Monumental but human
Rick Owens has spent much of his career exploring what happens when clothing refuses to remain within the expected proportions of the body. For Fall/Winter 2026-2027, presented at the Palais de Tokyo on March 5, that familiar instinct took on a more protective character. Titled Tower, the collection built its silhouettes upward and outward, surrounding the body with clothes that could appear imposing from a distance yet became considerably more complex on closer inspection.
The title itself carried several meanings. Owens connected it to the idea of a tower of strength and to the Eiffel Tower, while Marlene Dietrich emerged as the collection’s unexpected muse. He was interested not simply in her image but in the trajectory of her life, from sexual provocateur and screen icon to a performer who travelled with the USO during the Second World War. That combination of glamour, defiance and courage offered a framework for a collection conceived at a moment when Owens was thinking about threat and the character revealed in response to it.
On the runway, those ideas appeared through elongated, enveloping silhouettes that frequently approached the body as something to shield. Coats and mantles climbed towards the ears, shoulders extended beyond their natural line and towering boots gave the figures an almost armoured verticality. Yet Owens avoided reducing protection to rigidity. Many of the garments wrapped and swaddled the body rather than containing it within sharply defined structures, allowing volume to become shelter as much as assertion.
Glamour and pressure
Dietrich’s influence was clearest in the collection’s most expansive outerwear. Her famous white swansdown coat was transformed into enormous goat-hair pieces made from water-jet-cut circles of hide, replacing Hollywood whiteness with dusty, bruised shades. The reference was recognisable without becoming costume. Owens took an image associated with theatrical glamour and made it heavier, rougher and more physical, preserving its excess while changing the world it seemed to belong to.
Materials carried much of that tension. Kevlar appeared in strapless column dresses, while marbled felt produced in Rajasthan from Himalayan wool was shaped into mantles with collars extending beyond the ears. Bull leather and other substantial surfaces reinforced the sense of armour running through the collection, but their treatment prevented the clothes from feeling purely defensive. Texture softened architecture, irregularity interrupted severity and the body remained visible within forms that might otherwise have overwhelmed it.
That distinction matters in Owens’ work. Monumentality can easily become distance, particularly when silhouettes are pushed this far from ordinary proportions. Here, scale rarely seemed intended to erase the wearer. Instead, it altered the space around her. The clothes created a larger presence while retaining a surprising sense of movement, turning protection into something expressive rather than simply hard.
Earth, ash and artificiality
Colour moved away from the stark black most immediately associated with Owens towards a more eroded register. Muddy browns, dusty neutrals and bruised pastels gave parts of the collection an almost mineral quality, as though the surfaces had been weathered rather than freshly produced. Against the concrete interior of the Palais de Tokyo, the effect was less futuristic than elemental.
Then came deliberate artifice. Shaggy wigs and exaggerated millipede eyelashes created by Berlin-based artist Figa Link, also known as Bernardo Martins, disrupted any temptation to read the collection simply as austere or post-apocalyptic. Pink appeared unexpectedly. Faces became strange and theatrical. Owens has long been interested in exaggeration as a form of resistance, and here the grotesque, glamorous and humorous were allowed to disturb the collection’s more severe surfaces.
It made Tower difficult to place within a single mood. The women could resemble warriors, but they were not dressed in conventional uniforms. The clothes suggested armour without surrendering sensuality, while Dietrich introduced a particular kind of glamour built on performance and self-invention. Protection did not require invisibility. Strength did not require the rejection of beauty.
A softer kind of strength
Owens described the collection in relation to how character reveals itself under threat, giving its imposing forms a context beyond proportion alone. That idea could easily have produced clothing built entirely around defence. Instead, Tower repeatedly complicated its own hardness. Enveloping volumes offered shelter. Extreme materials were shaped with extraordinary craft. References to military dress existed alongside the exaggerated glamour of Dietrich and the deliberately artificial beauty of the models.
This is where Fall/Winter 2026-2027 felt particularly convincing. Owens did not need to abandon the visual language he has developed over decades in order to respond to the present. He pushed further into it, using familiar ideas of elongation, distortion and scale while allowing vulnerability to sit closer to the surface.
The result was monumental without becoming impersonal. Beneath the height of the boots, the enormous coats and the protective layers was a collection concerned with the person occupying them. Tower proposed strength not as an absence of fragility, but as something built around it.
May