Rick’s Kids

From left: Alastair Wong, Abraham Paulino, Joely Nina, Joris Rigerl, Christian Wywiorski, Matt Campo, Fiona Luo, Dylan Burgoon, Michael Smith, Tyler Logan, Emily Sexton, Sivateja Ponnuru, Fabian Malmhagen, Nazar Hrynkiw, Eric Colon, Bob Colleran, and Jessie Zhao. Photo: Marco Giannavola

In 2014, Michael Smith was 19 and living in Arizona when he was introduced to the avant-garde fashion designer Rick Owens. “My friend showed me a pair of shoes, and I hated them,” he says. “Six months later, I thought, Oh, those are kind of cool. Then another six months later, it was like, If I don’t own these shoes, I’m gonna die.” Within two years, the designer made up 90 percent of his wardrobe, and Smith had found his place in a community of devoted Rick Owens fans and collectors, hosted on the instant-messaging app Discord (it had begun as a thread on 4chan before going private in 2016). Members of Rick Owens Discord, or ROD, convene to discuss new collections and share eBay links. They also like to pool their knowledge to help catalogue one another’s Rick Owens pieces, which can be so complex and self-referential that Smith describes the brand as a form of “worldbuilding” — one quirk of the designer’s clothing is that the tags include unusually granular information about its material in a code that Owens fans have worked to crack. (LP, for example, stands for hammered lambskin, LGI for “glass ice” lambskin leather.)

The Discord chat only had about 20 people when Smith joined, but since then it’s swelled to more than 500 people across North America, Asia, and Europe. An active cluster is based in New York, its members ranging from fashion workers to writers to data analysts. Joely Nina first encountered the group in 2018 when she visited the city with a friend to shop at Saks — the friend, a ROD member, made a detour to buy a Rick Owens jacket from another ROD member, which led to an impromptu shopping trip with a dozen or so others from Discord (Nina joined ROD and later moved to the city; her partner, Christian Wywiorski, is also a member of ROD). When Smith moved to New York three years ago, friends from Discord became friends IRL. Alastair Wong recalls Smith striking up conversation at a Shake Shack after they exchanged a “knowing look, like you’re both in this weird cult,” when Smith clocked his leather stocking sneakers. Tyler Logan approached Smith when they happened to attend the same art show. “I grew up on the internet but was always shy,” says Logan. “This is the first group of internet friends I’ve ever had.”