Editor’s letter: summer 2025

Taken from the summer 25 print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

We have more in common than divides us. They’re the words I kept returning to following Keir Starmer’s ​“island of strangers” speech, in which the prime minister made a play for Reform voters by unleashing rhetoric that will, you expect, haunt him for a very long time.

There’s certainly plenty in common between the young trans women photographed by Jacqueline Landvik who, at a moment of great difficulty for their community, speak of ​“girls helping each other buy hormones. The communities of care [that are] forming in the shadows.” (Cisgender readers will surely find common ground with the ideal bathroom of Safe, one of our interviewees, being ​“whichever has a shorter queue”.)

You can feel the same community mindset in cover star Cortisa Star, the teenage American rapper who talks of bringing ​“as many dolls as possible into the studio”. A sense of affinity in the pan-generational love-in between timeless provocateur Goldie and revered graffiti writer 10Foot, who share deep lineage in signage. And, of course, a more visual example of commonality in the issue’s Mona Tougaard-starring Prada special. It’s been half a decade since Raf Simons joined Miuccia Prada as co-creative director of the brand. Five years on, the pair continue to break new ground.

As ever, there are no strangers in THE FACE – only friends you haven’t read about yet.

Matthew Whitehouse, Editor-in-Chief

London, May 2025