When you call a fashion collection Tower, it’s inevitable thoughts punt to the ivory sort, to designers luxuriously detached from reality, neo-Neros fiddling with their taffeta while Rome (or, in this case, Paris) burns. That isn’t Rick Owens. He’s an undeniable dark fantasist, sure, but he’s also rooted in the (often equally-dark) realities of the now. “The world around us is impossible to ignore,” he said, ahead of his Autumn/Winter 2026 collection. “The only way to go is parody.”
Was there parody here? Maybe, though you weren’t smiling as Owens’ sinister figures lurched through a fog so pea-soup thick it rendered them stark grey outlines, menacing nightmare apparitions so distorted as to appear inhuman. Towering, indeed, was the word. Most were hiked up to boogie man proportions on viciously pointed platform boots in tough leathers and wool felt a clear quarter-inch thick, buckled straps batoning down these clothes tightly over the body. This wasn’t like armour, it was armour – a bunch were made of stab-proof Kevlar, incongruously woven by an Owens supplier in Como, where all that faffy taffeta usually comes from.
Were these aggressors, protectors or victims – Kevlar-armoured to attack, or for self-defence? That much was never clear – they, and we, were left literally and metaphorically in the dark. A few stumbled on the way. They’re only human. And that humanistic aspect was something that’s fascinating, an idea you often think about when an Owens freak show rolls into town. I used the term ‘freak’ as something of a compliment, as I know Owens does too. And members of Owens’ army of misfits are amongst the sweetest, gentlest people you’ll ever meet – including this pussycat of a designer himself. His clothes too can look so hard and aggressive and shockingly new, yet are often gentle to the touch and couched in an awesome, awe-inspiring knowledge of where fashion comes from. Don’t trust a book, yadda yadda yadda.
The alien-ness of the familiar in this show was also something that got you thinking. Owens’ frayed-bottom jean shorts in pale chambray blue were pocked with texture, resembling plucked chicken skin genetically spliced with denim. You were squinting in the mist to make out what they were made from. And obscurity also extended to elaborate, vaguely extravagant Rapunzel-ean headpieces of macramé strands hanging down to completely hide models’ features, hand-crafted by London designer Lucas Moretti. Meanwhile, when Owens’ models swapped their towering boots for paper-thin rubber-toed plimsoles, they somehow looked weirder still. Owens doing ordinary is something that catches you off guard. But of course, there’s nothing ordinary about it at all.
Which is a fitting metaphor for this un-ordinary moment, where we all feel like we’re flailing in a morass, where figures like politicians and law enforcement have become harbingers of threat rather than beacons of reassurance, instigating chaos rather than bringing calm. And where, perhaps, it’s become part of a fashion designer’s job to provide a degree of societal succor rather than fantasia from on high. If that is indeed the case, Owens may be the very best we’ve got.
