Known to make surprise appearances on the fashion week calendar, Martine Rose presented in Milan for the first time, showing off her SS25 collection at men’s week. This season, however, birthed beauty looks begging the question many have been in search of an answer for. How do we define beauty? And what makes someone more beautiful than another? For Martine, the answer lies in the “cracks and crevices of culture”: from the unusual, to the unseen and unpredictable.
“The Spring-Summer 2025 Collection is dedicated to expressions of beauty spawned from the likes of disturbance, humour and sex,” read the show notes. Throughout the 34-look collection, maximalist nails adorned with bouffant crystals and plaid, floor-sweeping black wigs, and prosthetic noses stole the show. Designed to “fuel a confrontational look,” the long, disheveled hair and obviously fake noses reminded us of featurism and Black exclusion in beauty.
With over 44,000 nose jobs performed in the US in 2022 (over double the 20.7 thousand in Italy that year), rhinoplasties are often modeled after Eurocentric noses. “The first thing you see in people is often their nose. And it is often the first thing they change about themselves,” she tells Vogue. Presenting in a city the show notes referred to as “a traditional platform for the mainstream search of beauty,” the British designer decided to push against that with those wide, taped on noses (which oppose the traditional “ski slope” nose standard), seconded by a “hard wig, soft life” hair look.
Behind the messy, knotted hair looks were hairstylist Gary Gill (who was responsible for Fendi and Hérmes as well) and colorist Tasha Spencer, tying up disheveled tresses and making thin bangs go airborne. From noses to hair and nails, “the body-modifying elements question conventional notions of beauty, character and anonymity,” Rose wrote, interrogating the beauty standards and how they exist in the first place. So, between the walls of Porta Romana and the recycled sheet-covered seating, the tense, “untried and curious evolutions of beauty” were able to emerge.
