Botched plastic surgery, fleshy bruises, and migrating filler aren’t usually looks that many people strive for, but they were all over the runway at Natasha Zinko’s SS25 show at London Fashion Week. Catching up with Natasha Zinko herself after the show, she described her inspiration as being “plastic,” and how it's everywhere: inside our homes, our soil, our seas, and… our bodies.
The 47 look collection opened to pitch black with the sounds of an interview echoing through the warehouse space where the show was set. A woman’s voice described her experience with plastic surgery in almost grotesque detail, before being told “you’re messing with nature.” In response, she said: “nature messed with me.”
Behind a glass window lights came on revealing a distorted, opaque first look of the collection. As the first model walked on the other side of the glass, wearing a clinical white playsuit and knee-high surgical socks, she stopped to scrutinise her reflection in the glass, facing the audience but appearing not even to notice us there.
Each model that followed did the same, stepping out in surgical coats and patients gowns, blending the implications of both into one clinical entity. The hospital gowns usually worn for recovery from surgery were sexed up, with stiffened collars, open backs, and adjustable straps; a reminder that, even in recovery, looks are always the priority over everything else.
Jeans adorned with external bum-lifts were accompanied by t-shirts with drawn-on surgical line boobs and the iconic phrase “Who’s your surgeon?” Tracksuits and denim jackets were distorted in unusual silhouettes, with extra trouser legs and hoods attached in the wrong places as a reference to the horrors of botched surgeries-gone-wrong.
But don’t get it twisted: Natasha Zinko’s SS25 collection wasn’t a cautionary tale on plastic surgery. In fact, speaking with her after the show, she explained how she sees it as “people investing [in themselves,] and not hiding” because of their insecurities. Instead of frowning on cosmetic surgery, Zinko said she was simply inspired by it, putting old-fashion implants and body-modifications on the outside of clothes instead of hiding them inside the body.
In an age of secrecy, where revealing the cosmetic surgeries you've had done is seen as a slip up, Natasha Zinko wants us to stop hiding and instead wear it as confidently as our clothes. As she put it, the whole collection pretty much asked: “why should we hide?”
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