Meet the shaved-browed, horn-haired model and fashion student making waves
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Twenty-year-old Emilia Lunney is still a student but that’s not stopping her from making an impression on the world of fashion and beauty. After considering various careers, from veterinarian to mortician (“I’ve always been interested in death and the practices surrounding it”), Emilia settled on fashion as a creative outlet for telling stories and creating worlds and characters.
Studying Contour Fashion Design (underwear and swimwear) at London College of Fashion, although currently on a placement year in Belgium, Emilia’s ultimate goal is not to be an underwear designer but rather to learn the technical skills that will help her “manifest my inner world on this plane,” she says. “I think creative play helps to both ground me and let me escape from myself every so often.” While Emilia’s working on manifesting herself in fashion, she’s already managing it with regards to her own look. With her shaved eyebrows, hair styled flat on top with two horn-like mohawks on either side, as well as a neat undercut on either side, it’s slick and spikey, controlled and wild, punk af and we love it. Her unusual look lends itself well to her modelling career, being shot by everyone from Jordan Hemingway to Caspar Sejersen.
We talked to Emilia about using your body as a vessel of expression and what kind of fridge she wants in 30 years time.
What’s been your career highlight?
Any situation I’ve worked in where I’ve felt true freedom and collaboration is a highlight to me. A collaboration has to push me out of my comfort zone, I don’t like routine day-at-the-office or studio jobs.
What are you working on at the moment?
Getting my degree, finding internships and getting back to finding my creative self. At the minute I’m focusing on discovering who I am as an artist and what my personal direction is, who really inspires me and how can I inspire myself. I’m starting to test myself in mindless creation. I want to develop much faster and more fluid processes that should hopefully force me to let go of my need for perfection.
How do you want to change the world?
More kindness, more questioning, more reflection. Less greed. More individuality.
Would you rather colonise Mars or build a utopia in the centre of the earth?
Definitely build a Utopia in the centre of the earth. The idea that we have the right to move to a whole new planet and destroy it as we have this one is so selfish, I really question anyone who would pick to colonise anywhere. Definite Utopia over uncertain space pollution any day.
What is the future of beauty?
Real beauty’s future is bright right now. Your body is a vessel with so much potential, you can use it to express your inner psyche or you can use it to become totally inhuman. I’m hoping that more people can wake up to this potential now and see beauty as an avenue to celebrate the individual rather than using it to all look the same.
It's 30 years from now. You stumble home at 3 am and catch your reflection in the fridge door. What do you look like?
Like a dark witch with fabulous hair. I’d prefer not to have a fridge with a metal door though, I’d prefer something more chic.
As a warning to the other members of the resistance, your head is to be mounted above the gates of the city. How would you do your makeup that morning?
I’ve always got to have my eyebrows of course. Then the rest follows. If I’m really going for it maybe I should do something a bit camp, crack out the bleeding eyes with a bit of Windsor and Newton Realness. As long as I’ve got my brows and my horns I think I look pretty scary