Inside Rick Owens’ Tower: When Fashion Learns to Withstand the World.

Rick Owens has never trafficked in escapism. His work does not promise relief from the present so much as a way of metabolising it. If fashion can function as a sensorium - registering pressure, anxiety, threat - then Owens has long been one of its most acute instruments. With Tower, his Autumn/Winter 2026 menswear collection, that sensitivity hardens into something architectural, almost civic in ambition. Not a refuge above the fray, but a structure built to withstand it.

The title is a deliberate provocation. Tower invites the usual accusations levelled at fashion’s avant-garde - detachment, hauteur, an ivory isolation from consequence. Owens, ever aware of the charge, answers it obliquely. Shown at the Palais de Tokyo, the collection emerged through fog so dense it functioned less as atmosphere than obstruction. Models appeared as silhouettes before details resolved, their bodies swallowed and then partially returned by the haze. It was not a reveal but a negotiation. In a world where power increasingly operates through opacity, Owens made disorientation the first condition of seeing.

Owens has spoken openly about the impossibility of ignoring the world as it is, suggesting parody as a mode of survival. This is not parody as satire or laughter, but as distortion - the grotesque enlargement of authority until it becomes legible as performance. Police boots balloon to absurd proportions. Uniform codes reappear inflated, over-articulated, stripped of their claim to neutrality. Epaulettes, once removed from Owens’ work to avoid aggression, return as exaggeration, their symbolism pushed to the point of collapse. Authority here is not dismantled so much as overexposed.

Weather forecast: low visibility, high tension.

Materiality does much of the arguing. Kevlar - five times stronger than steel - is woven into coats and protective shells by a Como-based supplier better known for silk, a collision that feels pointed rather than perverse. Japanese cowhide, dense and glossy, forms modular jackets that can be peeled apart, revealing elongated underlayers like architectural cross-sections. Wool appears everywhere, but never sentimentally: Himalayan fibres left coarse and expressive, Tuscan boiled wools chosen for resilience, not romance. These are not garments designed to flatter; they are designed to endure.

And yet, for all its armour, Tower resists the logic of militarised masculinity. Owens has long described his community - often lazily branded “freaks” - as unusually gentle, emotionally literate, even tender. That paradox remains central. Models stumble on towering platforms. Balance is precarious. The body is not conquered by the clothes; it struggles within them. Vulnerability is not hidden beneath protection but made visible through it. In this sense, Tower aligns less with fantasies of domination than with Judith Butler’s writing on vulnerability as a shared, political condition - exposure not as weakness, but as the ground of ethical relation.

The collection’s most unexpected power lies in its handwork. Amid the industrial severity, labour reasserts itself insistently. London-based designer Lucas Moretti’s macramé masks, each requiring around thirty hours of knotting, cascade over faces like contemporary penitential hoods, obscuring identity while insisting on the time embedded in their making. Straytukay’s shearling net flight jackets feel both martial and domestic, recalling fishing gear as much as aviator lore. Even Owens’ denim mutates into something uncanny: chambray shorts frayed and puckered until they resemble skin, or moulting plumage - fabric edging toward the biological.

This tension between the synthetic and the organic, the engineered and the handmade, has always been Owens’ terrain. His references spiral outward rather than backward: medieval armour, biker leathers, Brutalist architecture, monastic robes, post-war uniforms. Yet these citations never function as nostalgia. They are stripped of certainty, recomposed as questions. What does protection look like when institutions no longer reassure? How does one dress for threat without becoming threatening?

Owens’ fascination with uniform is especially pointed now. In an era where figures meant to safeguard increasingly intimidate, Tower reframes the uniform as unstable theatre. The bloated “police boots,” named in shades like Butch Black and Mincy Mauve, parody the aesthetics of control by pushing them into excess. When models switch into thin, rubber-toed plimsolls, the effect is almost more unsettling - as if the armour has slipped, revealing something fragile underneath. Owens’ version of “ordinary” remains deeply strange, and that strangeness feels truthful.

There is also, unexpectedly, a spiritual undercurrent. The collection’s subtitle references the “Temple of Love, Tower of Light” - less manifesto than invocation. Owens has often spoken about fashion as a form of prayer, or at least ritual. Here, the clothes seem to oscillate between defence and devotion, between riot gear and vestment. The fog, the slow procession, the obscured faces all suggest liturgy as much as runway. One thinks of Tarkovsky’s use of weather as moral landscape, or of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty - not cruelty as violence, but as confrontation with what cannot be ignored.

What Tower ultimately proposes is not comfort, nor even hope in any conventional sense. It offers a method. In a moment defined by institutional failure, overstimulation and ambient fear, Owens refuses both distraction and despair. Instead, he leans into exaggeration, craft, and bodily truth. He builds clothes that acknowledge danger without aestheticising it, that protect without promising invulnerability.

In an industry still prone to mistaking novelty for relevance, Rick Owens continues to insist on something more demanding: attention. Tower does not elevate its wearer above the world. It places them squarely inside it, armoured but unsteady, exposed yet alert. Not a fortress, but a stance. And in times like these, that may be the most radical proposition fashion can make.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Paul Phung.