Temple

The Water

The Palais de Tokyo sits at the edge of the Seine, its brutalist bones facing the river as if in permanent argument with beauty. For the SS26 men’s show, Rick Owens brought his audience to the building’s rear courtyard, where a long rectangular fountain cuts through the stone. Scaffolding had been erected above it: dark iron, rising four stories, fitted with platforms and ladders. And then, from above, they came.

Models descended into the water. Some in raw leather that darkened as it drank the pool. Others in almost nothing. A baptism, conducted in full view of Paris, at the end of a season that asked what we are making things for anymore.

Owens called the collection Temple. He said: love is the best word to put out there. From a man who has spent thirty years building a vocabulary of darkness, weight, and permanence, that word lands like a stone dropped from height. Not a softening. An arrival.

I had been in Paris a few days earlier for the vernissage at the Palais Galliera — the retrospective the museum titled “Temple of Love,” a survey of his work spanning three decades. To move through those rooms is to understand what it means to build a body of work rather than a brand. The early pieces from his Hollywood Boulevard years beside the towering architectural silhouettes of recent seasons — nothing felt like an accident. Nothing felt like a departure. You were looking at a life that had known exactly what it was doing, all along.

So when the models entered the water, I understood what I was watching. This was not Rick Owens pivoting toward accessibility. This was Owens arriving at love the way a long journey arrives: not with haste, but with the weight of everything it has passed through.

What Arrived

The boxes came from Italy this week — five of them, 69 pieces, shipped April 7. I want to tell you what is actually here, because the edit we made for this delivery is deliberate, and the individual pieces reward attention.

The Temple Gown. This is the piece the season is named for, and its presence in the delivery is not incidental. A knit dress in black — form-fitting, descended from the logic of the body as architecture. Two arrived. The Temple Gown is not a statement piece in the way fashion uses that phrase. It does not announce itself. It assumes. There is a difference, and it is the difference between a garment that works once and a garment that works for twenty years.

The Gary Jacket. Two black leather jackets. The Gary is Rick Owens at his most essential — the leather jacket stripped of all the signals leather jackets usually send. No hardware excess. No aggressive proportions. What remains is structure and material, which is enough. It is always enough. A Gary Jacket becomes yours in a way that most garments never do: it learns you. The first season you wear it, it is a jacket. The fifth season, it is a second skin.

The Bolan Banana. The Bolan silhouette is one of Owens’ signatures — a trouser that rises high, cuts through the waist, and tapers dramatically toward the ankle in a way that makes the leg into a line. Three pairs arrived: two in black, one in milk. The milk Bolan Banana is the piece in this delivery I keep returning to. Against a black top — the Cropped Rib LS T or the SL Turtle — milk does something that white cannot. It has warmth. It has age.

The Detroit Cut. Three black woven pants with the Detroit construction — Owens’ cleaner trouser silhouette, precise at the hip, falling with weight through the leg. Three pairs. If the Bolan is a declaration, the Detroit is a commitment.

The Wrap SL Dress in Dark Dust. Three pieces. Dark Dust is the color that does the most complicated work this season — not black, not gray, but the space between them where something quieter lives. A woven dress with sleeve, wrapping closed. The kind of piece that looks unremarkable on a hanger and irreplaceable on.

The Heizer Mac. Two black woven jackets, the Heizer cut. A mac — that long coat that falls like a decision. Rick Owens in outerwear is always thinking about protection: how a garment wraps around you, how it puts something between you and the world. The Heizer Mac does this without drama. It simply covers you, completely.

The LPM Jacket. Three black jackets in cotton and nylon — high stand collar, asymmetric hidden placket that drapes across the front, cropped to the hip. It is a jacket that has considered geometry. The stand collar in particular: Owens has been thinking about Balenciaga’s relationship to the neck and shoulder for years, and the LPM jacket is where that thinking arrives in its most wearable form.

The Biker Level Sweater. Three black knit sweaters. The Biker Level is substantial — the kind of knit that constitutes an outfit on its own.

The Travel Liquid Bag. Two black leather bags. The Travel Liquid is one of Owens’ most resolved bag designs — clean, architectural, carrying only the hardware it needs and nothing it does not. If you have been looking for a Rick Owens bag that functions as a daily object rather than a seasonal statement, this is it.

The Shoulder Bag in Coral. One piece. This is the most unexpected object in the delivery, and perhaps the most important. Against sixty-eight pieces of black, dark dust, and milk, there is one coral leather shoulder bag. Coral — a color that sits between red and orange, the color of reef and sunset and something biological. In the context of this collection, and this season, and Owens’ stated turn toward love — this bag is the argument made visible. It is the moment in the Temple show when the model emerged from the water and you understood that everything dark around you was in service of this single warm thing.

There is one. It will find its person.

Why These Pieces, Here

We have carried Rick Owens at W Department for years, and the edit we make each season is not about stocking the most talked-about pieces. It is about selecting the ones that will still be worn in ten years. The ones that reward commitment.

This delivery holds to that. The Temple Gown. The Gary Jacket. The Bolan Banana in milk. The coral Shoulder Bag. These are not trend pieces. They are positions — and positions, unlike trends, compound in value over time. The woman who wears the Temple Gown this summer will still be wearing it in a different way in five years, and she will understand it better then.

That is what this brand has always been about. Not what is happening now, but what endures.

Come and See Them

The Temple collection is on the floor at W Department now. 54½ Lincoln Avenue, The Plaza, Santa Fe. These pieces ask to be met in person — the weight of the Gary Jacket in your hands, the fall of the Bolan through the leg, the coral of that single shoulder bag against everything else in the room. A photograph does some of this work. The rest requires you to be here.

We are open. Come in, or reach us directly. Some pieces are already spoken for. Others are waiting.

Christopher Webster April 2026 W Department, Santa Fe