“I’ve always believed that a meme can sometimes say more about contemporary culture than a thousand-word article,” says Rick Dick, the daring meme-maker who recently went viral for his AI-generated images of Dua Lipa’s wedding.
Jacob Elordi as a Chanel mermaid. Pope Leo XIV clad in Schiaparelli haute couture. Leonardo DiCaprio as a Victoria’s Secret angel, wings included.
The daring, enigmatic meme-maker Rick Dick, whose first name is Riccardo (he does not share his last name), has been entertaining the fashion corners of the internet since he started posting on Instagram in 2017. Back then, he would make collages and inventive images in Photoshop that were niche in their humor but spoke to the fashion community—say, Bella and Gigi Hadid wearing Zaha Hadid buildings as skirts. In 2022, he started investigating the capabilities of AI, and the visuals became bolder—King Charles III wearing Barbie pink, and a zombie version of the late Karl Lagerfeld, both at the Met Gala. His following and reach steadily grew, but he was still somewhat of an insider’s secret. And then Dua Lipa got married.dua
“It really feels like a movie,” said an X user alongside four images featuring Lipa and Turner, whose wedding was in Italy this past weekend. The visuals feature the couple eating pasta out of a pot, drinking an Aperol spritz with Charli xcx and Donatella Versace, and dancing with a signora.
Despite how public their London civil wedding was, and how many paparazzi seemed to have photographed their welcome party on Friday evening, there have been no images released from Lipa and Turner’s ceremony and reception on Saturday. Instead, the images that circulated on X over the weekend, which some users seemed to have confused for the real thing, were created by Rick Dick using AI and posted as memes. The public interest in the wedding and the lack of content thrust Rick Dick to the forefront of the zeitgeist this week.
“I’ve spent most of my life working with images in one form or another,” Riccardo tells me via email. (He does not speak English, and I don’t speak Italian. Thus, this interview made us digital pen pals. His answers have been translated.) He started with graphic design, then digital manipulation, and now AI. “What I do today sits somewhere between fashion, pop culture, visual art, and satire,” he says. “I like occupying that space where people aren’t quite sure whether they’re looking at a campaign, a meme, or an artwork.”
The magic behind the work of Rick Dick, who is from Maremma, a rural area in Tuscany, and is in his forties, is the synergy between his skill for composing an image and his savviness for identifying the right moment. “The projects that resonate most tend to be the ones that sit right on the edge between familiarity and impossibility,” he says, “where people aren’t quite sure whether to laugh, believe, or look twice.”
