RICK OWENS - IN THE NAME OF LOVE

For Rick Owens, love has never required softness. It can be monumental and unruly, expressed through concrete, leather and distortion. It can hold tenderness and ego, devotion and damage, beauty and collapse. Across more than three decades, Owens has built a universe around these contradictions—only now, he appears more willing than ever to name the force holding them together. That force is love.

It sits at the heart of Rick Owens: Temple of Love, the designer’s expansive retrospective staged at Paris’s Palais Galliera. Bringing together more than 100 silhouettes, personal documents, artworks and installations, the exhibition traced Owens’ journey from his beginnings in Los Angeles to the monumental collections of his Paris years. At the centre of this story is Owens’ wife and creative partner, Michèle Lamy. Her presence was felt throughout the exhibition, most intimately through a recreation of the couple’s former Californian bedroom.

More than wife or muse, Lamy remains the gravitational force within Owens’ world—an artist and collaborator whose restless creativity counters his instinct for discipline and control. This pursuit continued through Promoting Unlimited Love, the Spring/Summer 2026 Moncler + Rick Owens campaign photographed by Juergen Teller. Owens, Lamy, Teller and his wife and creative partner, Dovile Drizyte, appear exchanging kisses in images that move between intimacy, humour and provocation.

Through Teller’s deliberately unvarnished lens, affection is not polished into fantasy. Instead, the campaign proposes a form of love that is communal, imperfect and resistant to definition.

For all its concrete, leather and monumental scale, Owens’ temple is ultimately not a building. It is a life constructed with another person—provocative, evolving and alive. His pursuit of love is not the softening of Rick Owens. It may be his most radical gesture yet.