Last month, intense body horror The Substance went viral, grossing an impressive $47 million at the box office against a $17.5 million budget, and prompting hundreds of millions of reaction and review videos on TikTok. Combining bright stylisation with gore-filled scenes of sensory overload, the film is a two hour and 20 minute regurgitation of the ideology that a woman’s value is reduced to her beauty, depreciating with every birthday celebrated.
As mainstream culture’s hypersexualisation intensifies, The Substance’s popularity speaks to a new subversive, antithetical form of beauty: the sexy grotesque.
Halloween 2024 offered a particularly vivid illustration of the shift. Traditionally (Heidi Klum aside, perhaps), celebrity Halloween costumes have focused on sex appeal, but reflecting on the most celebrated looks of 2024, there has been a clear preference for leaning into the absurd. Victoria’s Secret model Alex Consani embodied this trend by dressing as “sexy Gru” from Despicable Me, wearing black lingerie, an oversized bald head and a prosthetic nose. Elsewhere, Kim Kardashian dressed as an albino alligator, and internet personality Amelia Dimoldenberg transformed into Roz from Monsters Inc. It seems that while sexuality remains central to pop culture, stars are finding new ways to drive engagement and clicks, via the unusual.
A fashion testament to the rise of sexy grotesque is the divisive (now viral) split-toe shoe, the Tabi. Originally designed by Martin Margiela in 1988, the hooved silhouette has been doused in hype since the pandemic. Last year, a girl’s Tabis were stolen by her date, and the story was covered by The New York Times, Dazed and Vogue. There are 26.5 million posts that mention “Tinder tabi thief” on TikTok, and the split-toe style has been duped by a number of brands. For fashion trend forecaster J’Nae Phillips, this resurgence speaks to the fast-spreading rejection of conformity, reflecting a broader movement “favouring grotesque, exaggerated forms that blur the lines between function and art”. Phillips predicts that five-finger shoes, such as the Vibram, are set to become the next cult favourite, as the commercial market increasingly embraces innovative and boundary-defying design.
Independent designer Rick Owens has long embraced the sexy grotesque, and has been tapped by more mainstream brands like Converse, Dr Martens and Moncler in recent years to bring his dark, edgy appeal to their collaborations. Owens’s runway shows frequently feature prosthetics, reptilian contact lenses and distorted proportions.
Owens also frequently collaborates with Fecal Matter, the Canadian design duo of Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, known for their post-human aesthetic that fuses macabre elements with surrealism. Dalton and Bhaskaran have walked several Rick Owens shows, including the recent Spring/Summer 2025 show. They also starred in the brand’s 2021 Converse x Rick Owens DRKSHDW campaign. Fecal Matter’s work remains highly provocative, perhaps most famously with their “skin heels”, a $10,000 shoe concept brought to life via digital rendering.
Dan Salkey, strategy partner at Small World, a consultancy that builds entertainment-first brands and that I also work for, feels there’s a distinct reason sexy grotesque art, marketing and dressing is on the rise. “In a fragmented media environment where people are harder to reach than ever before, the name of the game is entertain or die. There are plenty of ways brands inside and outside of fashion have been doing this: Duolingo builds brand lore through its green owl mascot, Loewe creates advertising that feels like it came out of a sketch show, while MSCHF has combined commerce and creativity to entertain people in new and bizarre ways,” he explains. “Ultimately, these brands understand that in a world filled with repetitive meme-style content, absurdism is a proxy for entertainment.” Both absurdism and sexy grotesque feel like extreme attempts to rewire our brains to see marketing as cultural commentary.
Elsewhere, brands are drawing from the sexy grotesque aesthetic through sensory marketing strategies that engage consumers beyond the visual. Notably, the use of food imagery has become a prominent motif in fashion and beauty, as employed by Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode. To promote the brand’s glazing milk or lip balms in flavours watermelon slice or espresso, recent campaigns feature Bieber pouring an oversized bottle of ‘glazing milk’ over her body while model Gabriette is captured with cake smeared provocatively across her face. This emphasis on sensory appeal is useful within the beauty realm, where consumers can’t experience products before purchasing online. For beauty brands, it’s also part of a more significant trend — an effort to craft brand identities that resonate on a more visceral, emotional level.
Exploring the aesthetic
Some smaller brands are engaging with the sexy grotesque head-on. Beauty mogul and makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench and her brand Isamaya Beauty have become known for their non-conformist, provocative approach to beauty. In February 2023, Ffrench launched her Lips collection of chrome penis-shaped lipsticks released in limited drops and stocked at Dover Street Market. Last month during Frieze, Ffrench exhibited her self-portrait series ‘Suspension’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The series features close-ups of Ffrench’s face and body stretched or pierced by hooks, with the intention to explore the grey areas between the “beautiful and uncomfortable”, using the body as a lens, Ffrench said in a statement. Her brand declined to share revenues but sales grew 120 per cent between 2023 and 2024, led by the US, notably New York and LA.
Another artist breaking boundaries in this space is fashion designer and artist Michaela Stark, known for her intricate couture pieces that combine hyper-femininity with body distortion to redefine what it means to be beautiful. Stark creates made-to-order demi couture from her London studio, and presented a new lingerie line called Panty at Milan Fashion Week for AW24, supported by Fondazione Sozzani. “With so much imagery of people fitting conventional beauty standards, I personally feel quite suffocated,” she explains. “I didn’t really consider my body to be that political. It wasn’t until I stepped into projects that were bigger than myself [that I noticed the context of how people perceived it].”
Amid increasing digital awareness, Stark was steered further into playing within the grotesque: the juxtaposing ideology is conspicuous, as her imagery remains rooted in traditional feminine beauty cues, like hourglass figures or soft skin, which are then distorted. “If you want to change someone’s perception of beauty and open up the lens of what is considered beautiful, you need to see something the eye is already trained to perceive as beautiful,” says Stark.
As the digital landscape becomes increasingly oversaturated, brands are turning to extreme emotional appeals — ecstasy versus horror, delight versus disgust, appealing or appalling the senses in a bid to ‘break the internet’ for a day. In this bold new landscape, beauty’s allure isn’t confined to the surface. It provokes, confronts and reshapes our understanding of what it can represent. Embracing sexy grotesque is a statement on society’s evolving fascination with the unconventional, a step towards redefining beauty for the modern age.
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