Rick Owens Faces the Heat

As temperatures soared in Paris, Rick Owens’ Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show imagined what people might want – and need – to wear

So Paris – like much of Europe right now – is burning, in heat that rocketed to 40 degrees Celsius and topped 100F. The temperatures reached in the city this week marked a historic record, albeit not one to celebrate – the Louvre and the Tour Eiffel closed early, and Rick Owens pulled his show from midday to 10am to try and avoid the soaring afternoon sun. Oddly enough, the collection itself was prescient of all that, hacked apart to expose flesh, tailoring skewed across bodies and even a few with outfits embedded with internal cooling systems of battery-operated fans. The collection’s overarching theme was processing menace – and maybe there’s nothing more menacing than what’s happening with the climate right now. Fear and clothing.

Then again, Owens has been interested in those ideas for a while. For several seasons, he’s enumerated the manners in which his clothing production has shifted to sustainable and environmentally friendly practices, from enzyme washes to recycled fabrications to the support of age-old manufacturers in Como. He was also the only designer in this furnace of a season to namecheck the environmental crisis as even a consideration, in this case influencing his decision to embark on a comprehensive collaboration with Adidas, a company which, Owens points out, was named to the CDP Climate A List for the second year in a row. “We still have a ways to go confronting the environmental crisis,” says Owens. “We can all start somewhere and aim higher.”

In a sense, this collection was about high and low, the accessible and the esoteric – in terms of the pattern, Owens’ Adidas collab was the centrepiece. It contains the expected tracksuits and gym shorts and running shoes, but also idiosyncratically Owensian floor-length shrouds and the aforementioned inflatable suits, a system Adidas calls Climacool which bloated his clothes out with air to cool the body within, creating gargantuan yet light silhouettes that resembled inflated trash bags or a costume from Addams Family Values. The shapes were echoed in caban jackets made in precious silk duchesse woven on antique looms that could only make 25 metres of fabric per day and contrasted with sheer tank tops in hand-piped latex that resembled disintegrating georgette and flubbery rubber capes that flared around bodies like the hollowed-out carcass of some kind of animal. There are always those kinds of thoughts, at a Rick Owens show, the contrast between the monstrous and the divine.

Here, it felt as though Owens was engaged with the realities of what people want to wear and may very well need to wear. The lightness of his clothes felt appropriate as we broiled – I mean, it is the Spring/Summer 2027 season after all, glad someone remembered. And everyone was jealous as the jets of the fontaine du Palais de Tokyo started spurting, in proscenium arches that spanned Owens’ catwalk, drenching his models. In the past, those kinds of Owens watersports have seemed priapically climactic: this time, they were merely climatic. We all just wished they’d malfunction and gush over us too.