Martine Rose Spring 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Martine Rose Spring 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Martine Rose and Photographer Sharna Osborne with models Z

Martine Rose challenges beauty standards with her Spring 2025 campaign lensed by photographer Sharna Osborne.

The most immediately striking aspect of the imagery is the return of the false noses from the collection’s runway show, oversized latex things that dominate the face of their wearer and distort their true proportions, uncannily shattering the gestalt of the face and turning expectations back on the viewer. The impact is further deepened by the fact that all of the noses have the same sallow, white-person skin tone no matter the color of the individual who wears it: a nod to the reality that a eurocentric and white supremacist heritage continues to shape contemporary perceptions of what kind of bodies and images can be aesthetically valuable.

Osborne’s photographic approach takes on a similar theme of distortion. The images are hazy and grainy, as if we’re watching a flip phone video of a warped VHS tape playing on an analogue television. The attitudes and actions of the enschnozed protagonists are similarly layered and inscrutable; they seem to occupy some sort of art gallery or textile studio space, and bring to it a sense of irreverent impudence.

The campaign is not only striking in its punk subversion of the typical polish of fashion imagery, but also in its synthesis of directness and ambiguity. We can instantly understand that contemporary beauty standards are being criticized, but the campaign never tells us where to go from here. Instead, we are provoked into questioning, into embracing the chaos, into daring to dream up a new world out of the old one.

It’s a fitting message for Martine Rose, a brand that remains fiercely committed to doing things its own way and speaking to its own community of genuine individuals. The nose knows: nobody does it like Martine Rose.