Byredo's playground beauty brought a sense of nostalgia at Simone Rocha

If you’ve ever coated your nails with a few layers of Tipp-Ex, swiped the tips with a felt pen, or used a lipliner for your eyebrows, then the beauty moodboard for Simone Rocha’s autumn/winter 2025 show will be quite familiar. The look for the show, masterminded by make-up artist Thomas de Kluyver, was all about recapturing the open-mindedness of children, an approach that manifested in beaded brows, whitewashed nails and casually thrown-up hair.

“Simone was inspired by the children’s fable The Tortoise And The Hare, so we wanted to do something playful and childlike with the make-up,” de Kluyver shares with British Vogue. “We have these beaded brows – pink, red and black – along with a gorgeous flushed cheek and beautiful brown lipstick. The colour palette is classic Simone and very cute and teenage.” In past years, he’s conjured whimsical appliqué ribbons that were attached to models’ cheekbones, and climbing rose vines in place of eyebrows for Rocha shows.

The brows – this season’s focal point – were a three-step process. First, de Kluyver used a Byredo lipstick (shades Lost In Letter, Eperdu and On The Edge) to draw on spindly, curved brows. Then, he took prosthetic glue, coating the lipstick brow and waiting a few minutes for the solution to grow tacky. After that, monochromatic beads were fixed to each brow with tweezers, creating the illusion of softly iridescent texture – much like the sprinkles you might top a child’s birthday cake with. Stitched together in single file, the bead colours matched the lipstick outline beneath.

Hairstylist Holly Smith aimed to “bring a little bit of individuality with a few detailed hairstyles peppered throughout”. And so, some models had their hair loose while others wore low bunched buns, or what she describes as boyish, chilled, undone-but-done styles. “To achieve this we used a lot of bumble & bumble thickening spray because we needed the hair off the face. We also wanted to get rid of anything that looked too washed or clean,” she said. “It’s about texture, not a solid mass… almost like they did it themselves.”

The same theme of playground innocence was reflected in the models’ manicures: three variations designed by celebrity manicurist Ama Quashie. “We have a matte white, a white moon and a red moon: all created to evoke this idea of childhood and a sweet type of provocation,” she explains. “It’s about being that age when you didn’t have access to nail varnish, so used things like Tipp-Ex, instead.”