Emerging from the void, Rick Owens’ SS26 army swept through the Palais de Tokyo like a procession of monastic gladiators, descending from scaffolding into water and transforming the runway into a site of ritual. Some dove in headfirst, reemerging soaked – garments clinging, reshaped, reframed. And with that, the water became a place of baptism, imbuing each look with new vulnerability and weight.
Owens called the collection Temple, after his retrospective Temple of Love, which opened immediately after the show at the Palais Galliera – just across the street, but conceptually across a universe. If the exhibition delves into the pursuit of “glamour and sleaze” that brought Owens improbably from Hollywood Boulevard to the museums of Paris, the runway offered its living, breathing altar: flesh, leather and fortified silhouettes. That meant Owens’ signature glamour-meets-apocalypse aesthetic found new form through raw leather jackets made in Hyogo, Japan, and revisited knitwear from early collaborator Terry-Ann Frencken. Elsewhere, voluptuously proportioned flight jackets and parkas rendered in silk taffeta or GRSC-certified industrial nylon canvas were paired with voluminous cotton shorts and padded, orthopedic velcro-strapped “burrito” sneakers.
Strapped in leather, wrapped in silk taffeta and that GRSC-certified nylon from Como, figures began to cling to the scaffold’s edge as the show progressed – tethered, suspended mid-air as if in purgatory. It seemed to form a portrait of the world right now – a world on the brink, teetering on the edge of catastrophe, just one misstep from disaster – but was navigated with the grace of a ballet dancer.
As things came to a close, Klaus Nomi’s Dido’s Lament played like a farewell to certainty. Yet this was not an ending. With slashed leathers, swollen silhouettes and drenched devotion, Temple didn’t mourn collapse – it elevated it. Owens conjured a vision of catastrophe dressed in reverence. And it felt like a prophecy.
Photography by Christina Fragkou.
