Rick Owens presented his Spring/Summer 2027 collection, titled “Tower,” on Thursday afternoon in Paris, continuing his decades-long investigation of the body as architecture. The show, staged in the Palais de Tokyo’s concrete vastness, featured a single monolithic structure at its center — a blackened steel frame that models circled like figures orbiting a monument.
The collection’s defining gesture was elongation. Shoulders extended beyond the natural line in cantilevered constructions that recalled the buttresses of a Gothic cathedral. Trousers fell straight to the floor, pooling around the shoe in a way that made the wearer appear both grounded and ascending. The effect was processional — these were clothes for moving through a space with gravity and purpose.
The footwear was a continuation of Owens’s collaboration with Converse: the Turbodrk Chuck 70 in full leather with an exaggerated, bulbous sole that referenced both orthopedic support and Brutalist concrete forms. The model echoed the collection’s central tension — between weight and lift, between the body’s limitations and its capacity for transformation.
Fabrics were treated with Owens’s characteristic severity. Bonded leather, double-layer cotton jersey, and a new recycled denim developed in collaboration with a Japanese mill appeared in a nearly monochrome palette of black, bone, charcoal, and the occasional flash of oxidized copper. The copper pieces — a sleeveless vest, a wrap skirt worn over trousers — oxidized differently on each garment, ensuring that no two pieces aged identically.
