Rick Owens is very sorry about making his shows last season so intimate and exclusive. If we recall, Owens traditionally took over Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for his large-scale shows but his last few shows took place in his atelier on Place du Palais-Bourbon. A designer who always thought big, Owens used these shows to display a more delicate side to his futuristic designs. But he’s over it now, according to the show notes of his SS25 show. He got it out of his system. Next stop: Hollywood.

While his last collections were titled Porterville, after the hometown that Owens despised, this SS25 show was titled Hollywood and served as a evocation of the bombastic and larger-than-life reality that Owens faced when he finally escaped Porterville. Battalions of models, including students and faculty from local Parisian fashion schools, marched in formation around the Palais de Tokyo’s central plaza. One outfit would appear twenty times across these groups of five by five as they evoked that classic era of Hollywood, pre-code and epic. 

The outfits ranged from chiffon hooded shawls that bellowed in the wind to frayed gym shorts paired with padded bicep guards, Ancient Egyptian-like headpieces to knitted gimp masks. In a bold move, the entire collection was rendered in whites, creams and taupes, which begged the question: could fashion’s Prince of Darkness actually be lightening up?