Temple Of Love / Rick Owens at Palais Galliera

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Temple Of Love / Rick Owens at Palais Galliera

Rick Owens Retrospective at Palais Galliera.

At the entrance of the Palais Galliera, monolithic sarcophagi covered in black paillettes rise like guardians of an unnamed rite, still and imposing, as if to cauterise the noise of the city before granting passage into another world. They stand not merely as sculptures but as premonitions, preparing the visitor for what awaits beyond: a descent into a realm where light recedes and the border between fashion and ritual dissolve into shadow. In the candid rooms of the Musée de la Mode, Rick Owens constructs a sanctuary for what society has cast aside: the discarded, the reviled, the beautifully defiant. Draped in silence and sheathed in felt, cement and steel there is no chronology to follow, only a slow unraveling of obsessions and of bodies eroding under the weight of time, of filth recast as dignity, of decay offered as erotic promise.

With the sunlight died and the night above me
To cross the threshold of this exhibition is to enter a space beyond daylight, a chamber unreachable by the sun, severed from the rhythm of the outside world. The act itself resembles a passage, a gesture of surrender. Like cadavres exquis, the mannequins are not whole beings but composite presences, their limbs sculpted from cement and stone, their forms assembled and housed within square alcoves that recall ancient crypts more than display cases. They stand close to one another, aligned not by collection but by mood, by thematic proximity, by emotional temperature. One hovers mid-air, suspended as if frozen in mid-ascension, its skirt’s long train brushing against the glass surface below like a final breath held too long. Perched atop plinths cloaked in felt, they preside over the viewer from above—not as deities to be worshipped but as gargoyle-like witnesses, vigilant and silent, uncannily animate in their stillness. At first, they repel. And then, slowly, they begin to embrace.
Darkness is nearly complete, punctured only by sparse, deliberate shafts of light that fall on vitrines and mannequins like divine judgement. Felt covers the walls, absorbing sound and softening perception, a material both humble and mystical—Owens’ homage to Joseph Beuys, whose story of survival through fat and felt during a wartime airplane crash became, for Owens, a parable of protection and artistic rebirth. These layers of reference create a sacred texture, a suggestion that one is standing not in a museum but in a naos—the innermost sanctum of a temple, a space reserved for initiates and gods, unreachable to most, guarded by silence and flame. Rick Owens’ voice murmurs in the background, reciting the exhibition’s captions in French, his words bouncing off the walls, sometimes echoing, sometimes dissolving, as though they too were absorbed into the fabric of the room.

On walls as wide as lovers’ eyes
The visitor is led into a space where the dark veil lifts abruptly and daylight pours in with almost violent clarity. This final hall refuses the murk and hush of what came before, instead presenting the garments in a stark, blinding glow. Mannequins gathered from various collections stand rigid in formation, not in historical order but as though summoned for an unknowable final rite. They neither explain nor evolve; they simply are, held in mid-breath. Their materials bruise the space—pony-skin, latex, draped jersey, spiked leather—all frozen under the relentless pressure of natural light, as if interrogated rather than revealed. In the back, heavy pony-hair armchairs sit against the wall, each one cradling a catalogue of the exhibition, left open and vulnerable, pages fanned like relics waiting to be deciphered. The floor reflects the outside world in brief flashes, but the garments remain opaque, withholding. This room resists narrative, abandons coherence, and dares to replace linearity with feeling. And still, the ritual holds: a choreography of sensation emerges, an alchemy of black, bruised colour palettes, fractured silhouettes, and textures that ache with memory.

You come for cover in the Temple of Love
What Rick Owens has constructed across his career is not merely a fashion system but a cosmology, an architecture of feeling where garments, furniture, and bodies coexist in radical honesty. He has always spoken for those left outside the gates—for the freaks, the heretics, the romantics who seek shelter in places that look like ruin to others. His world offers not comfort, but communion. Nowhere is this clearer than in the third room of the exhibition, where sound becomes sculptural: the steady drop of water, rhythmic and clear, arcs through the air before crashing into a wide steel basin. The source is a sculpture of Rick Owens himself, clad in his usual black trousers, from whose groin this crystalline stream emerges, transforming an act of urination into a kind of ritual absolution.
To the left, video monitors flicker with explicit scenes that defy easy interpretation: Owens and Michèle engaged in a threesome, Rick’s mouth filled with another’s urine, Michèle perched on her birthday cake as a viscous substance merges with the frosting, other sequences portraying acts of fisting, primal encounters, animalistic gestures—all framed not with irony but with reverence, with the clarity of someone who has long rejected shame in favour of sovereignty. These are not provocations for their own sake, but offerings. Alongside them, artefacts appear—worn underwear, archival objects, curated symbols—all tethered to the body, all evidence of a life lived without censorship, where pleasure, defilement, and transcendence blur into a single instinct.

The only haven you can trust
The final threshold is quiet, modest in scale, but unbearably intimate. A room wrapped once again in heavy felt—thicker here, almost sepulchral—serves as the resting place for Owens’ and Michèle Lamy’s personal bed, shipped directly from their Los Angeles home. The sheets are undone, the pillows sag with the weight of sleeping skulls, the space thick with the scent of shared years. There is no spectacle left—only presence. A bookshelf stands nearby, containing titles that form the intellectual scaffolding of their lives: Breuer’s brutalist visions, Mapplethorpe’s queer mythologies, Steichen’s melancholy glamour, the underground queer aesthetics of Transvestite. A partition leads to a wardrobe—earth tones, black, more felt. On a nearby shelf, perfumes rest next to jars of black henna, the same used to stain their hair and fingertips, a ritual so subtle it barely registers until one realises that it, too, is a kind of resistance.
In the end, the retrospective does not close with a climax, but with a return—to the private, the silent, the sacred. What Rick Owens offers is not an easy haven, but a temple for those who long to stand outside and still be seen. And in that shadowed space, covered in fabric thick enough to muffle the world, one realises that this—this refusal, this nakedness, this embrace of the abject—is the only form of love that cannot be taken away.