Dishevelled ballet buns and headbands replaced Cecilie Bahnsen's signature braids this season

If you were lucky enough to step backstage at Cecilie Bahnsen's autumn/winter 2025 show in Paris, you’d have noticed a familiar signature of the Danish designer conspicuously missing. Wading through air thick with the scent of styling cream and the quiet hum of hairdryers, you’d find her emblematic braids nowhere to be seen. “This season departs from our tradition of designing a braided look for Cecilie Bahnsen,” explained lead hairdresser and Bahnsen veteran Cim Mahony.

The new look came about as a way to reflect Bahnsen’s partnership with sportswear giants The North Face and Asics. As Mahony notes, Bahnsen's “intricate designs float somewhere between couture and ready-to-wear,” so a hint of activewear was “sprinkled on top.”

To build on this hybrid aesthetic, the hair team turned to topknots, ponytails, and free-flowing locks with what Mahony called “a very rough, almost sweaty texture.” For type-four-textured hair, Mahony said they “opted for natural texture, but contained it to small silhouettes as well as beautifully crafted cornrows,” ensuring continuity across the diverse cast by Emma Mattel. No matter the hair type, all short styles were contained with a simple two-centimetre-wide headband, completing and complementing the athletic aesthetic.

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Throughout, the Dyson Chitosan pre-styling cream and the newly launched Dyson Supersonic R hairdryer played a key role. Mahony described the process as “scrunching the product into the hair and lightly diffusing to mimic a slightly sweaty texture post-workout,” then securing everything with a headband for added control.

Meanwhile, silver glitter traced the lower lash line, adding a soft glimmer that complemented the collection’s theme of fleeting beauty. Bahnsen’s floral inspirations also hinted at impermanence, a notion echoed by the hair’s undone polish.

Below, step backstage and explore the step-by-step process of Cecilie Bahnsen's AW25 beauty look: