Dear Shaded Viewers,
Rick Owens’ FW26 Tower collection is built around three gravitational poles – the Kevlar tailoring, the macramé tower gowns, and the Dietrich‑coded goat‑hair coats – each one a different way of asking how a body can be both barricade and beacon.
The Kevlar tower sheaths and outerwear move like a thesis on contemporary fear: straight, unbending silhouettes that refuse flattery yet radiate a perverse elegance. The fact that this Kevlar, five times stronger than steel, is traditionally used in body armor charges every step with the memory of real‑world impact; these are clothes that have already seen the news before they hit the runway. Cut into glossy columns or layered via cropped jackets over elongated vests, the tailoring doesn’t just suggest protection, it performs it, turning the wearer into an architectural presence rather than a decorative one. In these looks, Owens frames self‑defence as a form of spiritual structure – a temple built from seams and darts instead of stone.
The hand‑tied macramé tower gowns feel like the collection’s quietest yet most radical gesture: garments whose extravagance lies not in excess material but in excess time. Each one, requiring thousands of metres of waxed cord and more than fifty slow, repetitive hours, hangs on the body like a suspended web of concentration, an exoskeleton of patience. Their openwork construction leaves skin visible in slivers and negative space, insisting that vulnerability is built into the armour, not concealed by it. In a season obsessed elsewhere with surface spectacle, Owens’ macramé reads instead as resistance – a tactile reminder that the most subversive luxury now is the human hand refusing to speed up.
If Kevlar gives Tower its severity and macramé its spirituality, the long‑hair goat coats explode with myth. Owens’ “brutalist” response to Marlene Dietrich’s legendary swansdown coat reimagines late‑career cabaret glamour as something shaggy, almost monstrous, cut in cotton‑candy hues that blur decadence into dream. Where Dietrich once floated under a pink spotlight in a white cloud, these coats lumber and shimmer, more tower than plume, suggesting a heroine who has survived the war, the spotlight and the hangover. They fuse phase‑one seductress, phase‑two soldier and phase‑three cabaret commander into a single silhouette: a woman who knows exactly how artificial the performance is, and chooses to step into it anyway.
Together, these three pillars – Kevlar shells, macramé exoskeletons and goat‑hair clouds – define Tower as one of Owens’ clearest manifestos in years: a wardrobe for standing tall when the world tilts, for embracing armor without surrendering the urge to glow.
Later,
Diane
CASTING: ANGUS MUNRO (AMC CASTING)
STYLING: TYRONE DYLAN SUSMAN
HAIR: DUFFY (STREETERS)
MAKEUP: DANIEL SALLSTROM (MA WORLD GROUP)
NAILS: CHRISTINA CONRAD
PROSTHETICS: SANDRINE DENIS
PRODUCTION: LA MODE EN IMAGES
MUSIC : ‘LUXUS 1-3’ BY RYOJI IKEDA MIXED BY JEFF JUDD
