After staging last season’s intimate show at his home, Rick Owens wrote in today’s Spring/Summer 2025 show notes that he “felt bad about making attendance so restricted.” So this time around, at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (a frequented venue by the designer), he decided to open up his fashion-week spectacle to the masses. “I asked all the fashion schools in Paris to send us students and faculty, men or women, who would like to walk in [the show],” he said. The result was a runway filled with just 10 looks worn by 200 total models, forming what he called his “white satin army of love.”
The collection’s name, “Hollywood,” offered a tribute to the Los Angeles “boulevard of vice” where Owens found his people — “flaming creatures” and “weirdos and freaks,” he called them. His sartorial depiction of those character tropes appeared entirely in heavenly off-white hues, despite the “lurid sin” and “redeeming morality” they might otherwise possess.
To the strums of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 Allegretto, Owens’ fashion brigade communicated a message of universalism. Longtime Owens muse and designer Tyrone Dylan Susman opened the show in a sculptural, chiffon coat, boasting strong opaque shoulders, a deep V-neck and a sheer body that revealed trashed gym shorts. Behind him, a legion of the designer’s eclectic models were draped in the same garment.
Jackets and capes were made with narrow-loomed denim, which was treated in an Italian washhouse that makes smaller batches to reduce water waste and employs a water purifying process that allows for recycling. Eggshell-colored biker jackets, meanwhile, donned cowhide tanned with only vegetal and natural tannins in Solofra and Tuscany, and silk gazar woven jumpsuits were constructed with GOTS-certified natural silk. Between his dedicated materials and the brevity of his collection, it was clear that Owens had the environment at the top of his mind while designing.
Dafne Balatsos, who has worked with Owens for the last 25 years, designed a selection of silk charmeuse robes from the remaining stock of the now-closed Oriental Silks store on Hollywood’s Beverly Boulevard. In the brand’s early days, Balatsos would run to the hushed outpost to pick up a few meters of the fabric for Owens’ collections. With two-and-a-half decades under her belt (and a much larger budget), her work came full circle.
Poised acrobats later cascaded down the historic venue’s steps, frozen in contortionist positions atop a conical wooden structure that was held up by several models. The spectacle—the “Gymnast Bouquet,” as Owens called it—nodded to the women holding other women in the brand’s Spring/Summer 2016 Cyclops show.
200 models later, Owens show left showgoers in a trance: where his presentation might have felt like something out of the Ancient Roman Empire, his pointed message felt necessary in the contemporary: “Expressing our individuality is great but sometimes expressing our unity and reliance on each other is a good thing to remember too,” Owens concluded. “Especially in the face of the peak intolerance we are experiencing in the world right now.”
See Rick Owens’ Spring/Summer 2025 collection in the gallery above.
