Paris has been broiling all week, and Rick Owens was aware of this. For his Spring 2027 menswear show, he moved the start time from midday to 10 a.m. Temperatures during Fashion Week reached nearly 108°F (42°C). Still, guests sat on black metal benches that had been baking in the sun since dawn, holding umbrellas and bottles of iced water. Nobody looked comfortable. Characteristically, Owens looked like himself – all dark geometry, black coat, and platform boots – as though the weather were somebody else’s problem.
He had staged the show at the Palais de Tokyo‘s reflecting pool before. This time, jets of water shot up alongside the suspended metal runway, drenching the models during the finale. The fountains formed a kind of triumphal arch overhead. On a day like this, the rest of us could only be jealous.
The collection is called STONE. Set against a backdrop of global uncertainty and growing social tension, it explores a fundamental question about protection. But, being Owens, the answer was never simple. For Spring 2027, his vision probed the human psyche in moments of crisis – the idea that, when faced with the threat of collapse, we tense up and become rigid. He worked from there.
The concept of tensegrity, introduced by architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s, served as a conceptual pillar of the collection. Based on the balance between compression and tension, this structural principle mirrors the mechanics of the human body. The most literal translation came in the form of tensegrity chaps. Longtime collaborator Straytukay worked foam and latex into cage-like structures that resembled bone and connective tissue – compression and tension, the exact mechanism by which a body holds itself together under pressure. They resembled the exoskeletons of large, unhurried insects.
The atmosphere was not easy. Long black polyester capes swallowed thin figures whole. Models navigated staircases in Frankenstein boots, followed by a slanted ramp over the water. The overarching theme was processing menace, and there may be nothing more menacing than the current climate.
This is also where the Adidas collaboration came in. After a decade apart — the last joint collection was released in 2017 – the duo is back for Spring 2027 with performance gear that is equally bizarre and cutting-edge. The partnership introduced a new, high-performance, yet accessible, technical running shoe, which is scheduled for release in 2027. adidas’s Climacool technology was also integrated directly into the collection. Inflatable jackets and shorts with internal fans were designed to function as personal cooling systems when paired with ice vests. The goal is to lower a runner’s core body temperature before competition. In a city averse to air conditioning, Owens brought the cooling system onto the body itself. The jackets inflate into enormous, vaguely unsettling silhouettes – somewhere between a Michelin Man and a hazmat suit.
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Owens was candid about his own relationship to athletic performance. “Cardio was never a big thing for me,” he said backstage. “I’m naturally kind of skinny, so I was able to get away with a high metabolism.” Yet he has come to treat his life as a form of athletic discipline, guarding his energy, training, and assigning blocks of time for peak focus. The most quietly radical gesture in the show may have been the smallest: the accessible running shoe engineered not as a luxury item, but as a tool.
The rest of the collection moved between the austere and the genuinely beautiful. Second-skin t-shirts with a zipper up the spine sat alongside strong-shouldered coats and platform leather boots. Safari jackets with an industrial edge appeared next to Dracula-collar blousons. Sheer tank tops were hand-piped in latex by Matisse Di Maggio; each piece required more than thirty-five hours and four hands to complete. Silk duchesse, which could be woven only on antique looms capable of producing twenty-five meters of fabric per day, was used for caban jackets. The contrast between that kind of painstaking craftsmanship and inflatable nylon cooling systems seemed to be the real point of the show: pressure held in place by two opposing forces.
Alongside the countless elements that comprise Owens’s recognizable style – a cool color palette built around black, white, and cream tones; sculptural forms; and balloon silhouettes – one particular element stood out: removable leather epaulets perched on coats and jackets. Owens called them symbols of authority. Airline pilots wear them. Cruise captains wear them. The implication is that someone needs to take command right now.
Whether the show fully delivered on its ambitions is another matter. The intellectual framework was rich: tensegrity, climate catastrophe, Buckminster Fuller, and the body as architecture under siege. However, a concept still has to produce a feeling in the room, no matter how compelling it is. What Owens gave us was austere and intelligent, occasionally thrilling and occasionally oppressive. Which may have been entirely the point.
