Rick Owens is a mood—a sound as much as a look. Sometimes his clothes are a seduction, other times, they’re an assault. The same collection can conjure the dance floor at Berghain, with messy S&M cuts and weathered leather, and a grand opera, with dust-colored gowns draped like classic Madame Grés from the 1930s. Owens, who grew up in a devoutly Catholic family in Porterville, California, started his label in Los Angeles, in 1994, with his life partner, Michèle Lamy. Music has been key to their every collection and side project, including the couple’s Brutalist furniture, which is exhibited in galleries and sold as fine art. Owens named his signature leather biker’s jacket after the Stooges, his maxed-out take on Converse after the Ramones, and often collaborates with musicians, like the queer rapper Zebra Katz and radical drag artist Christeene.
This week, a monumental exhibition of Owens’ life and work opens at the Palais Galliera, in Paris. Titled “Temple of Love,” after a song by Sisters of Mercy, the exhibition includes over 100 outfits he’s made over the last three decades, along with videos and mementos from his personal archive. And, of course, the music that’s influenced him. Below, Owens discusses how his life and work always comes with a soundtrack.
The exhibition title comes from a song by a 1980s English rock band. What made that particular track so significant?
I had used another of their songs, “Lights,” for the Strobe [men’s Fall-Winter] show in 2022. Shoes and music are the starting points to build every collection, because both take so long to create. With the music, I like to ease people into the show. It has to be meditative, and then something close to ecstatic or [a] resolution at the end.
I had reached out to Andrew Eldritch of the band about using “Lights” because it had meant a lot to me when I was younger. He had been reluctant to, because he never liked the production on it, and it’s from such a long time ago. But we did a rapturous mix which played over the most ridiculous collection, shown with huge Egyptian-style helmets that had Dan Flavin kind of lights on the top. So over the top and camp, but delicious.
When we were working on the exhibition in Paris, I was invited to do something to the façade of the museum, and I was going to wrap the statues in front of the museum, but it felt rude to do that—and also awkward during wartime. So, I have put sequin slip covers on them. They will look art deco. The working title for them was “The Sisters of Mercy” because they look like stoic nuns. The name stuck, then I thought… Temple of Love.
For the exhibition, you recreated the bedroom you shared with Lamy on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990s, around the time you started the brand. The bed looks like a pagan altar. What music was playing in that room back then?
Sisters of Mercy, of course. And a lot of Marlena Dietrich, Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed.
The really dark Lou Reed? Like the album Berlin, with the candlelight, Dubonnet on ice, drugs, suicide, and children screaming?
Oh yes. We played “Sad Song” from that album a lot. And all of Coney Island Baby, blasting out on cassette. That room was also the first place we made furniture together.
How else has music shaped your environment?
There are three black and white album covers that I’ve always loved as a triptych and have on my wall: The Idiot by Iggy Pop, Klaus Nomi, and Heroes by David Bowie. I love the way Iggy is pointing one way and Bowie the other, and there’s Nomi in the middle in his Bauhaus monochrome look. I took a photograph of the covers together, in my office, and made a print, which came out with a wonderful white streak across it. That’s going into the catalogue for the show.
I’m putting the graphic on five or ten pieces this week for the [Spring/Summer 2026 men’s] runway show. We don’t have the rights to the images, but they fit so well with the collection. We probably can’t sell them, but I’ll just give them away as gifts.
What’s your workout music?
I’m listening to a lot of Brutalismus 3000 to work out to right now, and a track by Basstrologe from 2021, which samples “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane. Also “Girl, so confusing” by Charli xcx. I follow Anne Imhof on Instagram, and she used “365” featuring Shygirl on a post about rehearsals for her show in LA, and it was really good. So, I thought—am I missing something? If Charli is good enough for Anne Imhof, she’s good enough for me.
What’s your make-out music?
Always disco.
Will there be a soundscape in the exhibition?
When you first walk in, you’ll hear me reading from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, which was one of the first books I read from my dad’s library. I needed exoticism growing up and that was where I found it. I’m reading it out in French as part of the audio guide. I have been asking myself recently: What would enrich my life? I’m never going to buy a yacht. So, I decided to learn French because learning something is enriching, and also, it’s a gesture to Paris and to thank the city for letting me have the show.
Anyway, for my audio guide, I recite from my favorite part of the book, when the hero Jean des Esseintes is describing Gustave Moureau’s paintings of Salome and how “under the friction of her jangling necklaces, her nipples harden.” Extraordinarily, that line isn’t in the English version of the book. Everything else was translated word for word, but not that. So, I’ve changed literary history by reading it in French but also in English, murmuring to you as you walk around the first room of the show.
I have always loved the Oscar Wilde play and the Strauss opera about Salome. We have paintings on loan from the Moreau museum for the exhibition. Later, when you get to the room with the statue of me pissing, you’ll hear Montserrat Caballé singing the aria from Samson et Dalila.
You once said you’d love Cher to play you in a biopic. Is she still the ultimate pop star for you?
She’s so underrated. I listen to a lot of the old stuff. She did an album called Bittersweet White Light in 1973 which is all old standards, like “The Man That Got Away”, and they are all extravagantly orchestrated, and camp, but also really earnest, on par with Judy Garland. Rapturous and moving.
Your fashion shows often have a ritual quality to them. Is the music a part of that?
It’s only recently I’ve started to use music that I once considered sacred. I switched out pounding techno for Mahler’s Symphony No.5 for a show on the day Ukraine was invaded. It’s such an important piece of music, but I didn’t feel I had the authority to use it until then. And it suited the day. Instead of being manipulative, it felt soothing.
I also used Bowie’s “Warszawa” for the Porterville show I did in my house last February, working with people who are really committed to an aesthetic—latex boots by Straytukay in London, rubber garments with Matisse di Maggio, and shoes by Leo Prothman. Using the music felt sincere and not overstepping things. I wouldn’t have done that before. And because of this retrospective, I’ve allowed myself to be sentimental and nostalgic, and consider all the elements that got me to where I am.
