Alectra Rothschild’s AW25 Masculina collection, Give the Girl a Gun, is a raw, unfiltered expression of trans rage
Today’s Masculina show opened with the unmistakable voice of President Donald Trump, spewing his latest vitriol against trans people. Swiftly, however, he was cut off by performance artist Cassie Augusta Jørgensen, demanding him to “shut the f*** up”. Her spoken word piece, which found the artist in a cinched corset cackling at and challenging the audience, concluded with an earth-shattering scream, inspired by Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns. In the film, the scream shatters the glass in a rooftop atrium. Luckily the show venue didn’t have any windows.
While previous Masculina outings were joyful celebrations of trans women, autumn/winter '25 embodies something both dark and vital: rage. Trans rage, specifically. “It’s addressing how people treat trans people. It’s way more a pointed finger – an outrage, an outcry,” says designer Alectra Rothschild. “Only focusing on celebrating and the beauty of transness has done only so much. It’s humanising trans people – and that’s super important. But I also think people need to take it seriously, and I don’t know that they do with the last work I’ve shown.”Dubbed Give the Girl a Gun, the show directly confronts and calls out the audience (hinted by the invitation, which depicted a gun pointing directly at the recipient). “It’s a way of telling everybody that they’re all complicit in this,” says Rothschild. “Everybody is allowing trans people to be treated like absolute dirt continuously and I’ve just had it.”
Here, Rotschild imagines her cast of trans women – her muses – as a gang of assassins (those latex face coverings harken to the gun-wielding anime of Lucy Liu’s character in Kill Bill) or warriors returning from battle, their clothes ripped to shreds and hanging off the body. “I finished a garment as I normally would and then tore it apart,” says Rothschild of her process. Fashioned from deadstock and upcycled material – including leather, sequins and fur both faux and real – the garments, while born of a certain violence, are also unapologetically sexy (a Masculina must), the gaping tears revealing the body. Many looks, as Rothschild puts it, “only cover what they need to”. Elsewhere, pointy-shouldered outerwear doubles as a sort of weapon. These are women you ought not to cross.
The full-throttle abrasiveness of the show – its rage – certainly stirred something in the audience. But Rothschild isn’t overly concerned with the show’s impact. Rather, it was an expression – a scream – she couldn’t hold in a moment longer. “I don’t know how people are going to take it, because fashion and politics is a fickle thing,” says Rothschild, noting that more often than not it doesn’t land. “But me, sending it out, with a full cast of trans people… I mean, if you don’t take it seriously, that’s your problem.”
See all the looks from Alectra Rothschild / Masculina's autumn/winter '25 collection below:
