Make-up artist and Dazed 100 alum Marcelo Gutierrez has been working with Madonna for almost two years now, helping shape her next visual chapter as she gears up to release Confessions II, her 15th studio album. But he’s quick to resist the idea that it’s a total reinvention as he speaks over video call. “Madonna’s already invented the wheel,” he says. “It’s about bringing her into the now and the future, while still holding onto everything she’s already built.”

Across a four-decade career, the pop icon has become synonymous with transformation, constantly shifting between aesthetics. From Like a Virgin’s hyper-femininity, the religious provocation of Like a Prayer, to the futurism of Ray of Light and the Western cowgirl of Music, Madonna’s image has never stayed too still for long.

Now, in the latest campaign for KIKO Milano, the brand’s global make-up artistry creative director has Madonna blushing, as the star is glammed up and shot by photographer Rafael Pavarotti. “It’s easy to reference her own history of beauty,” says Gutierrez of the campaign moodboard, which brought together her legacy with 70s glamour cinema and the modern edge of New York as visual references. “But it always comes back to her face. There’s so much power there.”

Growing up, Madonna was already part of Gutierrez’s world, alongside ABBA and Cher, before he fully understood the scale of her cultural impact. “As my identity as a queer person was growing, I really began to understand what she meant for queer culture at large,” he says. But it was Truth or Dare and the Sex book that stayed with him most. “That’s when I understood it differently,” he adds. “The discipline, the obsession, the work ethic. She felt like an Olympian of her own work.”

What’s made their partnership work so well, he says, is time and trust. “Madonna is a true master of transformation, collaboration and provocation,” he explains. “She’s really given me the trust to evolve her look.” But that trust comes with an expectation when you’re creating for an icon. “Excuses in Madonna camp aren’t real,” he says. “She pushes you to do things you haven’t done before, at a rate you haven’t done before.”

And the results seem to be working, as her Confessions II and KIKO campaigns are a hit with die-hard fans. More recently, he’s watched Madonna’s earlier work find a second life through Gen Z, with her archive resurfacing across TikTok. “We were all kind of gagged seeing it come back,” he says. “It was happening alongside everything else – the new music, the campaign – it all kind of collided.”

For Gutierrez, it only reinforces what Madonna has always represented: “It's about celebrating an artist and a woman who has proven that consistency, that collaboration, that having the nerve and the want and desire to always grow is always on trend,” he says. “That’s the beauty.”