Rick Owens Spring 2026 Menswear Collection
Immediately after this outstanding all-standing show, the especially dressy Rick Owens crowd headed up through the Palais de Tokyo and entered the “Temple of Love.” This is the name of the excellent new Rick Owens retrospective that opened at the Palais Galliera tonight. As well as some beautiful displays of his many-splendored runway résumé, it also contains a life-size sculpture of the designer emitting a stream of liquid almost as forceful as the jets of water that were part of this evening’s finale.
Inveigling Owens to discuss his collections can be as challenging as catching smoke, and this evening he was at his most elusive: the retrospective had made him introspective. “The exhibition summons up thoughts of mortality, of decline, and of death… I’m always kind of conscious that I live a weird life, with excess validation. Because you want to be heard, and I have been heard. But then there are times when I get really cranky, and I think, ‘you’re so spoiled. You have nothing to get gloomy or huffy about.’”
Owens later seemed to fret that the urgent creative angst that generated that work in the Galliera was increasingly smothered by a blanket of contentment. Then he alluded to an unease at being so opposed to “voracious consumption,” yet through his vocation also an agent of it. We were about to divert into a discussion about window frames (I told you he was elusive), before I made one last attempt to pin this Porterville butterfly down: how would he elevator pitch tonight’s collection? “Sleek, reckless, elegant sleaze. Elegant sleaze, that’s kind of my thing.”
That précis and the ponderings that preceded it were the deep and shallow ends, respectively, of the pool of thought behind this show and collection. After so many seasons of showing his menswear in the Palais de Tokyo, Owens finally took the dive to have his models walk through the fountain in its Seine-facing courtyard. The models started out above the water on a scaffold, before climbing down and wading in. Each man as he walked would at some point pause, and then fall forward, immersing himself fully. They then rose from the depths and carried on, drenched.
The carabiners harnessed to some of the models were not, even if they could have been, part of the collection. Instead they were there to secure their wearers to that scaffold at a finale that saw them arranged across it in a grand mise-en-scène flanked by those jets of water. Amongst all this baptism, drama, and spectacle, some finer points in the collection were inevitably swept away. One deep v-neck black vest seemed to be illustrated with Owens birth star chart, while a white hoodie was screen printed with a photo of some urinals. There were two sequin dresses whose dry clean only labels will be forever void.
Nylon, denim, silk taffeta, leather, and flesh were the main materials at play: Owens sliced shorts, cropped and frayed jackets, and unzipped tranches of biker in order to present sections of skin beneath. Fringed leather cloaks sat on their wearers like tattered wings. Dracula collared long bikers encrusted with drab embroideries of bouclé-looking sequins created especially impressive human-borne waterfalls when raised from the depths of the fountain.
Back in that retrospective-introspection chat, Owens’s leisurely nagging at his own intimations of mortality (“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”) had prompted me to wonder: had he ever considered taking a sabbatical? “No!” Owens replied, startled: “Because what else would I do?”
