Fashion Exhibition: From ‘Temple of Love’ in Paris to Frieze London: Rick Owens Explores Brutal Elegance Across Two Cities

Rick Owens - an influential avant‑garde designer from California who has flourished creatively in Paris since 2003 - is the focus of Temple of Love, a bold and immersive retrospective currently on show at the Palais Galliera. 

This production is not only a retrospective of his fashion but a full sensory experience: sculpture, memory, politics, performance, and personal narrative, all woven into one radical vision.

Visual: Michèle Lamy
(C) Rick Owen

This autumn, Rick Owens will extend his creative vision beyond Paris with a special presentation at Frieze London in October, hosted by Carpenters Workshop Gallery. There, Owens will unveil a new series of collectible design pieces exploring the conceptual and aesthetic poetics of rust—a material condition he sees as a symbol of both decay and endurance. Among the centerpiece works is a dramatic reinterpretation of his signature Double Bubble chair, now upholstered in vivid blood-red leather. The exhibition will also feature selections of Owens’s vintage fashion and archival pieces. Complementing his display, Owens’s longtime partner and creative collaborator Michèle Lamy will debut a new sculptural installation, continuing the duo’s shared exploration of prehistoric and natural forms—notably antlers and horns, which they see as primal symbols of brutality and self-protection. 

Together, the London showcase and Temple of Love form a powerful dual reflection on impermanence, intimacy, and radical aesthetics.

The Temple of Love retrospective in Paris, running until January 4, 2026, was conceived as a devotional space rather than a conventional display, bridging fashion, architecture, sculpture and performance.  

Owens serves as artistic director alongside curator Alexandre Samson and honorary director Miren Arzalluz, ensuring every element carries his aesthetic imprint. 

At Galliera, Owens is exalted as not merely a designer, but a myth‑maker and philosopher of form.

The first galleries revisit Owens’s 1990s Los Angeles era: a Catholic upbringing fostered discipline, while 1930s Hollywood, Wagnerian opera, and the decadent novel À rebours informed his rejection of normative beauty. Authentic early pieces were rediscovered with help from collaborators to form the opening room.

Over time Owens moved from raw, black leather draped silhouettes to complex architectural forms —his hallmark "dust" grey, monastic tones and elongated lines combining to create pieces that function as wearable sculpture.

Inside and outside the museum, the exhibition unfolds around you: museum statues are draped in sequined veils; thirty brutalist cement sculptures punctuate the gardens alongside Californian wildflowers recalling Owens’s childhood.

Inside, multimedia—including references to Gustave Moreau, Joseph Beuys, and Steven Parrino—deepens the narrative.

A faithful reconstruction of Owens’s and muse Michèle Lamy’s Hollywood bedroom provides intimate insight into their shared life and creative symbiosis. Personal artefacts—books, perfumes, even Ziggy Stardust vinyl—are integrated as living installation 

The exhibit includes provocative elements: video installations like Owens's famed “Horse” piece—featuring simulated copulation with a black stallion—are housed behind disclaimers in a room with sexual and violent content; this section is not recommended for minors.

This is the first time Palais Galliera has devoted an entire retrospective to a living designer in Paris—a significant institutional recognition of Owens’s influence 

Over 100 iconic silhouettes are displayed alongside archival objects, installations, personal effects, and architectural interventions—a testament to Owens’s interdisciplinary practice and uncompromising vision 

The show reframes fashion as a spiritual, political, and philosophical discipline, continuing Owens’s three-decade-long questioning of conventional aesthetics and power structures.

Temple of Love is not simply an exhibition—it’s a reckoning. Through Owens’s personal mythology, every garment becomes an altar. Every installation, a provocation. For the fashion‑curious, the conceptually driven, and those who believe in beauty that unsettles—this show is essential viewing.

The exhibition has received critical reception.  

I’M Firenze Digest hails Temple of Love as “the retrospective everyone’s talking about,” calling Owens “a philosopher, architect and prophet” rather than a designer, and urging visitors to see it as “a pilgrimage through 30 years of radical aesthetics” 

nss magazine (via curator Alexandre Samson) underscores the exhibition’s commitment to technical integrity and the designer’s structural vision—setting his work apart as sculptural, cerebral, and politically charged.

A Shaded View on Fashion praises the exhibition as “a monument to radical beauty,” emphasizing its rejection of nostalgia in favor of spiritual staging and sustained confrontation with identity, decay, and transformation.