We were drenched. Soaked by sweat, like nearly everyone across Europe, and further saturated by the spray that rose from the four streams of water shooting into the bright blue sky beside Rick Owens’s suspended metal runway. The runway stretched over the pool at the Palais de Tokyo, while the fountains appropriately formed a triumphal arch. Today Owens presented a show marked by intuitive fashion foresight and sharp insight.
Following Dior’s presentation the previous day, Owens adjusted his schedule after reviewing ominous weather forecasts, moving the show earlier to the morning. Even then, the light and heat remained relentless; we were handed umbrellas and chilled water to counter their effects. Backstage, Owens expressed concern about showcasing “black garments and heavy techno” at ten in the morning. The soundtrack featured an exclusive remix of “Girl in Bed” by Istanbul-based artist Sissy Misfit, a musician whose trans‑techno aesthetic Owens has long admired. From it he isolated and repeated what he described as the “most doomy and dramatic” loops.
When confronted with inevitable doom, tension tends to harden. In this collection Owens sought to apply his dark harmony to that tension. The collection’s clearest structural metaphor appeared in the tensegrity trousers, handcrafted by Straytukay from foam and latex. They resembled vaguely insectoid exoskeletons. In a pre‑show interview Owens explained that the concept drew on Buckminster Fuller’s idea of systems in which isolated components under compression are held within networks of continuous tension. He linked this to the human body and expanded it to the mind: “We feel like an architecture of tensions: it holds us together.” This notion defined the collection.
Training emerged as a coping strategy, reflected in Owens’s first collaborative designs with Adidas since 2013‑2017. The new shoes presented here included a loose ankle gaiter‑sock and a runner featuring a squishy, engorged sole. Owens described the shoe as an accessible, high‑performance technical running shoe, produced through Adidas’s expertise rather than being falsely attributed to his own brand. “I’m not a runner. Cardio was never a major part of my routine. I’m naturally slender, which allowed me to maintain a high metabolism. Moreover, I do not develop high‑performance running shoes because that is not my expertise,” he stated. The same philosophy applied to the Adidas Climacool technology incorporated into inflated jackets and shorts equipped with interior fans, first shown in Paris by Anrealage a few seasons earlier and originally derived from cooling systems used by Japanese workers in extreme heat. The fans expanded the Adidas looks into vaguely unsettling, mid‑apocalyptic Michelin‑man silhouettes.
Owens remarked, “Many aspects of what happens in Concordia strike me as ‘too art‑school, too fashion‑school, this is ridiculous.’ Yet I remind myself that within this context it is worth pursuing. Sometimes ideas seem absurd, but once they are realized I am grateful for the resolve to push forward with something so audacious.”
He added, “You must make this credible—though perhaps not the garment itself—but there must be an underlying idea that aligns with the rest of the collection and reflects the values I propose for consideration when you purchase a pair of my black shorts.”
Owens further noted that he now views his life as an athletic discipline: training, diet, energy management, and allocating “specific blocks of time” for peak performance. In his youth his focus was endurance: sewing through the night and reaching UPS before the morning shipping deadline. Trim jogging suits were crafted from technical poly‑cotton jersey, later transitioning to leather, flesh‑tone, and nude‑girdle fabrics knitted from recycled nylon in Germany and finished in Lombardy. Sports apparel merged with fetish wear, casting the body simultaneously as a pleasure machine and a workhorse.
Asserting authority was another theme. Removable leather epaulettes adorned coats and jackets made of silk‑cotton poplin from Como, alongside strong‑shouldered tailoring in compact silk crepe. Even when ostensibly under command, tension induced distortion. Cabans were exaggerated in recycled‑polyester duchesse. Sheer tank tops were fashioned from hand‑piped latex by Parisian rubber artisan Matisse Di Maggio. Latex capes originated from Florence‑based Druart of Torture Garden Latex in London.
Water from the fountains trickled down the latex as wearers progressed through the finale of this pleasurably intense, high‑performance Rick Owens show. The remainder of the audience sweated through it.
