The Palais Galliera show, curated by Alexandre Samson (who also oversaw the acclaimed “1997 Fashion Big Bang” in 2023, among other exhibitions), will feature designs from Owens’s years in Paris for his eponymous line, along with his work for Revillon (the heritage fur house that hired him in 2002, providing the impetus for his relocation), his collaboration with Fortuny (Venice being an essential part of his emotional and cultural map), and pieces from Los Angeles, where his aesthetic and his business were born in an Eastside studio across from his then partner, now wife Lamy’s restaurant, Les Deux Cafes. (Lamy’s LA wardrobe will be reproduced in the museum, as will the couple’s monolithic platform bed from that time—i.e., the bed that begat the designer’s made-to-order furniture line, now overseen by Lamy; Travis Scott has one.)

There will be hundreds of threadbare “spiderwebby” tees from those early years, as well as runway showstoppers (his Mad Max–meets–Madam Satan constructions of leather, silk, and jersey, all sharp-shouldered and sinuous, equal parts Brutalist and romantic), stripped down to their component parts. (“Can we not do the full looks?” Owens says he asked Samson. “This really quiets it down.”) There will be album covers by David Bowie, Klaus Nomi, and Iggy Pop, and a soundtrack that stretches from the Sisters of Mercy to Gustav Mahler. And there will be draped evening concoctions—Madame Grès goes to the moon?—that defy easy explanation or replication. (“Will I ever be able to do that again in my life?” Owens asks, without irony.) In a “Joy of Decadence” room with limited access for those with young’uns or the squeamish, there will be the life-size statue of the designer urinating that made its debut in Florence in 2006. For all its disparate elements, though, the intent of the show is to make clear Owens’s technical skills as a patternmaker, cutter, and draper, and to showcase his classical imagination.

“I want people who think they know Rick Owens to be surprised by his cultural side,” says Samson, “which is very rooted in French culture…. There is so much more to Rick Owens than transgression.”

Indeed: What Owens wants the public to take away from the exhibition is some notion of the “kindness” and “gentleness” that inform his designs—which, he feels, have been misread as everything from satanic to apocalyptic.

But to understand Rick Owens’s work, you have to perceive it through his gaze. When he unleashes 200 models and students walking in unison around the Palais de Tokyo, say, as he did a year ago for his seminal Hollywood men’s show, you have to see in those black-eyed hordes of towering dudes his embrace of the superfans who stand outside his show season on season. And when he chose to have models walk the runway carrying other models on their backs, as he did for women’s spring-summer 2016, you have to hear him questioning the relevance of the stiletto: “How can I use physicality in a new way?” he asks himself. “How can I do something spectacular without being wasteful?” The retrospective is, in a sense, an act of translation, meant to map his singular, remarkable journey from Hollywood club kid in tattered, survivalist mode to the kind of flaneur who visits church gardens with a toddler, admires the “grace” with which his wife navigates the world, and deeply misses his mom and dad.