Rick Owens Went All Hollywood For Spring-Summer 2025

For a few seasons now, much of the fashion conversation has revolved around the concept of quiet luxury and understatement. Fashion, in general, would be less ostentatious; with sober clothes and smaller-scale runway shows that would be smaller in scale.

Pieter Mulier set a precedent when he invited a small gathering of press and buyers to his Antwerp penthouse apartment for an intimate Maison Alaïa show. In Paris, Rick Owens also scaled back from the monumental spaces of Palais de Tokyo to his own apartment on Place Bourbon for both his men’s and women’s shows.

This wasn’t the first time Owens had shown at home or nearby. During the pandemic, he stayed close to his apartment on Venice’s Lido beach, unveiling his collections to a worldwide audience also at home.

For SS25, Owens returned to the plaza outside Palais de Tokyo. "After showing in the house last season, I felt bad about making attendance so restricted," he wrote in the show notes. "So this time around I wanted to welcome everyone."

Last season’s collection, named "Porterville" after Owens' stiflinghometown, which he eventually ran away from, continued his autobiography-through-fashion with "Hollywood," inspired by "the boulevard of vice I gleefully ran to, to find my people, weirdos, and freaks, living in a world Lou Reed described in Walk on the Wild Side."

Owens referenced cult figures like Peter Berlin, and directors Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger; the latter also penned Hollywood Babylon, a compendium of the juiciest gossip of old Hollywood.

The show format echoed Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 blockbuster Cleopatra, featuring a cast of thousands—or more precisely, 200 models who walked the catwalk in groups of ten, including one human pyramid. Each group was dressed in identical looks.

"I asked all the fashion schools in Paris to send us students and faculty, men or women, who would like to walk in this white satin army of love." Amateur models joined professionals, as well as old friends like Jakob Jakobsson, who opened the second-ever Rick Owens show in New York 22 years ago, and Allanah Starr, a grande dame of the trans community.

This was not a quiet or discreet show; it was one of the most bombastic fashion spectacles ever seen on earth. Tacky, yes, but also touching and real. It was incredibly diverse, reaching for intimacy in a different way. Like the best Hollywood movies, there was spectacle, but also a moving and authentic story at its heart.

"Expressing our individuality is great," said Owens, "but sometimes expressing our unity and reliance on each other is a good thing to remember, too. Especially in the face of the peak intolerance we are experiencing in the world right now." 

Courtesy: Rick Owens

Text: Jesse Brouns