June 27, 2025 |
The dark prince just got his very own exhibition, and it’s everything you’d expect – and then some. Now open at Palais Galliera, located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, Rick Owens: Temple of Love is the first-ever retrospective charting the rise, reign and relentless reinvention of the cult Californian designer.
A little bit monastic, a little bit metal and a lot bonkers, the display unspools like a cinematic fever dream of Owens’ world – all raw concrete, sequinned shrouds and silhouettes that teeter between the apocalyptic and the divine. It’s a show that doesn’t just showcase clothes; it sanctifies them. Because if anyone deserves a temple, it’s Rick.
From his early days in ‘90s Los Angeles to his Parisian ascension as fashion’s most devout disruptor, Owens has built a career on contradiction: soft power, gothic glamour, ascetic excess. Born in California in 1961, he began his life in fashion as a pattern-cutter in L.A., eventually founding his eponymous label in 1992. With resources tight and imagination vast, he reworked military blankets into monastic coats and army duffels into dresses. Even then, his palette was austere – black, bone, a spectral grey he famously named “dust.” His silhouettes, meanwhile, evoked 1930s Hollywood elegance filtered through the lens of underground rebellion.
When Owens moved to Paris in 2003, the stage for his radical fashion ‘sermons’ expanded, and he used it well. His runway shows became full-scale performances of defiance – whether casting an all-Black, all-female step team in place of traditional models, or sending out men in tunics with visible genitalia. These were not gestures made for shock, but sacrifices offered in pursuit of deeper truths: gender, power and the sacred strength of women. His work is always as architectural as it is emotional, and always unapologetically personal.
So it makes sense that Owens himself took on the role of artistic director for Temple of Love, collaborating with the museum’s team – general curator Miren Arzalluz and scientific curator Alexandre Samson – to create something truly immersive. The exhibition spills out of the museum’s neoclassical interior and into its very bones: the garden (where thirty concrete monoliths jut from the earth like brutalist cenotaphs), the façade (where classical statues stand shrouded in sequin-embroidered fabric, draped like mourners in some celestial ritual), even a recreation of Owens’s Californian bedroom, complete with the unmistakable presence of Michèle Lamy, his muse, partner and high priestess of his aesthetic universe.
Over 100 silhouettes populate the museum, flanked by never-before-seen installations and deeply personal ephemera – sketches, videos, notebooks. Artworks by Gustave Moreau, Joseph Beuys and Steven Parrino appear like ghosts, illuminating Owens’ influences and obsessions. The effect is somewhere between a gallery and a reliquary.
It’s somewhat overwhelming, intimate and utterly uncompromising – just like the man himself. Temple of Love isn’t a lot more than a retrospective; it’s a sanctification of Rick Owens’ universe, built on contradiction, ritual and radical beauty. You don’t walk through it so much as submit to it. And by the time you emerge – blinking into Parisian daylight – you might just believe, as Owens always has, that fashion isn’t frivolous. It’s sacred.
Photography courtesy of Palais Galliera.
