Rick, who recently turned 60, it’s been not so much a ‘journey’ as a topsy-turvy rollercoaster ride. And it remains freewheeling and self-defining each year, each season, and through each collection he designs. Long may it continue.