Rick Owens Temple of Love: First Exhibition at Palais Galliera in Paris
The Paris fashion world is buzzing with the arrival of Rick Owens’ first exhibition in Paris. Titled “Temple of Love”, the show at the prestigious Palais Galliera is more than a retrospective. It is an immersive experience into the uncompromising universe of one of fashion’s most visionary designers.
Paris has long been the stage for Rick Owens’ radical vision of fashion. A vision both austere and romantic, brutal and tender. Now, for the first time, Rick Owens has been given his own exhibition in the city he has called home for three decades. Temple of Love, currently on view at Palais Galliera since the Rick Owens SS26 Collection presentation during Paris Fashion Week a couple of weeks ago, transforms the museum into a sanctuary of personal mythology, memory, and defiance.
Rick Owens has never been interested in staging a typical retrospective. Instead of lining up his garments in tidy chronological order, he transforms the Palais Galliera into what he calls a Temple, a charged space where clothing, influence, and memory collide. The title, Rick Owens Temple of Love, is itself a double gesture: it acknowledges the museum’s monumental architecture, but it also borrows from a track by the gothic band Sisters of Mercy, a sly reference for a designer often described as fashion’s self-styled prince of darkness.
What greets visitors is the consistency of his aesthetic: the monumental silhouettes, the strict architectural lines, the devotion to stark black and white. Yet there are surprises. Splashes of color, newly present in recent work, suggest that the story is not only about severity, but about change. Rick Owens has never been static. Even in his most uncompromising collections, he is moving forward.
From L.A. to Paris – a homecoming in Rick Owens’ career
Paris, more than Los Angeles, has shaped that trajectory. Owens was born in California, raised in a Mexican-American family, and started showing under his name in LA in the early 1990s. By 2003 he had shifted to Paris, and from there his world widened quickly. Critics saw his strange mix of 1930s Hollywood drape and 1990s grunge attitude, and coined the phrase grunge couture to describe it. Paris gave him a stage and, in many ways, a homecoming. Temple of Love is not a retrospective in the dry, academic sense, but rather a meditation on the journey — from fragile early silhouettes to regal menswear drapes to the sculptural, gender-blurring creations that now define his name.
Rick Owens has always circled around ritual. He calls his shows ceremonies, not fashion. A place where beauty and severity sit next to each other, sometimes even fight. In the exhibition the clothes are not just clothes. They sit heavy, more like relics. The space itself does not feel like a gallery. It is closer to a chapel, quiet and strange, almost spiritual. The references come from everywhere. Egyptian workers. Medieval popes. Skaters rolling down California streets. He gathers them all, twists them, makes them his own.
It feels personal too. He says it is for memory, for friends who are gone. For the strength that comes only through loss. Temple of Love is about remembering. The title is not just gothic style. It points to impermanence. To mourning. To love that does not last. But also to creation as a way of holding on. It does not read like ego. It reads like a shrine, like a letter to the people who left their mark on him.
The outsiders are here as well at Rick Owens Temple of Love. Always at the center of his story. The misfits, the ones who never fit the mold. They are not pushed aside. They are honored. Temple of Love sets them right in the middle. It repeats the belief Owens has carried for years: beauty belongs to defiance.
Rick Owens Temple of Love – Experience the true spirit of Rick Owens
Fashion? Yes, the garments are here, monumental, gothic, wide, heavy. But that is not really the point. Cut and fabric matter less. The mood matters more. He wants you to feel it. Fragility, devotion, beauty clawing itself out of darkness.
And maybe that is why Rick Owens Temple of Love matters. It resists the fast cycle, the endless novelty. Rick Owens moves at his own speed. Slow. Careful. Always. That choice has kept his vision alive for decades. This exhibition is a marker, a statement. Fashion can be ritual. It can be memory. It can be devotion. For those who step into Palais Galliera, the reward is not a line of garments. It is meeting the spirit that drives them.
Watch the following film by HD FASHION TV by YULIA HARFOUCH that is an attempt to understand the world of Rick Owens through the exhibition temple of love:
