Oct. 3, 2025

Rick Owens’
Tenacious Tenderness

WORDS ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN

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Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2026 collection.

Across the street from the Palais de Tokyo where Rick Owens stages his shows, the façade of the Musée Galliera is still adorned with three enormous statues wrapped in sequined fabric. Majestic and loaded with symbolism, they guard the retrospective marking his thirty years in fashion and serve as a reminder of his tenacity as a deeply nonconformist designer who has made it in the gilded salons of Paris. Watching his show unfold on Thursday evening, you couldn’t help but think of how he—and we, his industry—see the Rick Owens versus how someone who doesn’t know his mind would perceive his theatre. And how unique that dichotomy makes him in today’s social climate.

Models came down a giant industrial staircase erected in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo, from the balcony into the fountain, and walked through the water. They were dressed in sky-high platform ruched leather boots, bondage trousers, and pharaonic shoulder structures, their faces paled and their eyes covered in black contact lenses. “This whole Josephine-Baker-descending-the-staircase thing was so elegant and so cabaret. I’ve been meaning to do those stairs for years,” Owens said after the show, describing the show like one of those distinctly Parisian couture moments. When it comes to Owens, it’s all about ways of seeing.

To those who know his world, what might look dark and menacing to some looked sensual and sensitive: sheer fabrics swathed around the body, layered and sheathed with softness like something out of a boudoir dream. Gowns were draped softly like duvets falling off the body to reveal translucent second-skin bodies underneath. Capes embroidered with strands of leather evoked the plume of the loungewear wardrobe. Through the eyes of Owens and those who understand him, it was a kind of Old Hollywood high-octane glamour; soft and erotic. The soundtrack was a Jeff Judd remix of “Somebody to Love” by Basstrologe.

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“I wanted to do dainty and delicate for girls. I’ve never really done that. I wanted lingerie. I actually reached out to a lingerie collaborator in Paris. I kept layering sheer things on top of each other. It ended up really suppressing all the nudity,” he explained. “There are all those geometric seams on the body, and I thought, oh, I’m controlling veins and arteries on the body. That’s what I’m doing. It was a whole system in sheer tulle and lines. I was looking at these girls and it was very delicate and pretty, but there was also a steeliness to it, I thought, like all of that rigor and control. It was a steely sensuality.”

As Owens’ inimitable take on the season’s sleep- and loungewear theme, it was a visually complex collection which, in many ways, served to illustrate the divisions challenging the world at this moment in time. To frame it simply, if you try to understand where someone is coming from, you’ll see what they see: beauty, sensitivity, benevolence. Or, as Owens put it, tenacity: “Enduring hardships and discomfort gracefully is what tenacity is all about. We’re living through a very grotesque period and I thought tenacity would be the right message.”