Rick Owens is face to face with a life-size wax sculpture of himself

Rick Owens is face to face with a life-size wax sculpture of himself, staring out of shredded wadding and packed in a wooden crate in a corner of his London store. It's an oddly unnerving sight, as the cult Californian designer is first to admit: brown-eyed and eerily close in appearance to the man himself, the look of it is made no less disturbing by the fact that it is severed from the waist down it has no legs.

Owens objects for less obvious reasons: "It's not nearly disgusting enough," he muses, in his west-coast American drawl. "It's been prettified." It's true that the object in question is somewhat vanilla when compared to the living, breathing man. Owens' mother is Mexican-born and his olive complexion and aquiline profile reflects that. His replica appears, somewhat bizarrely, to have rouged cheeks and lips that might not unreasonably be described as rosy. "And the eyelashes are too curled," he says, matter-of-factly. "I'll have to cut them."

Eventually, this doppelganger will reside in Tokyo, where it will be blessed "with a Godzilla tail". There's one destined for Korea, too. In that case, a wind machine will ensure that "its hair goes crazy". The original Rick Owens waxwork, meanwhile, takes pride of place in his Paris boutique."Now, that one really is horrible," Owens says with pride. When it first went on display at the Pitti Immagine fashion fair in Florence in January 2006, it caused something of a sensation, not least because it portrayed the designer, hanging from the ceiling, jeans lowered, urinating on to a mirrored floor. Today, and perhaps given the relatively bourgeois retail environment that it calls home, the bottom half is draped in black cloth, though anyone visiting may lift its skirts, should they so desire.

And it was a rite of passage, he argues, warming to the formality of the subject. "At a certain point in his life," Owens says, "when he reaches a level of stature, a man commissions his portrait to go over the fireplace. It's a classical tradition, but I thought I'd do it in wax because that's funnier. It's my Dorian Gray moment."

Almost a decade later, Owens is this time in London to oversee the most recent expansion of his empire. As always, he is wearing his own designs, specifically layered fine-gauge cashmere and jersey T-shirts with "drippy" necklines and raw edges, equally louche cropped dhoti pants, the crotch of which reaches a little above his knees, and huge black leather trainers.

He once said he wanted to get intimate with Iggy Pop – he is bisexual, and put it less euphemistically than that, but pity his poor parents. His appearance is often compared to Iggy's and it's easy to see why, although Owens is a larger man.