Rick Owens. Fall/Winter 2026 womens - Paris Fashion Week

 

Rick Owens "doomsday witches" told you so.  Correct?   As also noted with his Spring/Summer 2026 collection, where the oracle has become more prolific, be it the feminine power of intuition and her projection of clarity, when the mind is stable.  And for this, ritual is so important, to which Owens's steadfast showings over the years, particularly since 2020, when the whole world went into lockdown via a pandemic, and Owens with his wife Michèle Lamy retreated to Libo, Venice.  Thus, began the more doomsdayish of presentations, although it was already part of his ethos, of his recent collections evolved smoke machines, sobre and prophetic attributes, with those void like contact lenses worn specially by the female models.  with their layered, protective, stylized clothing, defiant against Christo-Fascist control.  Five years later, this ritualised theme continues on in Paris, France. 

And yes, we all could be at that 11th hour, with global fascism in overdrive, as the late comedian George Carlin once said,  it, "fascism" will not come with jackboots, but rather with 'smiling face t-shirts and sneakers', he was, in a visualizing prophecy, correct.  With wars, that are now in line with the Far Right version of Total War, countries, namely Israel and America, are now resorting to annihilation to change regimes, gone are the days of post-neoconservative surgical strikes of the George Bush era.  Even scarier, with Christian/Judean end-of-world old testament rhetoric officials controlling their war machines, we can very well ask the questions.  Are we getting closer to nuclear war.  More importantly; how did we let this happen?

And what is equally alarming, which ties in within these potent questions, and one has to be honest, as that we lack societally, a counterculture buffer for our reactive protests against Fascism, in other words, what is happening today globally is bad, if not worse than what it was in the 1970s and 1980s at the height of the Cold War and Far Right incursions into our lives.  Gen Z, who is leading the charge in global protests, are struggling to maintain a cohesiveness, beyond global rejection of the status quo.

Yet, Rick Owens is essentially a Baby Boomer, and at the age of 64, he has one of the most interesting backstories of a fashion designer, showing up as a last gasp for fame pre the 2000s and late 1990s, he did indeed grasp onto a sure thing, moving to Paris in 2002 with his wife Michèle Lamy, a once L.A. darling and entrepreneur, now in her late 80s, with both of them sharing a fascinating 1970s counterculture history, particularly Lamy with her Studio 54 - esque late 70s resonation,  which offers an insight into longevity, particularly when the fashion industry can knock you out in less than 5 years.

Owens within his 20 year timeline, while setting the tone for the Rick Owens signature label, has covered every element of the bygone countercultures,all wrapped up in his unique doomsday, gothic, cult like persona, saying, "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..." further eluding for his Fall/Winter 2026/27 collection, that he had, "... missed that kind of energy."  To which, Owens latest array is a remodeling, as he has done numerous times, of his own backlog, be it his punk, glitter, and gothic exaggerations, within a backdrop of runway necromancers, seen as doomsday orcles, that not only warned us pre and post 2020, but may also offer all of us a solution, to offset these end-of -days.

Are we willing to listen? 

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(A.Glass 2026)