From Rick Owens: “This men’s collection is named Temple, after my retrospective, Temple of Love (“love” is a word really worth promoting right now), which will be opening immediately after the runway show at the Musée Palais Galliera right across the street.
A retrospective summons up thoughts of peaking, finality, and decline, and I was delighted to lean into that. The exhibition tracks the pursuit of glamour and sleaze that I was looking for on Hollywood Boulevard, and eventually, improbably, ending up in a Paris museum. I have always thought of what I do as a fascination with the denseness of European aesthetic sophistication seen through a filter of American bluntness.
The bluntness here is in the fields of flesh shown between gaps of black leather.
Studded straps from Hollywood Boulevard are draped and swagged to recall garlands held by nymphs to trap a satyr in William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s sylvan neoclassical paintings. Straps are always a good excuse for men to comfortably indulge in self-adornment that also provides a whiff of action.
Heavyweight leathers, veg-tanned in Santa Croce sull’Arno, Tuscany, are also slashed, fringed, spiked, and zipped to move, sway, and breathe. Voluptuously proportioned flight jackets and parkas are rendered in either silk taffeta or industrial nylon canvas woven in the Como region of Italy by a family-owned mill founded in 1952. The nylon used is GRS-certified, which ensures a reduction in water consumption, emissions, and hazardous waste, lessening the dependence on non-renewable resources. These are worn with voluminous cotton canvas shorts paired with open-toed Velcro-strapped padded orthopedic footwear we call Burrito Sneaks.
I have done a collaboration with Suicide, the New York punk band pioneering the use of minimalist electronic instrumentation during the 1970s. Vocalist Alan Vega and musician Martin Rev’s raw, disturbing sound mirrored their destroyed and deconstructed leathers, which we have translated here into jackets made from heavy hides tanned and produced in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan.
Terry-Ann Frencken, working with cashmere under the name Totalkoster, was our first showroom model in 2002 and, indulging in the spirit of shameless nostalgia, I asked her to reproduce some of her favorite knits from that time. Polaroid images I took of her 20 years ago are among the first pages of this exhibition’s catalog.
The soundtrack is Klaus Nomi—one of the legendary weirdos who helped liberate the weirdo in me—singing Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell:
Thy hand, Belinda; darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest.
More I would, but death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest.
When I am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast.
Remember me,
Remember me,
Remember me,
But ah! forget my fate…
Ding-dong the witch is dead.”
Photos: Owenscorp / Courtesy of Rick Owens
Casting: Angus Munro (AMC Casting), Georges Labbat
Styling: Tyrone Dylan Susman
Hair: Duffy (Streeters)
Makeup: Daniel Sallstrom (MA World Group)
Production: La Mode en Images
Stunt Coordinator: Michel Bouis
Music: “Death” (from Dido and Aeneas) by Klaus Nomi mixed by Jeff Judd
www.rickowens.eu
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Highlights from the Collection
