Rick Owens stuns Paris Fashion Week with colossal show

After Louis Vuitton opened Paris Fashion Week Men with a majestic event, celebrating humankind with models of every possible skin colour, it was Rick Owens’s turn to make an impression on Thursday with an exceptional show, electrifying its audience with an inclusive message that was undoubtedly more authentic. The Mexico-born US designer presented his Spring/Summer 2025 collection with a show held on the forecourt of the Palais de Tokyo, featuring no fewer than 200 models, women and men of all shapes and sizes from all over the world, all of them dressed in white. A memorable event, ending with a final act that lasted over 10 minutes.
 

Rick Owens, back at the Palais de Tokyo after showing at its Parisian headquarters in place du Palais-Bourbon, made a huge statement, giving the fashion world one of those enduring moments it simply loves. It was a stunning procession, part Hollywood costume drama and part peace march, featuring scores of models/extras, who strode down the steps of the Palais de Tokyo’s immense Art Deco forecourt to the solemn rhythm of Beethoven’s 7th symphony.
 
The cast was divided in groups of 20 models, each clan wearing their own distinctive outfit, which seemed to either emerge from a distant past, or come from a galaxy far into the future. “The idea was to bunch them together, each group with a sort of uniform. Putting all these groups together seemed to be an appropriate message, illustrating what would be best for this world of ours, in the current situation,” Owens told FashionNetwork.com after the show.

In the collection’s introductory note, Owens said that “expressing our individuality is fine but, sometimes, manifesting our unity and our need to rely on one another is also a very good thing. Especially when we are witnessing a dramatic escalation of intolerance in the world right now.”
 
Rick Owens’s various clans marched on solemnly, some wearing maxi capes, others long see-through hooded tunics, others enveloped in long flowing mantles with pointy raised shoulders. Some wore masks, others were swathed in tight-fitting or draped garments. Suddenly, a group of models appeared on the forecourt’s topmost terrace, between the building’s huge columns, clad in a long tunic, their shoulders and upper body covered by a mini cape, a semi-circular golden tiara on their heads, like the priests and priestesses of an ancient religion.
 

The choreography hinted at the ‘United Nations of Rick Owens’. It was an incredible assemblage of highly diverse people, with different physiques, sizes, sex, skin colours and presumably also religion, which produced, on a runway show scale, a kind of summit meeting of all these different peoples. An impressive spectacle that caused a groundswell of emotion in the audience, especially when a woman arrived on stage perched high above a raft-like structure carried on the shoulders of 10 muscular men, brandishing a white flag with the image of two clasped hands. “The idea of that image came to me just a week ago. It suddenly seemed so obvious to me,” Owens told FashionNetwork.com.
 
Most of the models were fashion academy students, a deliberate choice by Owens in the spirit of inclusivity. “I always thought it wasn’t quite right that 90% of the models featuring in shows are stick thin, and only a few of them are chubby. Besides, last season I staged my show at home, with a small audience, excluding many people, like fashion students. This time I wanted everyone to take part,” said Owens.
 
Owens undoubtedly has a sense of the spectacular, and claimed that the show, which was entitled ‘Hollywood’, was heavily influenced by cinema. “I was mostly inspired by the history of cinema, especially the 1930s with their Art Deco sets, black and white movies, the sense of moral redemption and the way sin was portrayed in films of that era,” he said.
 
The décor, the characters and the setting were indeed a throwback to the big-budget costume dramas of the golden age of film, as well as to more recent sci-fi epics like Star Wars and Dune. And the looks were very Rick Owens, eminently suited to the genre, from the oversize sport tops with diagonal zip, to the satin blouses with maxi hoods layered over shorts and leggings, matched with high-heeled Plexiglas boots or giant sneakers.
 
Choosing white as the dominant colour was significant too. Though it was actually off-white, stripping this classic, highly symbolic colour of its references to purity, brilliance and candour by employing a range of different shades like ecru, chalk white, light beige and clay. Owens is an aficionado of black total looks, but he could never imagine an all-black procession. “It would have been too sinister. This really isn’t the time for it. I opted for sending a message of hope. I wanted something soft, gentle, full of love. Nowadays, we need dignity, elegance and sobriety,” he concluded.