All photos by Sonnyphoto.
Dear Shaded Viewers,
The Rick Owens men’s FW26 show at the Palais de Tokyo unfolded like a controlled hallucination: a tower of smoke, sound and bodies where the clothes emerged as spectral apparitions rather than straightforward propositions.
From the first beat of Ryoji Ikeda’s “Ultratronics 11,” remixed into a strafing, metallic pulse by Jeff Judd, the space became an industrial chapel, a “temple of love, tower of light” cloaked in toxic incense. Models advanced as if surfacing from a blast zone, forms half-lost in a greyed-out haze that turned the runway into a post-event crime scene and a devotional procession at once. The smoke was both erotic veil and enemy; it caressed silhouettes but also punished them, denying the audience the forensic view these garments deserved.
What could be discerned through the fog felt like weaponized tenderness: close-fitting coats that wrapped and tied like lab garments in glossy black bull leather and Kevlar, a fiber five times stronger than steel and traditionally used in body armor. Bloated “police” boots, grotesquely exaggerated in butch black, dominating dust and mincy mauve, skewered any straightforward militarism, parodying authority as fetish object. Transformable outerwear in heavy, waxy cowhide from Himeji, cut into two-piece garments with cropped jackets peeling away to reveal longer vest layers beneath, suggested survival gear designed for bodies that still want to seduce.
There was a sense that somewhere inside the cloud lay a catalogue of obsessive materiality: cabans in 8mm Himalayan wool felt, hand-worked in Rajasthan into veined, geological surfaces, and sack coats in brushed alpaca and RWS-certified boiled wool woven in Tuscany. Mélange wools from a fifth-generation mill in Japan’s Bishū region and from Bonotto in Veneto gave the tailoring a quiet, aristocratic grit that fought to cut through the visual blur. Shaggy, flower-power flight jackets made from water jet–cut shearling and goat hides, linked into netted, color-patched pelts in collaboration with @STRAYTUKAY, flickered at the edge of visibility like hallucinated plumage.
Up close, when the fog momentarily thinned, the collection’s human detailing came into focus: hand-crocheted silk–cashmere knits by @sarutanya clinging to torsos like intimate handwriting, and hand-tufted jackets developed with Paris-based textile artist @jtrofimova that turned the upper body into a moving relief sculpture. Hand-tied macramé masks by @lucas____moretti, each requiring 3,000 meters of waxed cord and over 30 hours to complete, read as devotional bondage—part protest, part protection, part invitation. Hair and makeup, devised with Berlin-based digital creator @figa.link, sharpened this mood of reactive resistance, turning faces into glitching billboards for unease and desire.
The one tension in this engulfing ritual was not that the atmosphere obscured the clothes, but that it demanded a different way of seeing them: not as showroom objects, but as moving architecture inside a charged, toxic dream. The smoke felt quintessentially Rick—part incense, part tear gas—wrapping Kevlar, Himalayan wool and grotesque police boots in a cinematic blur that heightened their menace and eroticism rather than cancelling their detail. The “tower” became less a pedestal and more a weather system, a place where fashion and environment fused so completely that the garments were experienced as sensations first and scrutinized second. In that sense, the immersion was the point: this was not a collection asking to be politely observed, but a world insisting that you breathe it in, feel it on your skin, and only then start decoding the seams, felts, and fifth-generation mills that underwrote its authority.
CASTING ANGUS MUNRO (AMC CASTING)
STYLING TYRONE DYLAN SUSMAN
HAIR DUFFY (STREETERS)
MAKEUP DANIEL SALLSTROM (MA WORLD GROUP)
PRODUCTION LA MODE EN IMAGES
MUSIC ‘ULTRATRONICS 11’ BY RYOJI IKEDA MIXED BY JEFF JUDD
Later,
Diane
