Rick Owens knows how to make a splash — literally. For Spring 2026, the designer staged a standing-only show at the parvis of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where models in towering Frankenstein boots walked an elevated plank over a reflecting pool, climbed down ladders, waded knee-deep in water, drenched themselves, and ascended back to secure themselves in a gleaming grid of carabiners.
It was part ritual, part performance art — all unmistakably Owens.
Gothic Glamour Meets Hollywood Sleaze
“I wanted glamour, elegance and leather,” Owens said backstage, sipping from a tiny bottle of ginger beer. “Also, there has to be a little bit of Hollywood Boulevard sleaziness…because that’s my thing.”
The show pulsed to the bone-rattling soundtrack of Klaus Nomi as drenched coats, fetish flight jackets in silk taffeta, and deconstructed leather looks made their way through the water. There was no mercy for luxury — everything was made to be submerged, challenged, and reborn.
Straps returned as aesthetic architecture: a way to adorn, reveal, and suggest. “A suggestion of either danger or action, which is maybe on the way to heroism,” Owens noted. Dracula collars reappeared from Fall 2025, sharpened and dramatic.
Leaning Into Legacy — and Decay
Fresh from the opening of his Temple of Love retrospective at the Palais Galliera, Owens leaned into existential themes of aging, finality, and legacy. “What could possibly top that for me?” he asked, referencing both the exhibition and his career-long refusal to conform.
He revived early-2000s knits with help from Terry-Ann Frencken, his first showroom model turned designer, and collaborated with New York punk band Suicide on distressed leather jackets. It was Owens circling back through his own timeline — not with nostalgia, but a sense of evolution and confrontation.
Rick on OnlyFans?
Perhaps the most surreal moment came from a quiet reveal in his WWD interview: Rick Owens now has an OnlyFans account — for his feet. Inspired by the Countess of Castiglione, an 18th-century Italian aristocrat who obsessively photographed herself until she ended her days taking photos of her feet in seclusion, Owens saw it as a commentary on aging.
His team was skeptical. But as Rick bluntly put it, “I started my career with a picture of me p–sing into my mouth… this is the most innocent thing I’ve ever done.”
A Rick Owens Moment to Remember
Spring 2026 proved, once again, that Rick Owens doesn’t follow the fashion cycle — he confronts it, drenches it, straps it down, and makes it beg for more.
Caste point, garments less crazy than other times.