In 2019, Christopher John Rogers won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund‘s top prize, raking in $400,000 dollars to fund his brand. Then, the pandemic hit and he dropped off the NYFW calendar. “It was really strange to go from this really big high to this bout of uncertainty about what was going to be next,” Rogers told Vogue on their podcast yesterday. But, last night, at his NYFW FW25 show, Rogers reminded us what perseverance looks like.
In his return to the city’s official calendar, this season’s beauty went in the complete opposite direction than his last show in Spring/Summer 2020. The beauty back then—childlike and sculptural—matured in his Fall/Winter 2025 show.
“The inspiration is a strong woman who knows what she wants,” hair stylist Sonny Molina tells ESSENCE, backstage ahead of the show, about the show’s chignons. “It looks a bit simple, but there’s a lot going on underneath the surface,” Molina says.
To execute the look, a moussed ponytail is pulled straight up, then anchored with two bobby pins and hair ties, flipped down, sliced in half and wrapped around. To experiment with the fine-tuned bun, hair pieces dyed to the models’s natural hair color, almost like the angular bang at Mugler last season, were then fixed onto the chignons.
“The bang is very square and strong, similar to the block coloring in the collection,” he says. Bumble and bumble Finishing Spray was used to remove flyaways, add sheen, and flatten the hair. For the other straight, long bangs, “we used the mousse at the front of the head to blow all of the hair forward, then on the right side to work in the roots going backwards,” he says. For this, he worked Thickening Full Form Soft Hair Mousse in opposing directions.
Meanwhile, makeup artist Alex Levy leaned into patina metallics, coined as the show’s “galactic lip” to add a new dimension. “When the [models] move under the light it’s going to kind of look like a different color,” Levy says. To achieve the look, eye makeup was used on the lips—like the MAC Colour Excess Gel Pencil Eye Liner as lip liner, and Dazzleshadow Extreme as lipstick—for a textured finish.
“We’re playing with colors that are still bright and vibrant,” perhaps a nod to the playful nature of Rogers’ world. “But they have a base that has a grit to them,” Levy says. This was in the large part thanks to grounding the tones with Dazzleshadow Liquid. “We wanted this to be like [a mature woman’s] going out lip,” he says. “In the Christopher John Rogers world, our nude is a shimmer nude.”