DRKSHDW & Rick Owens: man according to the master of dark glamour
Rick Owens is not just a creator of forms: he’s a thinker. Each collection translates architectural, mythological, and intimate visions into garments that function as emotional devices.
Fall Winter 2025, between sculptural pieces and lived-in garments, is an opportunity to read not just a wardrobe, but the mental map of an author constantly questioning the relationship between beauty and embarrassment, ritual and the everyday. In recent months, between new projects and a Paris retrospective, Owens seems to be reflecting on the legacy of his work. A phase of awareness and reckoning that reopens the central question: what does it mean today to build an alternative aesthetic?
Ritual, brutalism, melancholy
At the core of Owens’s poetics lies a precise triangulation: architecture (especially brutalism), the idea of ritual, and a productive melancholy able to turn loss into form.
The reference to brutalism is not a decorative whim, but a method. Owens once recalled a photograph, a Berlin wall, that revealed to him an ethos of reduction and rigor. Since then, this vision has permeated silhouettes, seams, and proportions. For him, brutalism is discipline: subtraction that allows the aesthetic will to emerge.
His creative practice unfolds in isolation and workshop. During production periods, Owens retreats to Concordia, near his Italian factory, where time slows down and work becomes meditative craftsmanship. This isolation is strategic: the place where form simmers, where theatrical fantasy takes shape.
Then comes the performative dimension, increasingly central in recent years. His shows are not simple presentations, but collective rites. Owens has turned them into contemporary liturgies: choreographies, altered bodies, post-apocalyptic settings interrogating the present.
FW25 confirmed this register, alternating scenes of ritual dystopia with moments in which the very materials—chains, leather, handcraft—exposed the labor behind the staged fiction.
Finally, melancholy. Owens has openly admitted that there is a “melancholic side” to his work: every exhibition or retrospective forces him to look back. Yet it is not a paralyzing melancholy; rather, it sharpens his aesthetic practice, almost therapeutically.
His production of furniture and domestic objects fits into this discourse. Monumental, anti-cozy, it reflects the same search for material truth animating his clothing: stripped of ornament, essential and radical.
“I never had that much to lose,” Owens once confessed. A sentence that explains his freedom: those who do not fear loss can take risks with greater honesty.
And again: “The coolest thing is when you don’t care about being cool anymore. Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac.” Indifference here is a creative strategy: not sterile isolation, but the possibility of inventing new codes.
Rick Owens’s urban poetry: dark men’s shoes
Owens’s sneakers and boots are not accessories: they are postural statements. They change the way one walks, interacts with urban space, perceives oneself.
In FW25, they return in versions oscillating between monumental and everyday: shoes that seem like small stages to wear. Each is conceived as a tool, an extension of the body provoking physical and narrative reactions.
Radical minimalism with Rick Owens low-top men’s sneakers
Minimalism in Owens is never neutral: it is emotional discipline. Stripping away ornament concentrates expressive force in lines, proportions, matter.
The low-top sneakers embody this logic: few lines, immense presence. Exercises in subtraction that generate tension, contrast, intensity.
Contemporary cuts and comfort: the Rick Owens men’s trousers to know now
Trousers become the perfect lab for his thinking. Owens uses them to explore movement: unexpected lengths, sculptural draping, hems worked like engravings.
Comfort coexists with sculpture. Technical wool, dense cotton, and deconstructed jersey create pieces that are not only functional but ritual: garments to be worn as signs, not merely objects.
Rick Owens DRKSHDW Men: denim and jersey for a raw yet refined attitude
DRKSHDW embodies the more accessible side of his radicality. Washed denim, pre-worn-looking jersey, raw seams showcasing artisanal labor.
Here sophistication is born from deliberate flaw: an aesthetic that exhibits wear, the trace of time, the poetry of rawness. The same pursuit Owens continues in his furniture and objects: monumentality and imperfection as instruments of truth.
Daily experimentation and intelligent layering with DRKSHDW for him
For Owens, layering is writing on the body. Jackets become sculptures, coats redraw the shoulder, overlapping lengths resemble the phrases of a complex discourse.
It is not just aesthetics but strategy. Overlays measure the emotional temperature of dressing, building protections and openings. Layering thus becomes ritual practice, spiritual exercise, aesthetic resilience.
