Immediately pre-show, his jaw set with concentration, Rick Owens was insinuating a long, down-filled two-panel tendril of silky pink synthetic within the bulbously twisted, rich saffron pillowing already being worn by the model in front of him. “You know, I wanted it to be voluptuous and flamboyant,” he said, “but then I look at it: It definitely is about strapping yourself in for a bumpy ride.”

Do we need to say what ride that is? Owens didn’t waste his breath. Instead he flitted away to tweak and pluck and refine the details of a collection that mixed extreme sculptural form, soft and fluffy like beaten egg white, with a harder undercurrent. Once out walking the models came and went hither and thither, irregularly—they had rehearsed three times so presumably this was on purpose—and thus it was difficult to be sure that there was a planned arc for the order of the looks. This view started with a suite of leather jackets, richly treated to look rough, with zippered lateral pouches for storage, and buffering, too big to count as pockets. Below these were Owens’s favored wide kick-y pants, the Madchester silhouette, with quadruple (maybe quintuple) welt round-toe shoes with a protruding shelf-let at the heel. Then suit jackets, one olive, one dusky lilac, with extended knit arms in different colors worn over wide pants with extreme folding protrusions running from left hem to right thigh. Coats in horizontal patchworks of glossed leather and wide-weave linen, slightly frayed, featured, too. Then the airbags were activated, bursting forth from the Owens dashboard first as constricted monochrome entwining at the shoulder and later saffron, orange, gray, and lilac flourishing all down the torso.

The colors were softer, many of the pieces certainly, too. Owens said that he’d initially planned this collection, entitled Glitter, to be the first in a positively-flavored suite of shows. He said: “I wanted to kind of get away from the doom. My last few seasons have been about doom: How do you negotiate things, and things changing, and handling that gracefully. But . . . this cycle ends up being a continuation of the other cycle.” He added: “Maybe it’s because clothes fundamentally are about fear and threats. It’s basically always been about armor: putting on the best face you can.”