By RUTH LA FERLA


Maya Yogev has a thing for leather - her lambskin coats and jackets are as malleable as wax. Her designs express a sensibility that is “on the darker side,” she acknowledged, with their somber colors, cascading lapels and droopy shapes. They also bear more than a passing resemblance to the designs of Rick Owens, a fellow Californian whose brooding aesthetic is the talk of the runways.

“I’ve been told it’s kind of copycat,” Ms. Yogev said of her work. “That can be kind of frustrating at times.” But comparisons to Mr. Owens “can also be useful,” she added. “Once you mention his name, everyone is automatically drawn.”

Her affinity for washed-out, gothtinged leathers and stretched-out shapes is understandable: Ms. Yogev, the designer of Grai, based in Los Angeles, apprenticed with Mr. Owens at a formative stage in her career. But she is far from the only fashion maker indebted to that designer’s particular brand of urban decay.

A veritable industry has sprung up around Mr. Owens, who may be fashion’s most imitated designer. Rival houses are racing to produce their own distillations of his angular flaps, zigzagging zippers, gossamer T-shirts and biker jackets pliant as second skins. In the tradition of Giorgio Armani, Vivienne Westwood and Tom Ford, his ideas are absorbed or copied outright in collections as diverse as those of Alexander Wang and Rag & Bone, or on a more commercial level, by Topshop and American Apparel.

“He has certainly captured the moment,” said Kathryn Deane, president of the Tobe Report, a retail newsletter. Once every decade or so, she said, “everybody seems to be on the same wavelength, and for now that wavelength is Rick Owens.”

Mr. Owens seems to speak most persuasively to designers on the cutting edge: Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of Ohne Titel; Haider Ackermann, whose fall collection was dominated by supple draped leathers; Gareth Pugh in London; and Nicole and Michael Colovos of Helmut Lang, whose slant-zipper, funnel-neck jackets and sheepskin and leather coats, cut away to reveal softly draped underlayers and scrunched-up leggings, unmistakably echo those of Mr. Owens.

The Colovoses, who say their style has been shaped by the angular construction and complex layering of the Japanese vanguard, and by the ghostly palette of painters like Marlene Dumas, maintain that such comparisons are inevitable. “At times everyone just seems to come together,” Nicole Colovos said. “We’re responding to a feeling that just gets channeled somehow.”

That “feeling” - a confluence of rock star and crypt chic - is one Mr. Owens, 47, has been peddling for years. Since founding his label in Los Angeles in 1994, he has rarely strayed from his signature style.

Mr. Owens’s emergence as fashion’s center of attraction is a paradox. He was, after all, long a shadowy figure in the industry, an outsider based in Los Angeles. In an e-mail message, he responded with terse resignation to the suggestion that others were copying him. “When something’s in the air,” he wrote, “no one can really own it.”