Editor’s letter, winter 2025

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

I thought a lot about ​“experience” while making this issue. So much of what we do at THE FACE is focused on newness. I love it – it’s what keeps me excited. But I also love the kind of knowledge and understanding you only really get from living. See: FACE Editorial Assistant Tiffany Lai’s brilliant feature on pensioner protestors, Jesse Glazzard’s beautiful portraits of a middle-aged trans community in Italy and 71-year-old Cindy Sherman’s eerie fantastic AW25 fashion story.

Not that experience always always equates to age. Take cover star Romy Mars, who has experienced more in her 19 years than many do in a lifetime (not least, being grounded for trying to use her dad’s credit card to charter a helicopter). As she reveals in her first-ever cover story, where she answers questions from FACE friends and family, Romy is a wise-beyond-her-years master of her own universe – with as expansive views on girlhood as anyone.

Then there’s Odessa A’zion, the star of Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA. Odessa spent years on the edge of breakout, until experience brought her to Josh Safdie. Now she’s opposite Timothée Chalamet in the director’s ping pong Oscar contender Marty Supreme, with a performance of precision and depth that might just be her Big One. ​“It’s a life-changing, career-shifting role, with people that you’d only dream to work with,” she tells writer Trey Taylor. ​“It just felt like this crazy gift.”

Add to this Dave, the 27-year-old king of UK rap. He exploded onto the scene as a 16-year-old wunderkind, rapping about his two brothers’ incarcerations and a system stacked against them growing up in Streatham, South London. If he sounded mature then, imagine how he sounds on new album The Boy Who Played the Harp – an extraordinary cycle through guilt, shame, repentance and, yes, lived experience.

Experience tells me it might just be our best issue yet.

Matthew Whitehouse, Editor-in-Chief

London, November 2025