Rick Owens Beats Paris Heatwave With Air-Conditioned adidas Collaboration for SS27
Featuring heavily puffed-up, inflated jackets and shorts engineered with actual internal mechanical fans that pair with ice vests.
Summary
Rick Owens unveiled his SS27 "STONE" menswear collection during at Paris Fashion Week.
The lineup debuts fan-inflated adidas ClimaCool outerwear and a 2027 running shoe.
Radical pieces include hand-piped latex tops and architectural Tensegrity chaps.
Amid a sweltering Paris heatwave, Rick Owens unveiled his Spring/Summer 2027 Menswear show with striking punctuality — an unusual defiance of typical Paris Fashion Week delays. Transforming the outdoor concrete grounds of the Palais de Tokyo into a dystopian theater , Owens’ collection, titled “STONE” , confronted a collective sense of societal menace through themes of discipline, transformation, and physical resilience.
Models advanced along a steel‑grate runway like defensive figures – choosing to arm, train, or turn to stone – their severe expressions heightened by spiky, feather‑like eyelash extensions. This visceral mood was reinforced by a stark palette of deep black, dark brown and flesh‑toned beige, echoing the raw concrete surroundings. Owens balanced technical innovation with his avant‑garde aesthetic, presenting inflated jackets, swollen cabans and sharp‑shouldered tailoring alongside sheer latex pieces that blurred the boundary between utility and fetish.
At the core of the collection was a bold collaboration with adidas, engineered to withstand extreme environments. Owens introduced a high‑performance, affordable adidas x Rick Owens running shoe slated for 2027, alongside garments built with adidas’ ClimaCool technology. Inflated jackets and shorts, fitted with internal fans, combined with custom ice vests to create personal cooling systems designed to lower a runner’s torso temperature before competition. This athletic language extended to trim jogging suits in poly‑cotton jersey, fetishized black and flesh‑toned leather, and recycled nylon girdle fabric knit in Germany and finished in Italy.
The collection’s most radical statements emerged through intricate, hand-crafted latex and structural leg configurations. Paris-based rubber designer Matisse Di Maggio developed sheer tank tops evoking 1920s beaded lingerie, hand-piping the latex in an exhaustive process requiring four hands and over 35 hours of labor per garment. These delicate layers contrasted sharply against sweeping latex capes by London’s Florence Druart and skeletal “Tensegrity” chaps hand-constructed from foam and latex by long-time collaborator Straytukay. Grounded in the architectural principles popularized by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s, these chaps formed a continuous network of tension and compression that mirrored the biological layout of human bones and connective tissues. Anchoring these complex visuals were Owens’ signature over-the-knee leather platform boots featuring razor-sharp pointed toes, pulled high over three-striped track pants to finalize an uncompromising uniform of modern survival.
