This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
On Thursday morning, exactly five minutes before the Rick Owens show was scheduled to start in Paris, the designer introduced me to a quiet artist from Berlin named Bernardo Martins. Martins, whose online moniker is Figa.Link, uses AI to create vivid and unsettling portraits of people with sunken cheeks, hardcore face piercings, and mullets. But these are not e-boy mullets. They are much more alien and architectural, with blunt bangs and rainbow tails. Some are aggressively reversed (party in front, business in the back). Others are spiky and scary, or wavy and wild. He calls his signature look “skullets.”
“They’re really beautiful,” Owens said.
“How did you describe my work earlier?” Martins asked.
Owens paused to think. “Savage,” he replied. “Brutal.”
Backstage, hair stylists were turning Martins’s digital art into reality, attacking wigs with scissors and dye and gluing tendrilly hair extensions to shaved heads. Some models walked around with pink baby bangs and stringy sideburns, others with bleached emo mops and freakily long eyelash extensions. Several models had a Rick Owens logo stenciled on their bald heads, paired with popsicle-colored rat tails. Stalking around in their vertiginous Rick Owens platform boots, they looked genuinely otherworldly, like a race of giant techno-punks here to deliver us from boring fashion.
If there is a hair trend emerging in this young fall 2026 season, it is the turbo mullet. In what could be read as a reaction to menswear’s prevailing of the perfectly-coiffed Clark Kent figure that perpetually dominates Milan, two of the standout moments of Paris have involved hair that’s part Ziggy Stardust, part Rod Stewart. At Dior, Jonathan Anderson worked with the ever-innovative hairstylist Guido Palau to dream up wonderful anime-esque mullets in a highlighter yellow hue. Said Anderson of the ’dos: “I don’t want normality.”
Ah, normality—the very thing that Owens has built a glam-goth fashion empire on rebelling against. Enter the skullets. Owens found Figa.Link online (it is the exact type of thing that you might expect the designer’s algorithm to cough up), and sent Martins a video of himself asking if he would like to collaborate. Somehow, the artist missed the message. “I thought he was ghosting me,” Owens deadpanned. Finally, someone else on the team got a response—two days before the show. “And I said, okay, well, can you fly tomorrow?”
It was an easy yes: Martins, like most Berlin-based experimental artists, was already a Rick Owens stan. “I'm in my own universe most of the time,” he said. Owenscorp is a bit different; backstage, the models were lining up for mononymous fashion-hair guru Duffy and the avant-garde makeup artist Daniel Sallstrom, who together oversee the brand’s anti-beauty aesthetic. “When I saw that Rick had brought so many talented people in and they could collaborate, add to it, and bring it to the real world, it was really special.”
“I’m always looking for subcultures,” Owens added. “And there are few and far between that feel genuine and authentic. And I felt like Bernardo captured a world. I don't know if it's an actual subculture, but I feel like there are people that can relate to those looks. I feel like I see them around, and he kind of crystallized it. And so I love endorsing that.”
While the last wig was being given its finishing snips, Owens stood on a balcony with a killer Eiffel Tower view. “The clothes are definitely cop clothes,” he said, referring to his fall 2026 collection. Owens, the patron saint of fashion outsiders, is the rare major designer whose work engages with the complexity and tragedy of the real world. As he explained, he’d been thinking about surveillance and authority, and reappropriated police and military jackets for his own defiantly sharp tactical wear. Owens also reacts to uncertainty by embracing community—Martins was one of several collaborators from the Rick Owens community whose work appeared in the show, including shaggy shearling flight jackets made with underground designer Straytukay and cutout argyle-check sweaters handknit by a frequent Rick Owens model.
“We’re all aware of what’s happening now,” Owens said. “And what does one do in the face of fear and danger and threat? You mock it. That is our role. That’s what creative people have been doing since the beginning of time. We mock threat, and that is the way we process it.”
Is that where the rainbow mullets come in? I asked. Owens smiled. “Flower power!”
