Rick Owens Fetishized the Tracksuit. adidas Let Him.

There's a word worth sitting with here. A writer at Highsnobiety used it deliberately — fetishized — to describe what Rick Owens did to the adidas tracksuit for Spring/Summer 2027. Not elevated. Not reimagined. Fetishized. That choice of language is doing real work, and the fact that it's being said out loud in a major fashion publication, without irony or apology, tells you something about where we are.

The Tracksuit Stopped Asking

For a long time, athletic clothing that wanted to be taken seriously by fashion had to perform a kind of self-effacement — had to signal that it understood its place, that it was reaching upward into the world of taste rather than demanding that world come meet it. The tracksuit was always the example. It kept getting folded into collections as a wink, a nod to the streets, a concession to comfort dressed up in expensive fabric. It was tolerated.

What's interesting about the Highsnobiety piece isn't the wearable air conditioning, as genuinely strange as that is. It's the framing around the tracksuit specifically. When a writer calls something fetishized and means it as the headline compliment — when that's the lead, not the caveat — the object in question has stopped asking permission. The tracksuit isn't being incorporated into fashion. It's being worshipped by it.

Rick Owens doing this with adidas is the right pairing for exactly that shift. These aren't two brands meeting in the middle. This is a designer with a fully formed, uncompromising aesthetic choosing a specific sportswear archive and pressing his weight into it. The result, according to the coverage, is wearable air conditioning — which sounds like a punchline until you consider that the most radical thing clothing can do right now is work. Actually function. Solve something real while looking like it belongs on a runway.

Function as Radical Act

There's a version of fashion that treats utility as a concession — as though acknowledging the body's needs is somehow beneath the enterprise. That version is aging out. The fact that wearable air conditioning lands not as a tech story but as a fashion story, covered by Highsnobiety in the same breath as the aesthetic language around the tracksuit, suggests the wall between those two things is coming down faster than most editors are willing to admit.

What the Highsnobiety piece stakes out — and what's worth paying attention to — is the idea that Spring/Summer 2027 contains both of these things simultaneously and treats neither as the compromise. The tracksuit gets fetishized. The clothing cools you down. And somehow the collection is bigger than the sum of those two facts.

That's not a small claim. That's a position. And the fact that it's being staked out now, in this language, about this collaboration, means the conversation has moved. The tracksuit doesn't need a designer to rescue it anymore. It needed one to take it seriously — seriously enough to obsess over it, to let it be the object of real desire rather than a knowing reference.

Rick Owens did that. adidas let him. The rest of fashion is going to have to figure out what that means for everything they've been treating as beneath them.