Rick Owens. Men's Fall/Winter 2026, 2027 - Paris Fashion Week.

Rick Owens has always played around with uniform looks, be it from militarist styles, though to mountaineering outdoor esque arrays of the last 24 years.  While, encapsulating his doomsday cultish elements, or that boulevard of broken dreams necromantic, after the heyday of the counterculture years came to an abrupt end in 1989.  Including that inevitable collapsed state of being.  In other words, the final outcome for all of us, being death.  And, I have said numerous times, as the years have rolled on, Owens has held the independent line, as one of the last of the independent Fashion designers remaining in 2026, he has not evolved his styles, but rather, drawing from his own timeline, to redefine what he had already created.  So, his collections don't feel new, just revamped.  As though Owens is on a constant reset.  But, alas, nothing can remain static forever.

And the dystopian Avant-garde trend of 2000 through to 2018, of artisan styled distressed leather jackets, symmetrically cut draped tops, in all black, with its astronomical pricing, which not only priced out the buyer, but in an inflation based economy, which shows no signs of abating, also priced out the designers.  Replaced by the conglomerate funded modernist styles, which became more of a trend leading up to the 2020 pandmeic (and thereafter), and that Avant-garde coolness of a society in decline, may never be reinvigorated on the runway again, by the sheer fact, we're now all living in a Fascist dystopia, without being dressed in those dark futurist styles, as a complementing flair of societal ruin.  Can Owens continue to represent this reflective dystopic simulacra? 

Living in Paris since 2002, with his wife Michèle Lamy, somewhat away from the recent turmoil of America, yet ever so close to the political and social turmoil that could break out in Paris again, which occurred throughout 2025.  Owens use of smoke machines has been a steady fixture since his Libo, Venice days in 2020, when he and Lamy retreated to the beaches of Libo, during the pandmeic, the billowing smoke seems to becoming more engulfing on the runway.  Either representing a cleansing element of being reborn, as I have noted in previous Owens shows, or currently reflecting the massive amount of tear gas authorities have been using in America on anti-immigration protesters. To which, CS gas has known carcinogens. Owens runway smoke is of course non toxic, with a notes of Sage, portraying the cleansing aspect to be the motivation or a paradoxical infusion of what smoke can also be used for, disorientation. 

Owens Fall 2026 collection, is more aligned with the darker military imprint from prior collections, albeit with a serious, and more insulated, intense tone.  And as mentioned, this is not new, nor innovating for Owens, as his prophetic aesthetics are now becoming a reality.  It has to be said, that doomsday is not a prestaged costume show.  

It's already here.

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(A.Glass 2026)