From sci-fi sneakers to Italian film fantasies, this creative mind exaggerates the rules of fashion and beauty.
Picture Rihanna on the cover of Interview magazine wearing a nun’s habit and pencil-thin brows above kohl-smoked eyes, or Zendaya sprouting Vulcan ears in a spoof sci-fi ad for an athletic brand. In Nadia Lee Cohen’s world, beauty is a storytelling device – makeup, hair, and styling are dialed up to transform today’s icons into cinematic characters. It’s beauty direction as world-building – turning celebrity shoots into scenes from a movie only Cohen could direct.
When Cohen shot Kate Moss for Perfect Magazine, she cast the supermodel as a retro-fantasy siren in a “troubled romance from a bygone era”. Moss is nearly unrecognizable beneath a mane of backcombed blonde hair, heavy ’60s eyeliner, and a Burberry red leather trench – embracing a campy, vintage melodrama. Opposite actor Ray Winstone, she plays the vampy lover in a faded North London social club, complete with smeared mirrors and acid-green tiles. By laying the eyeliner thick and the atmosphere even thicker, Cohen turns Moss into a character out of an imaginary film. In contrast, for The Cut’s fall fashion issue, Cohen captured Chloë Sevigny (at 49) with stark simplicity. Slicked-back hair, minimal makeup, and androgynous tailoring (white shirt, wide tie, and braces) give Sevigny a cool, no-frills edge – less “It Girl” than auteur in her own right. Here Cohen’s beauty direction resists airbrushing or overt glamour, highlighting Sevigny’s natural intensity. In both cases – maximalist fantasy for Moss, wry minimalism for Sevigny – Cohen uses style as a narrative tool, molding each woman’s image to fit a story.
One of Cohen’s most talked-about recent editorials pushed this philosophy to glorious extremes. Interview’s Spring 2024 cover story “Rihanna Is Ready to Confess” has the pop chameleon serving sinner and saint all at once. For the cover, Cohen styled Rihanna as a transgressive pin-up nun – an oversized white Dior shirt slipping off one shoulder, a full nun’s habit draped over her head, and makeup that channels both Betty Boop and ’90s club kids. Glossy red lips, bold blue eyeshadow and those deliberately thin brows complete the cartoonish yet sultry look. Inside the spread, Cohen flips the script – one moment Rihanna is flawlessly glam and the next, she’s depicted in unvarnished realness. In one shot, her wig is sliding off and her face is caked in purposefully blotchy powder, looking more undone than we’ve ever seen her. By oscillating between high-voltage glamour and deliberately “ugly” styling, Cohen uses beauty (and its breakdown) to support the narrative of confession. It’s as if she’s peeling back the polished pop-star facade to reveal layers of authenticity.
Cohen’s daring aesthetic isn’t confined to magazine pages – she brings the same cinematic eye to fashion and advertising campaigns. For Balenciaga’s Summer 2025 campaign, she turned a lookbook into a Hollywood screen test. The series of portraits, lensed in front of old-school studio curtains, presents a lineup of characters instead of models. Each subject embodies a trope. Twin Peaks icon Kyle MacLachlan becomes a cape-flared “Villain,” complete with a dramatic upturned collar, actress Rachel Sennott vamps in black lingerie as the mysterious “Her,” and others take turns as “The Prodigy,” “The Artist,” “The Main Character,” and so on. Hair, makeup, and costume are tweaked to amplify each role – a prim bouffant here, a sinister smoky eye there. Meanwhile, for a far more casual brand like On Running, Cohen went delightfully over the top. She directed Zendaya in a Spring 2025 campaign as the heroine of a faux retro sci-fi trailer, Zone Dreamers. With custom space-age wigs and prosthetic Spock ears poking through, Zendaya looks like a glam alien out of a 1960s B-movie – all to sell sneakers. By pushing beauty styling beyond the expected (otherworldly prosthetics for sportswear, movie-style archetypes for high fashion), Cohen turns ads into art-house moments.
Even in the realm of celebrity business ventures, Cohen’s visual stamp turns marketing into mise-en-scène. Her Holiday 2023 campaign for Kim Kardashian’s Skims, for example, plays like a lost ’60s pin-up magazine. Cohen transformed Kardashian into a glamorous après-ski icon from another era – swapping Kim’s signature dark locks for a honey-blonde bob with a vintage bouffant, and painting her with frosty blue eyeshadow and exaggerated blush for that perfect retro ski lodge glow. Every frame is meticulous in its throwback details, from the snowy props (skimpy lingerie paired with moon boots and faux ski gear) to the distressed print effect on the images that makes them look like dog-eared magazine covers.
And when Skims teamed up with Dolce & Gabbana, Cohen shifted gears to evoke mid-century Italian glamour. The collaboration’s campaign, shot in rich blacks-and-whites and soft pastels, nods to vintage Cinecittà film stills – with the Kardashian sisters styled like modern La Dolce Vita starlets, all satin lingerie and perfectly set hair, glossy but tinged with retro fantasy. In each of these commercial projects, Cohen’s approach to beauty direction remains constant. The makeup might be “too much,” the wigs intentionally noticeable, the poses melodramatic – and that’s exactly the point. By artfully exaggerating beauty tropes, Cohen exposes their power to shape identity. It’s an aesthetic of admiration laced with satire. The Nadia Lee Cohen effect lies in this balance – celebrating the artifice of beauty even as she uses it to say something incisive about performance and persona.
