adidas Originals x Rick Owens Reunite for 2027SS: Inside the Paris Fashion Week Comeback

Almost a decade after their original partnership quietly ended, Rick Owens and adidas Originals are back together. The reunion was confirmed at Paris Fashion Week, where Owens used his Spring/Summer 2027 runway show to debut a new lineup of adidas Originals footwear and apparel, marking the first Rick Owens x Adidas collision since the mid-2010s. The collection leans into two very different registers at once: a bulky, hiking-inspired take on adidas’ Springblade-era running silhouette, and a genuinely strange set of apparel built around inflatable, fan-cooled jackets. It is, by most accounts, one of the more unexpected sportswear reunions of the year.

 

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The announcement landed during Owens’ menswear presentation, staged once again at the Palais de Tokyo as part of his Spring/Summer 2027 collection, reportedly titled “Stone.” Within that runway show, Owens used the moment to confirm that adidas Originals would be his new sportswear partner, debuting both footwear and apparel built under the Three Stripes banner.

The pairing immediately stood out to longtime sneaker watchers because it revives a relationship that defined a specific era of fashion-meets-performance collaboration. In the mid-2010s, adidas built much of its lifestyle credibility around a trio of avant-garde designers, Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3, Raf Simons, and Rick Owens, with Owens’ run coming to an end around 2016. That earlier partnership has aged into something of a cult favorite among collectors, which is part of why its return generated so much attention the moment Owens stepped out in Paris.

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Two silhouettes were shown so far, and both clearly reference adidas’ Springblade family, the segmented, blade-soled running shoe that defined much of the brand’s performance-meets-fashion output during Owens’ original run with the brand. This time, though, the construction has been scaled up considerably. Where the 2010s-era Springblade leaned sleek and sculptural, the new pair builds around a noticeably thicker base and a more rugged, hiking-shoe attitude, with an oversized outer shell and heavily layered panels that give the shoe a protective, almost armored look. Large Three Stripes branding sits prominently on the upper, leaving no doubt about the adidas half of the equation.

The two pairs unveiled in Paris take that idea in slightly different directions. One sticks closer to a wearable, everyday silhouette, finished in a standard mix of mesh and leather. The other pushes further into Owens’ signature maximalism, with an exaggerated shroud-like overlay that extends nearly up to the knee, turning a running shoe into something closer to a sculptural boot. Together, the pair signals that this collaboration is less interested in revisiting the clean runners of the brand’s 2010s work and more interested in meeting the current moment, one where trail silhouettes, technical fabrics, and oversized proportions have become a far bigger part of the sneaker landscape than they were the first time Owens and adidas worked together.

It’s worth remembering what the Springblade actually represented when it first launched. The shoe’s segmented, individually flexing blades were pitched as a genuine performance innovation, designed to store and release energy with each stride, before the silhouette eventually found a second life as a fashion-forward shape favored by designers experimenting with adidas’ performance archive. Owens’ original run with the brand sat right alongside that moment, which makes the decision to revisit the blade-soled concept now feel less like a random callback and more like a deliberate nod to the era that first connected the two parties. Updating that shape with hiking-boot proportions and protective layering brings it in line with where outdoor-inflected design has moved over the past several years, rather than simply reissuing a decade-old silhouette unchanged.

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For longtime followers of both brands, the appeal here is less about any single shoe and more about what the pairing represents structurally. adidas has spent the past several years leaning hard into nostalgia-driven Originals reissues and athlete-led performance lines, while Owens has built an entire creative identity around taking utilitarian and athletic references and pushing them into something darker and more architectural. Putting those two instincts back in the same room, after a decade of each evolving independently, is the kind of pairing that tends to produce more interesting friction than a straightforward archive reissue would.

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If the footwear is the more familiar half of the collide, the apparel is where Owens pushed things into genuinely strange territory. The collection’s standout piece is an inflatable jacket built using adidas’ Climacool technology, one that expands into a sculptural, balloon-like form around the wearer. Built-in fans circulate air through the inflated shell, effectively turning the jacket into a wearable cooling system. Owens has described the resulting setup as a kind of personal air conditioning system, designed with a very specific performance goal in mind: cooling a runner’s torso as much as possible in the lead-up to a race.

The jacket doesn’t stand alone. It’s paired with fan-assisted, puffed-out shorts and an ice vest, the latter adapted from a cooling innovation adidas originally developed for footballers competing in the intense heat of the 2026 World Cup. Together, the pieces form a full cooling system rather than a single statement garment.

Not everything in the collection is built around climate control, though. Alongside the inflatable pieces, Owens showed black technical running shoes, lightweight jogging suits, and track pants finished with his signature elongated drawstrings, the kind of quieter, more wearable pieces that tend to anchor an otherwise theatrical runway presentation. Owens also described a set of flesh-toned leather adidas pieces, explaining that he had, in his words, fetishized the brand’s classic three-striped sportswear for this project, a line that captures just how personal this reunion seems to be for him.

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The timing of the show added an extra layer of context to the collection. Owens presented the cooling-focused pieces in the middle of an unusually intense Paris heatwave, with temperatures during fashion week climbing toward 42°C (108°F) in a city not exactly known for widespread air conditioning. That backdrop turned what might have read as a purely conceptual gimmick into something closer to a practical, if exaggerated, solution to a very real problem.

It’s also worth noting that Owens and adidas aren’t the first to explore fan-powered cooling garments. Outdoor workers in Japan have relied on similar fan-propelled jackets for years to manage extreme summer heat, and adidas had already experimented with inflatable cooling apparel for Mercedes’ Formula 1 team before bringing the concept to Owens’ runway. What makes the Rick Owens version stand out is less the underlying technology than the scale and theatricality Owens brought to it, turning a performance-wear concept into a full sculptural statement.

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To understand why this reunion landed as such a big moment, it helps to look back at the original partnership. Rick Owens and adidas first linked up in the mid-2010s, a period when the German sportswear giant was actively rebuilding its fashion credibility through collaborations with major avant-garde designers. Owens’ run with the brand sat alongside Yohji Yamamoto’s long-running Y-3 line and a parallel partnership with Raf Simons, with the three designers collectively shaping adidas’ identity as a serious player in high-fashion sportswear during that era. Owens and adidas’s original collaboration wound down around 2016, with the last collection under that run arriving in 2017.

In the years since, Owens shifted his sportswear energy toward Converse, launching a partnership with the brand under his DRKSHDW label in 2018 that has run for roughly five years and produced a steady stream of releases. Y-3, meanwhile, has experienced a notable cultural resurgence in recent seasons, while Raf Simons’ adidas chapter has largely faded from the conversation. Against that backdrop, Owens’ return to adidas reads as a genuine surprise, reuniting one of the era’s most influential designer-sportswear pairings at a moment when oversized, technical, and trail-inflected design has become far more central to the broader sneaker market than it was the first time around.

The broader collaboration economy has also shifted considerably since 2016. Where the mid-2010s wave of designer sportswear tie-ups leaned heavily on minimalism and clean silhouettes, the current landscape rewards bigger, more conceptual statements, oversized trail boots, deconstructed performance gear, and runway pieces built to generate conversation well beyond the show itself. Owens’ return to adidas arrives squarely inside that shift, which may explain why the brand chose such a maximalist, technically loaded reintroduction rather than a quieter, archive-driven re-launch.

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One of the more practical questions raised by the adidas reunion is what it means for Owens’ ongoing DRKSHDW partnership with Converse. As of this writing, neither Owens nor either brand has indicated that the Converse relationship is ending, and there’s no official suggestion that adidas Originals is replacing it outright. For now, the two appear to exist independently of one another, but the adidas news has understandably renewed questions about how Owens plans to balance two major sportswear partnerships moving forward.

Pre-publish note: Whether the Converse x Rick Owens DRKSHDW line continues alongside the new adidas Originals partnership remains unconfirmed. This section should be revisited if either brand issues a statement clarifying the status of the Converse collaboration.

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As of this writing, no official release date or retail pricing has been announced for any piece in the Rick Owens x adidas Originals Spring/Summer 2027 collection. Paris Fashion Week presentations typically arrive roughly six to nine months ahead of actual retail availability, so a release sometime in the first half of 2027 is a reasonable expectation, but this should be treated as an estimate rather than a confirmed timeline.

note: Style codes, confirmed colorways beyond what was shown on the runway, retail pricing, and an official release date are all still pending. This article should be updated with confirmed details once adidas or Rick Owens issues an official launch announcement, likely via SNKRS, adidas.com, or the Rick Owens online store.

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Whatever else comes out of it, the Rick Owens x adidas Originals reunion already feels like one of the more meaningful sportswear comebacks of the year, not because it’s nostalgic for its own sake, but because Owens has clearly used the decade away to push the collaboration somewhere new. The Springblade-inspired footwear trades 2010s sleekness for 2020s bulk, and the inflatable, fan-cooled apparel turns a practical performance problem into a genuinely theatrical design statement. With no release date locked in yet, the main thing to watch now is how much of this runway-first concept survives the translation to retail when Spring/Summer 2027 actually arrives.