RICHARD SATURNINO OWENS was born in Porterville, Calif., a conservative town at the edge of the Southern Sierra Nevada 160 miles north of Los Angeles. His father, John Owens, didn’t allow a TV in the house. Instead, he introduced Owens to Aristotle and the music of Richard Wagner; he also taught him fear and shame. “I am karma,” he says. “I’m the opposite result of my dad’s force in the world.” At Catholic school, he relished the stories of the saints and their vestments. They were, along with his mother’s Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie catalogs, among his only sources of exoticism. And, of course, “this hot, naked guy on a cross,” he says.
Owens has taken me to the church of St. Clotilde, a Gothic Revival basilica close to his home where he and his late mother, Concepción Owens, a former teacher’s aide, would come to talk; and where Connie, as she was known, prayed for her son’s happiness. John, a social worker, died in 2015. When Owens called to say goodbye, John, who hadn’t spoken to his son in four years after Owens had described him as bigoted in an interview, yelled, “It’s too late!” and hung up. (Owens later got him back on the phone for what he describes as “a soft ending.”) In every story he shares about his father, the designer describes a mortal enemy who could have been his best friend.
“When your parents die, there’s a primal acknowledgment that you’re next,” says Owens, who flew his mother to Concordia when her cancer worsened. “I thought, ‘I have to get her to Europe before she gets stuck in a hospital.’ Concordia is our center of survival, all of us,” he adds, settling into a pew. A week before her death, in 2022, Connie asked to accompany Owens, her only child, to Venice. “I want to go into the water,” she said. Owens replied, “Mom, you’re terrified of the water.” But she insisted. “I got her in this inflatable wheelchair, and she was squealing. It was the cutest thing,” he says. “She declined shortly after that.” A moment passes as we sit in silence. When he glances at me, Owens looks like he’s been crying. He asks if I’ve read anything by the late 19th-century French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a member of the Decadent literary movement who later converted to Catholicism. “Is that going to happen to me?” he says. “Am I going to find spirituality at the end?”
