Rick Owens

Owens learned his trade the unglamorous way — years of pattern-cutting in Los Angeles garment factories — before his washed, broken-in leathers and grunge-glamour drape found a cult that has never stopped growing. He runs the house with his wife and partner Michèle Lamy, a creative force in her own right, from a Paris headquarters where he famously lives above the studio.

The shows are the week’s most reliable spectacle — fog, fire, brutalist staging on the Palais de Tokyo plaza — but the enterprise underneath is disciplined: an independent, profitable house spanning runway, DRKSHDW denim, furniture in marble and bone, and collaborations that stretch from Birkenstock to Converse. Fashion’s dark lord is, by every practical measure, one of its great independents.