By Giulia Piceni. Cover image backstage shot at Rick Owens Hommes Spring Summer 2019 Babel Collection at Palais Bourbon in Paris, in June 19th 2018. ©OWENSCORP
Rick Owens: Temple of Love, The Radical Fashion Retrospective Redefining Design in 2025
In an era when fashion exhibitions often risk becoming nostalgic marketing ploys, Rick Owens: Temple of Love stands out as a rigorous and genre-defying manifesto. It reminds us that Owens is not a traditional designer; he is a creator of worlds where garments, objects, bodies, and beliefs coexist in an unsettling harmony.
In a season full of fashion retrospectives, Rick Owens: Temple of Love stands alone. It urges us to rethink the role of the designer not as a brand builder, but as a philosopher, architect, and prophet. Owens does not provide solutions; instead, he creates spaces where we can grapple with discomfort, ecstasy, decay, and transformation. For anyone interested in challenging discussions around fashion, this is the exhibition to watch. It may not be comforting, but it is essential—a testament not only to Rick Owens’s singular vision but also to the radical, enduring power of disruption.
Here are five compelling reasons why this retrospective is a must-see, not just for fashion lovers, but for anyone drawn to the darker, more urgent aspects of beauty.
How Rick Owens’s Museum Façade at Palais Galliera Sets the Stage for Temple of Love
The first powerful statement of the exhibition occurs outdoors, even before you enter the Palais Galliera. Rick Owens has wrapped the museum’s external sarcophagi in shimmering black sequinned fabric, creating a bold and theatrical gesture that challenges the hierarchy of tradition and glamour. In this act, we can see Owens’s ability to disrupt the sacred while simultaneously elevating the profane. This isn’t just a decorative intervention; it serves as a critical commentary on architecture. The wrapping evokes both Christo’s conceptual art and queer subversion. It proclaims that this museum, typically a guardian of haute couture history, now belongs to an outsider—an exile from California who has reshaped Parisian fashion with raw materials and an unapologetic vision. The façade becomes a threshold, and once you cross it, you enter Owens’s complete aesthetic world.
Rick Owens’s Brutalist Garden: Fashion Meets Concrete Sculpture
Upon entering the garden—often an overlooked transitional space in exhibitions—visitors are confronted with thirty brutalist cement sculptures designed by Rick Owens. These monolithic shapes are not just references to his furniture line but also expressions of a deeper ideology: fashion as shelter, monument, and altar. Owens is one of the rare designers who consistently approaches creation through a planetary lens. His collections often feature architectural proportions and sculptural silhouettes, and the inclusion of furniture and landscaping in the Galliera garden takes this concept even further. It’s not just a prelude; it’s a temple courtyard filled with ritualistic forces.
Rick Owens: Fashion Silhouettes as Existential Architecture
nside the museum, the exhibition unfolds as a procession of over 100 silhouettes, showcasing Rick Owens’s work from his early days in Los Angeles to his most recent Paris collections. What’s extraordinary is not just the sheer volume of pieces, but their philosophical coherence. Even in the earliest works—such as salvaged military bags turned into dresses and washed leather sculpted into jackets—the seeds of Owens’s mythology are evident. His commitment to “dust”, a specific shade of grey that has become a signature, runs alongside his preference for materials that carry a sense of history: boiled wools, distressed velvets, and scorched nylons. These are not garments that hide the process of their making; they expose seams like wounds, curve around the body like armour, or stand away from it like shields. This is fashion as existential architecture: a way to both reveal and protect the self.
Michèle Lamy’s Bedroom: A Sacred Domestic Reliquary
One of the most intimate and surprising parts of the exhibition is the recreation of Rick Owens and Michèle Lamy’s Californian bedroom. Far from feeling staged, this space offers an emotional counterpoint to the sculptural harshness that dominated the rest of the show. Lamy—Owens’s wife, muse, business partner, and shamanic collaborator—permeates the retrospective, but here, her aura becomes even more tangible. This room is not merely a domestic curiosity; it is a reliquary. Photographs, sketches, talismans, and even their shared bed are arranged not for comfort but as offerings. This suggests that Owens’s creative world is not born in solitude but in dialogue—with Lamy, with myth, and with memory. It underscores what the exhibition title conveys: for Rick Owens, love is the highest material.
Temple of Love by Rick Owens: Rick Owens’s Rethinking Retrospectives as Mythic Fashion Retrospective, Immersive Experiences
Unlike conventional retrospectives that organise works by date, collection, or theme, Temple of Love takes a looser, more atmospheric approach. It doesn’t so much guide you as engulf you. Videos, personal notebooks, music, sculptures, and even a scent of dust and earth permeate the galleries. In one area, works by Joseph Beuys and Steven Parrino contextualise Owens’s influences, forming a rich constellation of decadence, ritual, and defiance. What’s striking is that Owens does not shy away from his contradictions. He presents the raw, the refined, the political, and the personal, leaving space for all to coexist. The effect is not one of closure, but of expansion. He does not want us to look back; he wants us to feel the present. The retrospective concludes not with a resolution but with an invocation. This is not a career laid to rest, but a practice transformed into myth.
