Kink, BDSM and witches dominated beauty at Australian Fashion Week 2025

Another more bestial look tapped into the transformative elements of sex magic and Norton’s paintings of hybrid human-animal bodies. Thompson used “cold contouring” for a succubus chic beauty look that was raw and primal. Lids were left sweaty and bare, delicately emphasised veins replacing eyeshadow. On hair, Richard Kavanagh used sex tape to hold long plaited extensions inspired by shibari ropes. These extensions feature throughout the show, twisting around wrists, holding hands behind backs and jammed in models’ mouths in lieu of ball gags.

Nicol & Ford wasn’t the only runway where beauty looks were dark, uncanny, and frequently apocalyptic. After all, the designers said: “We live in dark, violent and troubling times, we’re all in a darker headspace based on what’s happened in the world in the last six months.” Here are our picks from an Australian Fashion Week like no other.

INJURY

There was a video game “choose your player” energy at Injury where founder and director Eugene Leung and design and brand director Dan Tse took inspiration from heroes of The Matrix and Dune. A blend of CGI artistry and sci-fi inspiration resulted in a cyber goth aesthetic, with beauty director Susan Lilian creating a look that incorporated sclera lenses, fake tattoos and world-weary eyes (the red shade in the ubiquitous Makeup Forever Flash Palette was used). 

Jade Pham, owner of CJ Artistry, hand-crafted delicate nails with clear plastic and flowers at the ends of fingertips, while hair director Jason Fassbender took inspiration from Rooney Mara in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and an array of punk and goth heroes. Hair was heavily dusted with powder and then sprayed down with hair spray for looks that varied wildly but maintained a stiff, eerily animated aesthetic.

WACKIE JU

Designer Jackie Wu’s collection, titled Saviour, was inspired by the destruction of Yuanmingyuan by the British and French during the Opium Wars. Backstage, beauty helped Wu fill the runway with the ghosts of imperial guards, concubines and nobles who emerged to a screeching cacophony of birds and the low thrum of war drums. Chinese make-up director Carly Lim said the looks were inspired by these figures, but also the ruins themselves. “What Jackie really wanted was these heroic figures, forced to desert their home,” says Lim. 

For concubines and noble women, lips were painted with an intricate floral design. The perfect shade of faded, pale red was achieved mixing MAC lipstick in So Grand with inc.credible Cosmetics lip. Shapes for liner were crude, rather than graphic. “Nothing was winged or refined, I wanted rough shapes you’d find on artefacts,” says Lim. Meanwhile, close to 200 hours were spent creating hair pieces for the show, according to Richard Kavanagh. The hero piece was a 20-foot-long red wig for a ghostly spectral figure with clawlike hands and red sclera lenses, a chic, wrath-filled ghost rising from the ashes of Imperial tragedy.

SPEED

The aesthetic at Speed was dark mermaids rising from the bottom of the ocean with regal grace and make-up director Sean Brady aimed for post-apocalyptic Dune aesthetics. “It’s my favourite genre,” he says of post-apocalyptic cinema, “there’s always a strong hot bitch and it’s always told with a beauty element. Milla Jovovich has that red lip even in Resident Evil for god knows what reason.” 

Kevyn Aucoin Glass Skin Illuminator was liberally applied to cheeks for a snail secretion slick while MAC shimmer pigments were used on eyes, mimicking light filtering through water and hitting skin or scales. Hair director Renya Xydis handcrafted Swarovski crystal hair pieces and hand-dyed a Fifth Element-inspired wig. “It’s hardcore, tactile hairdressing, the kind of stuff I was doing in the 90s,” she said of the show.

MARIAM SEDDIQ

What would It-girls wear to their last night on earth? This is the question designer Mariam Seddiq posed at CHROMA. Backstage, Madison Voloshin created black pixie cuts with super choppy fringes (it’s the apocalypse so dystopian party girls are cutting their hair with nail scissors). Beauty director Susan Lilian carved out eyes with sooty shadows and bleached brows – it looked like models had smudged on some charcoal from burnt-out wreckage. 

The hero of the beauty look was the macabre “gloves”; artificially elongated fingers spray painted silver and matte black ending in matching clawed talons crafted by Katya Ioujakova using OPI Matte Topcoat and Saviland Chrome Powders respectively. “The models got very in the mood after the nails and body paint were applied,” says Ioujakova, “they felt it added a demonic touch.”

IORDANES SPYRIDON GOGOS

The Iordanes Spyridon Gogos Jordan show was enchanting and disorienting. Make-up director Nicole Thompson blended face paint with $2 supermarket clay masks to mimic the chunky textures and prints of the collection. Models also made their own tweaks to make-up looks. The Real Housewives of Sydney’s Carolien Gaultier eschewed face paint for 2010 Kardashian-glam, while local drag queen Hannah Conda bashfully admitted she’d snatched her nose. 

Thi Vu, creative director of nails at Beauty Pavilion, incorporated beads, jewellery wire, wool, earrings and chains from Gogos’ cutting room floor to create 42 sets of talons (that took 70 hours over 7 days to create). Meanwhile, on hair, Richard Kavanagh admitted it takes a lot of Redken hairspray to keep a Trojan Horse headpiece made of real hair looking sleek.

ALL IS A GENTLE SPRING

At the last show of the week, designer Isabelle Hellyer and make-up director Katie Angus created a soft-goth look leveraging the fact that models, some of whom had walked every show on the roster, were looking as tired and raggedy as they were feeling. “The light purples and blues in their eye bags weren’t all that dissimilar to the colours I loved in the collection,” Hellyer quipped. Each model had a wash of the brand’s Hazelnut eyeshadow for a haunted eye, and some donned slept in liner.

The team were inspired by the women of the Academy Player’s Director, a kind of Yellow Pages for casting directors to find actors in their agents in the 1950s. These women had a glamorous despondency to which Hellyer was drawn. Hellyer specified a roughed-up curl from hair director Diane Gorgievski, referencing Madonna in Dangerous Game, another inspiration for the collection. “She’s styled in an easy shorthand for a movie star with smooth Hollywood waves. But then, there’s a gun to her head, and it’s messed up her hair.”

ASIYAM

Last year, Asiyam made history as the first solo modest fashion brand to host its own show. For the label’s second runway designer Asia Hassan, who arrived in Australia from Somalia as a refugee, drew inspiration from the butterfly’s life cycle. The collection was feminine, but the show itself was a statement; ending with a model donning a keffiyeh walking the runway and facing the media pit for several minutes as models filed behind her, forming a silent blockade to standing ovation from the front row. 

Sean Brady went for a bold-eye look. “It was really important to me that the girls looked strong,” he said, “and that there was reference to traditional kajal in the eye. I think in the state of the world right now, it was important to have a modest fashion brand, that is Muslim-owned, feeling like it has a lot of strength.” Hair told a similar story, with long Lady Godiva locks shining on the runway. Hair director Mary Alamine used O&M, Original Queenie Hairspray for a high-gloss, regal finish.