Rick Owens: Temple of Love

During this past men’s fashion week in Paris a major retrospective of the work of the American fashion designer Rick Owens opened at the Palais Galliera museum of fashion, titled “Temple of Love.” In case you cannot make it to the exhibit, Owens put out a new book with the same title, published by Rizzoli. 

The 200-page volume follows a similar format to the two previous Rick Owens volumes, with a black and white jacket and simple cardboard cover, which reflects Owens’s brutalist sensibility, cardboard being the concrete of paper. The book contains a mixture of photographs and essays. The essays open with a characteristically chaotic, all-id foreword from the rock musician Courtney Love, Owens’s first celebrity client, before moving on to the stately and well-researched piece, “A Rebours” (roughly, “against the grain,” after the deliciously subversive 1884 novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans that was an early inspiration for Owens in his hometown of Porterville), by Alexandre Samson, the exhibition’s curator, and is absolutely worth a read.

But who am I kidding, most people are here for the pictures, and they deliver. The images offer a mix of Owens’s early history and the looks that were assembled for the exhibition, shot by Luke Mayes, a multi-hyphenate at OWENSCROP and an early StyleZeitgeist forum member. Unlike the slick and sterile photos of Danielle Levitt that featured in the previous two Rick Owens books, Mayes’s shots show both his love for and connection to the clothes and an eye for composition. There are also his runway shots mixed in throughout, and the book ends with some of the most epic show moments Owens put on at Palais de Tokyo, a burning pyre, a Thomas Houseago dirt ravine, and the epic scaffolding Owens had built for his SS18 men’s show, titled “Dirt.” Overall, the book is a good summary of Owens’s work and will make a worthy addition to your fashion library.

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Rick Owens: Temple of Love, published by Rizzoli (200 pages, $57.50) is out now.

All images courtesy of the publisher.