Stone

On Thursday, 25 June 2026, Rick Owens showed his SS27 menswear collection, “Stone,” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Paris was over 100°F that morning, and the heat moved the show: scheduled for 12:30, it was pushed forward to 10:00 a.m. to spare the audience the worst of the day. Paisley and I were there in person. What Owens sent out, on one of the hottest mornings Paris menswear has seen, was a collection about cooling the body, enduring the menace, and what we turn to when we cannot turn away. This is what we saw.

The Heat

You descend into a Rick Owens show. That is true at the Palais de Tokyo in any season, the brutalist building facing the Seine, the audience gathering on the long forecourt where the water mirrors the sky. But on the 25th, the descent was literal in a way the body registered before the mind did. Paris had broken 100°F, and it broke early. By mid-morning the stone of the terrace was already giving the heat back.

So the show was moved. Owens shifted the start from 12:30 to 10:00, two and a half hours earlier, to put his audience in front of the clothes before the day turned punishing. We arrived into a Paris that was bright and hot. People fanned themselves with their seat numbers, hid under black umbrellas that were available at the entrance. The usual hugs and kisses of friends turned into air kisses from a distance to avoid the exchange of body heat. Into all of that, Owens sent out a collection about the body’s argument with temperature.

We have learned, over years of attending these shows, to distrust the easy reading. But this one was not a stretch; it was sitting on the terrace with us. The season is called “Stone.” The text Owens published with it begins: “WE ARE ALL PROCESSING MENACE. SOME OF US ARM. SOME OF US TRAIN. SOME OF US TURN AWAY. SOME OF US TURN TO STONE.” On the hottest morning of the week, in a city processing its own slow menace, a designer staged the question of what endures, and what stays cool, and what we become when we can do nothing else.

What Came Down

The first thing to understand is that “Stone” is, in part, a performance collection. Owens has begun a collaboration with adidas, and at the center of it is a technical running shoe built for 2027, a genuinely high-performance, genuinely affordable object. Around it, he built garments using adidas’s Climacool technology: jackets and shorts that inflate, fitted with interior fans, which together with an ice vest form what the notes called a personal air conditioning system, meant to cool a runner’s torso before the gun goes off. Owens praised adidas’s environmental record without sentiment, noting the company’s second consecutive place on the CDP Climate A List, the top four percent globally. He is not a man who hands out compliments lightly, and the detail mattered.

Sit with the image. A collection of personal cooling systems, shown on the morning the show had to flee the heat. The clothes at the Palais were doing what the schedule outside it could not.

From there, the collection moved through Owens’s familiar grammar, sharpened. Trim jogging suits in a poly-cotton technical jersey, then the same silhouette fetishized in lightweight leather, black and flesh-toned, then again in a women’s nude girdle-fabric knit, recycled nylon spun in Germany, dyed and finished in Lombardy. The provenance is not decoration. With Owens, it is the argument: that conviction is made somewhere specific, by someone’s hands.

Then the tailoring. Coats and jackets carried authoritarian epaulets, what the notes called a symbol of authority and trust, like an emperor, or an airline pilot, or a cruise boat captain. Removable leather epaulets sat on lightweight silk and cotton poplin woven in Como. The sharp-shouldered pieces were cut in compact silk crepe by Bonotto, a fourth-generation mill in the Veneto founded in 1912. Against the soft menace of the season, those shoulders read as armor: some of us arm.

The cabans were the pieces we keep returning to. Swollen, bloated, almost inflated in silhouette, cut in duchesse, some in dense recycled polyester yarns, some in a crisp light silk duchesse woven on vintage looms in Como that produce only twenty-five meters a day. Twenty-five meters. You cannot rush a fabric like that, and you cannot fake the way it holds a volume.

And then the collection turned, as Owens collections do, toward the body’s vulnerability. Sheer tank tops that read like 1920s beaded lingerie, hand-piped in latex, the way you would pipe a cake, by the Paris rubber mistress Matisse di Maggio: thirty-five hours and four hands per garment. Latex capes by Florence Druart of Torture Garden Latex in London. And the tensegrity chaps, foam and latex, hand-built by Straytukay. Tensegrity is a term Buckminster Fuller coined in the 1960s: isolated components held in compression inside a continuous network of tension. It is how certain architecture stands. It is also, as the notes pointed out, how the human body stands, bones in compression, connective tissue in tension. A pair of chaps as a small lesson in how we are held together.

The soundtrack was an exclusive remix of “Girl in Bed” by Sissy Misfit. It moved under the whole thing like weather.

We carry Rick Owens at W Department, and we have attended these shows long enough to know the difference between a season that performs and a season that means. “Stone” means. When we wrote about SS26 “Temple”, the turn was toward love, a word Owens dropped like a weight. “Stone” is the answer to a harder question. If “Temple” asked what we are making things for, “Stone” asks what we do when the world turns menacing, when the heat will not break. Some of us arm. Some of us train. Some of us turn to stone.

What does that have to do with a wardrobe in Santa Fe? More than it first appears. The whole logic of this house, the logic that has kept it on our floor for years, is that a garment should hold its position over time the way stone holds heat: slowly, completely, giving it back when you need it. The cabans, the sharp-shouldered crepe, the leather jogging silhouettes. These are not pieces that perform for a season and retire. They are positions, made by named hands in named places, built to be inhabited for a decade. As anyone who read our report from Paris Men’s Fashion Week already knows, that is the only kind of clothing we travel for.

There is also the plainer fact of the day. Owens built clothes to cool the body on a morning the body needed cooling. Santa Fe knows that argument. We live where the sun is a force and the air is thin, where what you wear has to negotiate with a climate that does not negotiate back.

The easy story of the 25th is the heat wave, and the heat wave is real. But the collection underneath it was not about spectacle. It was about endurance, told through fabric that takes a vintage loom a full day to make twenty-five meters of, through a running shoe priced to actually be bought, through chaps meant to quietly teach you how your own skeleton stays standing. Owens has spent thirty years building a vocabulary of weight and permanence, and on the hottest morning of the week he used it to say something simple and unfashionable: the point is to last.

That is the only thing we have ever cared about. Not what is happening now, but what endures.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Rick Owens SS27 “Stone” collection?

“Stone” is Rick Owens’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear collection, shown in Paris on 25 June 2026. Its theme draws from Owens’s published text, “We are all processing menace. Some of us arm. Some of us train. Some of us turn away. Some of us turn to stone.” The collection centers on bodily endurance, with an expanded adidas performance collaboration, sharp-shouldered tailoring, swollen duchesse cabans, and hand-built latex pieces.

Where and when was the Rick Owens SS27 show?

The show took place on Thursday, 25 June 2026, at the Palais de Tokyo, 13 Avenue du Président Wilson, in Paris. The Palais de Tokyo has been Rick Owens’s longtime venue for his Paris shows. Christopher and Paisley Webster of W Department attended in person.

Why was the Rick Owens SS27 show moved to 10 a.m.?

Paris was in an extreme heat wave on 25 June 2026, with temperatures above 100°F. To spare the audience the worst of the heat, the show was moved earlier, from its scheduled 12:30 start to 10:00 a.m. The change resonated with the collection itself, which featured personal cooling systems built to regulate the body against heat.

What is the adidas x Rick Owens running shoe?

It is a high-performance technical running shoe developed through the Rick Owens and adidas collaboration, scheduled for release in 2027 and positioned as genuinely affordable. The collection also used adidas’s Climacool technology in inflated jackets and shorts fitted with interior fans, which combine with an ice vest to cool a runner’s torso before a race.

Who made the latex and specialty pieces in “Stone”?

The sheer latex tank tops were hand-piped by the Paris rubber mistress Matisse di Maggio, requiring more than thirty-five hours and four hands per garment. The latex capes were made by Florence Druart of Torture Garden Latex in London, and the tensegrity foam-and-latex chaps were hand-constructed by Straytukay. Tailoring fabrics came from Bonotto in the Veneto and silk duchesse woven on vintage looms in Como.

Does W Department carry Rick Owens?

Yes. W Department carries Rick Owens for both men and women at its store at 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza in Santa Fe. The store is open daily, 11 AM to 5 PM, and appointments outside those hours can be arranged by request.

Come and See

We will return from Paris with the season in our heads and the heat still in our skin. The Rick Owens we carry at W Department lives on the floor at 54½ Lincoln Avenue, The Plaza, Santa Fe, open daily, 11 to 5. The pieces ask to be met in person: the weight of a caban, the fall of a leather jogging trouser, the way a sharp shoulder changes how you stand in a room. A photograph does some of this work. The rest requires you to be here.

We are open. Come in, or reach us directly.

Christopher Webster and Paisley Mason Webster June 2026 W Department, Santa Fe