On Monday evening in Paris, Karlie Kloss and the fashion designer Rick Owens were reminiscing about their first meeting. It was, Ms. Kloss said, 17 years ago when she was so fresh to modeling that her mom accompanied her to the fitting.
What a difference a decade and a half makes. Today Ms. Kloss sits on the Mount Rushmore of models who are household names. With her husband, Joshua Kushner, she also runs Bedford Media, a burgeoning media conglomerate, and it’s in that capacity that she reunited with Mr. Owens on a still night at the trailing end of Paris Fashion Week.
Mr. Owens and his wife, Michèle Lamy, had offered Ms. Kloss their austere Left Bank maison for a dinner celebrating the relaunch of i-D magazine, which the model-turned-mogul bought in 2023 after its previous owner Vice filed for bankruptcy.
“It’s an extraordinary piece of fashion history,” Ms. Kloss said over the clinking of Champagne glasses. “I just didn’t want it to die.”
The mission of the magazine, Thom Bettridge, i-D’s new editor in chief, said was to restore “the spirit of what it was but for right now.”
First, what was: Founded in 1980 by Terry Jones, i-D was a holy text for a generation of indie fashion acolytes. For a young designer, photographer or model, receiving an i-D feature was like getting blessed by the pope. Mr. Owens recalled that decades ago i-D gave him one of his earliest profiles.
The first print issue of Ms. Kloss’s overhauled i-D includes covers with the model Naomi Campbell, whose first magazine cover was actually a 1996 issue of i-D, and Enza Khoury, a heretofore unknown 18-year-old high schooler from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who was chosen from more than 800 undiscovered entrants that answered i-D’s casting call.
“We just wanted to put our stamp on someone who’s completely new in a way that Terry Jones used to do,” Mr. Bettridge said.
The magazine had flown Ms. Khoury and her father, Adam, to Paris for the dinner. Dressed in a sleeveless Gucci dress (she had picked the outfit from options i-D helped secure for her), Ms. Khoury said it was her first time leaving the country, let alone parachuting into Paris Fashion Week. She was shocked, she said, by the cleanliness of the highways and the abundance of electric cars. The next day, she was attending the Miu Miu and Kiko Kostadinov fashion shows with the i-D team.
“It’s an incredibly beautiful thing,” Mr. Khoury said of his daughter’s surreal European spin.
Other dinner-goers, who sat in thronelike chairs of Mr. Owens’s creation, sipping soup from martini glasses, were less new to the pages of i-D, a sign that the new ownership hadn’t diluted the reverence that those in the industry have for the magazine.
Juergen Teller, who shot many i-D covers, stuck out from the gothed-up guests in his pink T-shirt. (There seems to be an unspoken dress code at Château Owens.)
The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, another past cover contributor, convened with the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, and Petra Collins, who photographed the rapper SZA for a 2018 i-D cover, walked into the dining room with Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbo, the designers of the buzzy label All-In.
Mr. Jones was unable to attend the party, but his college-age granddaughter, Phoenix Rodan, was present, an indication that the new iteration of i-D has received the family’s blessing.
Ms. Kloss worked the room in a statuesque Rick Owens dress. “Can you sit down in that?” Mr. Bettridge asked. Ms. Kloss assured him she could and proved it come dinnertime.
During dinner Mr. Owens reclined on a bench made of felted human hair.
“There is a certain amount of gravitas to having something printed,” Mr. Owens said of why he offered his home for the occasion. “Online everything is so fractured.”
The magazine talk was brief as he is more interested in playing art docent in his own home.
For a few minutes, pausing only to greet the petite Miami rapper JT, who wore a ceremonial Owens gown, the designer called out highlights from his awesome art collection. On an opposite wall was a grandiose Art Nouveau urn by Georges Hoentschel. At his left was a Guernica-inspired mural by his daughter Scarlett Rouge with a fossilized-looking Anselm Kiefer suit over the top. Just around the corner was another Kiefer piece that was, Mr. Owens said, “major, major.”
Another room held a tank filled with sperm from the gonzo musician-artist Tommy Cash. Still, the most out-of-place thing in Mr. Owen’s concrete tomb of a home was a banal copy machine out of a suburban business center. Chez Owens, it appears, is a genuine live work space.
After dinner, guests filled into the living room, where they found Ms. Lamy singing “You Are So Beautiful” with ASAP Rocky, who slipped in during the dessert course in a Chanel ski cap, snakeskin Puma sneakers and blacked-out Ray-Bans that he never took off. As midnight neared, Mr. Owens slipped away upstairs. It was time for bed.
