Rick Owens: Temple of Love at Palais Galliera
The Palais Galliera, Paris’s fashion museum, has opened its doors to a designer who has built an empire on shadow, radical honesty and sculptural beauty. Rick Owens: Temple of Love, on show until 4 January 2026, is the first major Paris retrospective dedicated to the American-born designer whose work has shifted contemporary fashion far beyond the commercial and into the realm of myth, ritual and brutalist poetry.
SS19 Babel men’s fitting, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 19 June 2018 © owenscorp
Born in California in 1961, Owens began as a pattern-cutter on Hollywood Boulevard before launching his label in 1992. From the start, he embraced a raw, outsider aesthetic that is underground in attitude yet classically disciplined in construction. Limited resources pushed him toward reclaimed and salvaged materials early on: military bags became dresses, army blankets were reimagined as outerwear, and washed leather solidified his reputation. His language has always been stark—black, bone, and his now-iconic grey shade, "dust."
Jimmy, First Sketch, SS19 Babel Men's © OWENSCORP
But Temple of Love goes far beyond the garments. Owens himself served as artistic director of the exhibition, collaborating closely with Palais Galliera. The result is a total environment, an immersive trail that spills from the museum’s interior into the façade and gardens. More than 100 silhouettes are displayed alongside his notebooks, videos and previously unseen installations, offering a multi-sensory portrait of a designer for whom clothing is only one part of a larger cosmology.
The exhibition also celebrates Michèle Lamy, Owens’s wife, muse, and co-conspirator. Her presence runs through every chapter of his career, and a reconstruction of their Californian bedroom underscores the intimate, almost devotional nature of their creative partnership.
FW24 Porterville Women's, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 29 February 2024 © OWENSCORP
Owens’s work has long operated as a form of social and cultural critique. His shows are often confrontations, and he has often used fashion as a political stage, using non-traditional models, exposing male vulnerability (quite literally, in one notorious show), and championing women’s power with unapologetic force. When the world feels on the brink—as it so often has during his career—Owens responds by pushing further into sculptural silhouettes and unexpected colours, rendering chaos strangely majestic.
SS18 Dirt Women's, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, 28 September 2017 © OWENSCORP
Outside the museum, fabric draped in sequins wraps the statues on the façade, while thirty brutalist cement sculptures populate the garden, echoing the monolithic furniture pieces from his design line. California vines and plants bring a dreamlike familiarity to the scene—his origins, transplanted into Parisian soil.
Temple of Love refuses the easy label of “retrospective", edging closer to a kind of communion of love, darkness, and beauty in defiance. It invites us into a world where fashion is sculpture, rebellion is sacred, and creation is an act of devotion.
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Further Information:
Rick Owens: Temple of Love is on now at Palais Galliera, Paris, until 4 January 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Terry-Ann, Paris, 2002. © Rick Owens
All further images as credited in photo captions.