This summer marks the beginning of a season of major exhibitions where fashion is recontextualized—culturally, socially, and politically, offering an opportunity to discover, from prestigious galleries to renowned museums, the history behind the movements shaping our contemporary styles.
Since June 28 and until January 4, 2026, Paris’s Palais Galliera is hosting a major solo exhibition tracing the career of designer Rick Owens. Known for his post-apocalyptic style and the radical, sometimes unsettling, gothic-inspired silhouettes, Owens almost politically asserts the right to difference. Under the title Temple of Love, the exhibition invites understanding, openness, and aims to defy prejudice through over one hundred of his creations.
Paying Tribute to the Trailblazers of Punk Aesthetics
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Owens’s personal commentary punctuates the exhibition, immersing visitors in the roots of his influences and framing his battles within a clear historical continuum, beginning with the sculptural underground Californian scene of the 1930s, and continuing with the California punk movement of the 1970s and ’80s, extending into the decades that followed.
His contemporary aesthetic speaks to fans of dark wear while carrying a powerful message: in the heart of collapse, individuality is to be celebrated in both its strength and vulnerability.
The exhibition also reminds us that beyond the major fashion houses, influence can arise from independence and marginality.
It is worth noting that Rick Owens already made headlines at the June 2024 Fashion Week with his Spring-Summer 2025 show—a mystic-dystopian spectacle featuring 200 models clad in white silk.
Punk aesthetics and social rupture will also be at the center of the upcoming exhibition dedicated to Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, running from December 7, 2025, to April 19, 2026.
The announcement alone has created quite a buzz: on one side is English designer Vivienne Westwood, whose style was born from 1970s London punk, blurring the lines between fashion and activism as the stylist for the Sex Pistols, pioneering a subversive style that marked a cultural turning point. On the other is Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo, whose shapeless, colorless garments broke with Western fashion norms and shocked audiences since her 1981 debut show at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo. Despite their cultural contrast, comparing these two rebellious geniuses’ journeys offers rich insights.
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