Frostbite: Submission Beauty x Gabe Gordon FW26

Submission Beauty partnered with Gabe Gordon for FW26 - a winter horror story in ice and wool. Inspired by 1980s classics - Curtains, The Shining, The Howling - the runway story followed an ice skating team on a remote winter retreat in upstate New York. The camp decays. The bunks rot. Skaters disappear. The ice splits open, revealing dark water beneath, as if the lake itself is infected. In the final act, the last remaining skater performs under a full moon — and transforms. Survival means becoming other.

Gordon builds strong psychological worlds - cinematic, feral, emotionally charged. But FW26 sharpened the blade. Horror becomes language: the monster as queer symbol, desire as engine, otherness as survival. Beauty with a pulse and glamour with teeth. Exactly where Submission Beauty lives.

PHOTOGRAPHY CAMILIO FUENTEALBA BREVIS @camilo.fuentealba.brevis
STYLING AMERICA KORBAN @americakorban
MAKEUP ZENIA JAEGER @makeupbyzeniajaeger for Submission Beauty @submission.beauty
HAIR DAVEY MATTHEW @daveydidmyhair @theonly.agency
NAILS JULIA SUMITA@juliasumita
CASTING JOSE MALAVE @jsmlv.practice
PRODUCTION HILLARY LUI @_kill_hill
PR ANDSUCH NYC @andsuch.nyc
MAKEUP ASSISTANTS ELIKA HILATA @elikahilata_makeup JOHANNA NOMIEY @johannanomiey KATIE MANN @trippychickmakeup SHIORI SATO @shiorisatomua YUI OIWA @muayui_nyc

Gabe Gordon’s FW26 collection moved like a slow-burn nightmare. Not chaos, not control, but a kind of cold, steady dread.

Gordon and his husband and creative partner, Timothy Gibbons, have been building the label into something increasingly refined over the past few seasons, bringing deeper construction and tailoring into the brand’s knitwear DNA. This season, that refinement didn’t soften the work, it made it more unsettling. The garments felt like relics from the story: pieces pulled from a training camp closet or found at a town thrift store.

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There were sports silhouettes throughout,  the kind Gordon keeps returning to, not because he’s a sports guy, but because sportswear is one of America’s most charged costumes. And in Frostbite, sports became something else entirely: not wholesome, not patriotic, but erotic, haunted, and cracked open.

The world of the collection was decaying on purpose. Gordon spoke about being drawn to natural wear, age, and history embedded into fabric - overdyeing, overwashing, recycling yarns and textiles from past collections, even turning old T-shirts into yarn. On this runway, that obsession with decay wasn’t just a sustainability practice, it played as a part of the horror. The lake, the rot, the moldy bedding, the stained mattresses. The clothes looked like they had absorbed it.

The skaters who’d been “killed” wore a kind of post-mortem glamour, skin drained to a ghostly clammy pallor made with Submission Beauty Highlighter Lucid, eyes darkened and sunken with Highlighter Deep, sickly glossed with Balm Shiny.

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The beauty look split the cast into two camps: the living and the already gone. The skaters who’d been “killed” wore a kind of post-mortem glamour, skin drained to a ghostly clammy pallor made with Submission Beauty Highlighter Lucid, eyes darkened and sunken with Highlighter Deep, sickly glossed with Balm Shiny. Lips were left dry and fading, like the warmth had been pulled out of them.

The girls at the start of the story arrived intact: pale pastel lids in icy greens, illuminated skin enhanced with Submission Beauty Highlighter Deep and Lucid, lips glossed by Balm Shiny. The kind of softness horror always saves for last.

What makes Gabe Gordon hit so hard right now is that the brand refuses to separate aesthetics from emotion. It doesn’t do “pretty.” It does desire under pressure. Gordon’s collections are built for people who’ve been made to feel too much - too queer, too strange, too visible - and decided to turn that into power.

And Frostbite took that idea to its natural conclusion: the monster isn’t the villain. The monster is the truth. As Gordon put it: if you hide the part of you that’s monstrous - there’s no way you’ll survive.

The FW26 show was a love letter to the othered. A reminder that sometimes the only way through is becoming something else entirely.

@GABE.GORDON