“I’m a big fan of artifice,” Rick Owens once told me, in the midst of a far-too-long conversation about Marlene Dietrich, who we are both big fans of. She was, strangely, an inspiration for his Autumn/Winter 2026 collection – titled Tower, as in of strength, and Eiffel. That isn’t a very Owens-ian thing to reference, but Dietrich is something of a monument. You could clock her inference in sweeping fur coats, constructed from water-jet sliced circles of goat hide that mirrored her famous white swansdown coat with its 12-foot train, albeit in dusty, bruised pastels. A true Dietrich nut would connect those colours to her first appearance on film in the critically panned 1936 film The Garden of Allah, where she drifted through suspiciously Californian desert dunes in billowing chiffons. That Dietrich nut is me.
“Transforming yourself with rigour into something better than what was there before,” Owens said. “That is very admirable, and that’s honourable.” Owens is a maestro of transformation through clothes, of the body through silhouette, and of perspective. There’s also something strange about his continual perceptive preemptive abilities to create things (I don’t want to say ‘clothes’, because that seems a bit restrictive) that resonate soundly – as in his January menswear show, his opening a sequence of narrow wrapped dresses were executed in nail-blunting bull leather, or specially-woven Kevlar. Thick hides, and literal armour. Both things we need right now – but the spiralling crisis in the Middle East makes Owens’ decision, several months back, to weave that five-times-stronger-than-steel fabric in a luxurious mill in Como feel particularly prescient. A resilient, noble beauty, but one under attack. Tower, for Owens, actually connected to a personal mantra: temple of love, tower of light. “A prayer for love and hope,” Owens wrote. Then added, “And strength and protection.”
Would the legendarily spiky Dietrich recognise herself in Owens’ clothes? I highly doubt it. If she did, she certainly wouldn’t be happy. Dietrich’s vision of beauty was decidedly old-school – yanked-back face, pristine wig, panstick plastered – whereas Owens’ embraces its every description, oddity and mutation. Part of Owens’ Dietrich dialogue was her transition from the archetypical whiplash furred and sequinned femme fatale to dutiful, Légion d’honneur-awarded USO entertainer. Which is perhaps why, with fog machines a-pumping – a cheap trick he loves – Owens’ women marauded around the concrete bunker of the Palais de Tokyo basement, their reconstituted rags and combat gear lurching through smog. Guerillas, in the mist.
There is, however, always a paradoxical softness even when Owens is at his most harsh – teacup pot-bellies, rounded silhouettes, high pointed collars were blunted in down padding or Indian felt threaded with varicoses of pigment. Even that Kevlar wound up a bit cuddly. It’s something about Owens’ innate and personal niceness coming through. Another paradox is that the industrial heft of Owens clothes is often contradicted by its handcraft, of hand-crocheted knits, hand-tufted jackets, hand-tied macramé, stretching four kilometres and requiring 50 hours of work. Moving around the body, those reminded me of Dietrich’s hand-beaded, fringe-dripping evening gowns, mounted on flesh-coloured soufflé to idealise her imagined nudity.
Piled up into Owens’ pylon-like silhouettes, you lose some of that work – just as Marlene darling became a rose-tinted, vaseline-smeared mirage in her later years. But it sure looked beautiful as it blurred on by in the smoke, no mirrors.
