Rick Owens Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection
When Rick Owens presented his men’s collection back in January, he problematized the “enforcement energy that’s surrounding us.” At the time, it was anti-immigrant actions in Minnesota that were worrying. A month-and-a-half later, there’s a whole new conflagration in Iran and the wider Middle East to anguish over. Fashion’s place in a world in profound crisis is a puzzle for designers and those that follow them to fret over. Often they speak of joy and their role in providing it. Owens prefers to resist. “I was thinking about rising to the occasion; I was thinking that how you respond to threat defines character,” he said.
Talk of war has been almost absent in formal designer interviews, even though it’s topic number one in casual conversations this week. In that uncanny way of his, Owens seems to have anticipated the moment, developing a fall collection of ferocious glamour and sending it out at the Palais de Tokyo on a warrior woman tribe that conjured thoughts of terraformers on distant planets or road warriors in the Mad Max movies of old: their clothes the muddy, dunny colors of earth, swaddled and enveloping in place of straight lines, and practical though only up to a point. Owens prefers shorts to miniskirts, but he’s still got a fetish for extravagant boots; with all their snaps and pockets, it’s tempting to call them tactical, but then, of course, there are the towering heels.
In fact, it was Marlene Dietrich who played Owens’s muse this season. He said he admired her life’s arc, from sexual provocateur to wartime hero—the actress volunteered for USO tours, traveling to Algeria and across Europe to sing to the troops—to steely cabaret act. Dietrich’s iconic swansdown jacket was the inspiration for Owens’s spectacular goat hair coats; with their engulfing proportions they were the biggest furs by a mile in a season positively swimming in them.
Owens claimed he is in his own cabaret era, late career with more behind him than ahead. Not that you’d ever guess that, what with his boundary pushing materials (kevlar for strapless column dresses, mantles with collars that pushed past the ears constructed from marbled felt made in Rajasthan from Himalayan wool) and with his commitment to his avant garde collaborators. Figa Link, aka the Berlin based artist Bernardo Martins, was responsible for the shaggy wigs and millipede eyelashes in black or pink. “There’s been punk rock, there’s been glitter rock, there’s exaggeration, there are clothes that reject the status quo by creating something grotesque or mocking it,” Owens said. “I just missed that kind of energy.”
