The Face - New look. New season. New ideas. New issue. See our autumn cover story

A letter from our Editor, Matthew Whitehouse

When we began making this issue, reproductive rights were guaranteed in the US. As we send it to print, abortion is banned in 20 states, with more expected to follow suit or introduce severe restrictions.

We didn’t plan on making a statement with the work you see on the cover. And neither did its creator, 24-year-old Central Saint Martins graduate Amanda Colares Silva. As she tells us: ​“I like to think of my work as a form of escapism from the heaviness we face every day.”

But with the London fashion school’s graduate show taking place just weeks after May’s leaked Supreme Court draft outlining the imminent overturning of Roe v Wade, for many people Colares Silva’s work became imbued with new, unavoidable meaning. ​“I guess things happen for a reason,” she says now. ​“We don’t always know why.”

Newness is a central theme of what we hoped to communicate with this issue, fittingly redesigned by incoming Creative Director Christopher Simmonds and Art Director Alasdair Griffiths, who we’re beyond chuffed to welcome into the FACE fold.

Its backbone is a mega, 40-page cover-story editorial, shot by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott and featuring clothes made entirely by new designers. As we enter a precarious time in the UK, with young people already enduring the biggest drop in living standards since 1956, we hope it goes some way to giving these designers a platform to get started on their careers. Equally, as a nod to Colares Silva’s original aim, we hope the mag gives you a healthy dose of escapism, too.

Because, as THE FACE’s Features Editor Olive Pometsey writes in her excellent essay The Big Backlash: ​“In 2022, it can sometimes feel as though we’re enmeshed in a raging, unrelenting, unforgiving reversal of, well, everything progressive… So how do we push back the pushback?”

We start with new ideas. Here are just a few of them.