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Five years into their collision, the pair add a Megalace mule and a pared-back pull-on boot, landing in Japan September 18.
Dr. Martens and Rick Owens are rel three boots built on the same Quad sole this fall, and two of them are shapes the collaboration has not tried before. The lineup, QUAD SOLE PULL ON BOOT, QUAD SOLE STEEL TOE BOOT, and QUAD SOLE MEGALACE MULE, arrive in Japan on September 18 at Dr. Martens‘ Tokyo, Nagoya, and Sapporo stores, followed by the brand’s online store at midnight on September 19, a staggered rollout that gives physical retail a full day’s head start over the site. All three share a stacked Quad sole finished with pure white welt stitching, the collection’s one consistent visual marker across an otherwise varied set of sil, from a slip-on mule to a heavyweight steel-toe work boot.
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The QUAD SOLE MEGALACE MULE is the more unusual of the two new shapes. It is the first time this collect has built a mule rather than a boot, though it borrows heavily from the boots around it: Rick Owens‘ sign megalace detailing runs across the upper, joined by eyelets and metal hardware placed throughout, giving a slip-on shoe roughly the visual weight of the collection’s full boots despite the open heel. The QUAD SOLE PULL ON BOOT takes the opposite approach, stripping detail back rather than adding it. Drawing on Dr. Martens’ existing Pull On boot category, it swaps laces for strap and button closures at the opening, landing as the pared-down, minimal-hardware option in a lineup otherwise built around exaggerated lacing systems.
Between them, the two new styles cover ground the collide has not previously staked out. Where past Rick Owens seasons for Dr. Martens leaned almost entirely on elaborate lace-up boots built tall enough to require a side zip just to get them on, a slip-on mule and a strap-closure pull-on give the range something closer to an easy option and a no-lacing option, without abandon the hardware-heavy detail that has defined the partner since it began. Both new shapes still carry the collide sig extend, geometric tongue construction, just applied to bodies that ask less of the person putting them on than an 18-hole boot does.
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The QUAD SOLE STEEL TOE BOOT is the lineup’s return sil rather than a debut, continue a shape Dr. Martens and Rick Owens introduced in an earlier season. It combines classic eyelets and speed hooks with the connect’s exaggerated wraparound laces and an inner ankle zip, built from waxed Republic leather with a padded collar and, as the name states, a functioning steel toe cap. Construction follows Dr. Martens’ standard Goodyear welt, where the upper and sole are heat-sealed and stitched together for added durability, and the boot carry a special edition heel loop distinguishing it from the brand’s non-collaboration steel toe styles. It is the most convention work boot-shaped of the three, before the wraparound laces and stacked Quad sole push it back into the collaboration’s usual register.
Three pairs of black platform shoes arranged in a row against a white wall, including lace-up combat boots, strappy platform sandals, and tall zip-up boots, all with distinctive yellow stitching.
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Dr. Martens and Rick Owens have worked together since March 2021, when the first drop reworked the brand’s 1460 Bex platform boot with Owens’ lacing system. Owens described the appeal at the time in terms of the boots’ place in the punk shows he attended as a teenager, tying Dr. Martens to a raw, sweaty vitality he wanted to channel into his own designs. The partnership has continued in roughly yearly capsules since: an 18-hole boot and reworked 1460 in late 2022, campaigns shot with performance artists including Ron Athey and Sissy Misfit, and a 2024 relaunch built on the brand’s then-new 14XX sole platform under the banner “-DEVIANCE REDEFINED-.” Recurring design signatures carry across nearly every drop regardless of silhouette: oversized pearl-toned megalace detailing, extended geometric tongues, and welt stitching in either yellow or white depending on the season. Campaign imagery has followed a similar pattern of casting performers and scene figures rather than conventional models, a choice that lines up with how Owens has described the collaboration publicly: as a way of channeling the same raw, subcultural energy he associated with Dr. Martens boots at the punk and industrial shows he attended as a teenager, long before he became a fashion designer himself.
That five-year run sits on top of Dr. Martens‘ own longer history. The brand traces back to 1945, when German physician Klaus Märtens developed an air-cushioned sole for his own injured foot, refining it commercially with engineer Herbert Funck before UK bootmaker R. Griggs Group licensed the design and released the first 1460 boot on April 1, 1960. The style found its way from British factory workers into mod, skinhead, and later punk culture, worn on record covers and stages by figures including The Who’s Pete Townshend, well before Rick Owens folded that same silhouette into his own vocabulary decades later.
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Rick Owens’ own path to that reworking runs through Los Angeles and Paris rather than London. He launched his eponymous label in 1994 out of a small storefront off Hollywood Boulevard, after studying painting and then pattern-making and draping at art and trade schools in Los Angeles, building a reputation on draped, monochrome, deliberately unfinished-looking tailoring. A Vogue-backed runway debut in New York in 2002 brought him the CFDA’s Emerging Talent award the same year, and by 2003 he had relocated to Paris to take over as artistic director of the French fur house Revillon, where his runway collections have been staged ever since. Dr. Martens, by contrast, spent its first decades as workwear before punk and skinhead subcultures adopted it in the 1970s and 80s, the exact lineage Owens has said drew him to the brand in the first place. The Quad Sole collaboration sits at the meeting point of those two histories: an American-born, Paris-based designer known for stripped-back luxury applying his lacing systems and proportions to a British boot that built its reputation on the factory floor and the mosh pit rather than the runway.
The JAPAN rel brings that history together in one three-style capsule, arrive at physical stores a day ahead of its online release, a staggered rollout the connection has used for past Japan drops as well.
