“Sex sells,” declared Katie Price backstage at London Fashion Week as she prepared to make her first return to the catwalk since 2015.
The former glamour model, 48, joined Kelly Osbourne and The Sopranos star Drea de Matteo in Natasha Zinko’s provocative spring/summer 2027 show, staged in collaboration with OnlyFans.
Asked whether fashion still has a problem with women being openly sexy, Price told the Press Association: “Well, I think you’re talking to the wrong person there, because my whole 30 years have been around sex. Sex sells, and you can be sexy, beautiful, and shouldn’t be shamed for it.”
“Of course you don’t have to show skin to be beautiful,” she said as she got ready backstage in a baby blue full tracksuit.
For the show, Price appeared in a black lingerie-inspired mini dress, taking her place in one of a series of viewing boxes surrounding the audience at Collins Music Hall.
The appearance was, admittedly, familiar territory for the reality star and model.
“In the little window that I’m in, I just have to be me,” she said. “It’s just like being on a photo shoot, just standing there and posing. Something I do best.”
“I’m in my absolute element.”
Price said Zinko’s team had approached her about taking part, and she agreed after looking at the designer’s Instagram.
“I thought I love it. It’s so different, and the outfit they picked in me, I would even buy myself. It’s so me.”
And unlike some runway clothes, Price could actually imagine wearing it again.
“I would. I’d wear it out.”
The show was titled Pay Per View – and Zinko took the phrase rather literally.
Instead of sending models down a conventional runway, the Ukrainian-born designer populated the individual balconies and viewing boxes of Collins Music Hall with performers, turning the cavernous venue into something between theatre, a live social-media feed and a peep show.
The audience stood in the middle and looked up as different scenes unfolded around them. Crucially, the performers could look straight back.
The staging drew on the idea of the panopticon – a circular prison design in which inmates can potentially be observed from a central watchtower without knowing exactly when they are being watched.
“People behave differently when somebody watches them,” Zinko told PA before the show.
“So the audience is part of the game. They also watch for by our models.”
It was an unusually fitting concept for a show staged in collaboration with OnlyFans.
The subscription platform made its London Fashion Week debut with an 18-piece capsule collection created with Zinko, which formed part of the 42 looks presented during the evening.
The collaboration put Zinko’s stamp on OnlyFans’ visual identity through shrunken silhouettes, graphic X-ray motifs and everyday pieces, including a brown zip-up hoodie emblazoned with “ONLY FANZ”.
Zinko is also joining the platform as a creator, offering subscribers behind-the-scenes access to her studio and creative process.
For the designer, however, Pay Per View was less about OnlyFans specifically than the peculiar reality that almost everyone now performs some version of themselves for an audience.
“We all perform – each of us. Some more authentically, some more like they’re pretending to be another person or another character,” she said.
“So I was like thinking of this live streaming life that we have now and how it influences us as well and changes our behavior.”
The clothes reflected that idea of costume and performance, mixing lingerie-inspired pieces and exposed underwear with cowboy hats, tailoring, sportswear and corporate-looking shirts and skirts.
The show began not with a model walking but with a man singing opera a cappella from one of the boxes, dressed, incongruously, in a pink cleaner’s outfit.
It happened to be Zinko’s favourite look.
“He’s going to perform. So it’s actually authentically him,” she said, before laughing: “I guess he wants to clean.”
From there, things became increasingly disorientating.
Lights illuminated different boxes in turn, revealing an assortment of characters performing simultaneously as the audience attempted to work out where to look next.
There was kissing, pole dancing and models smoking real cigarettes as Zinko delivered on her promise that audiences would see “not sex, but close to it”.
Price posed in her black mini, while De Matteo – best known for playing Adriana La Cerva in The Sopranos – swivelled around on a director’s chair wearing a trench coat.
Osbourne, meanwhile, channelled something of her emo youth in black, wearing a bow tie and pencil skirt with a dramatic side-swept hairstyle.
The former also tapped into one of the more unlikely trends to emerge this fashion month: the return of business casual.
Among all the exposed skin and lingerie were shirts, ties, pencil skirts and corporate-looking separates – albeit styled considerably differently to anything likely to appear in an ordinary office.
Zinko said Price and Osbourne were chosen precisely because neither easily disappears into the clothes.
“They’re such strong personalities, and I adore this [type of] woman,” she said.
“They’re just like, you know, phenomenal, and I think we need these strong characters. They own the place. They own their window.”
Other performers were selected through an unusually involved casting process, with Zinko’s team asking prospective models about their individual talents rather than simply how they looked.
Each was then given their own space in which to perform.
It made the audience’s attention almost as important as the clothes.
One moment you were watching an opera singer, the next Price posing several metres away, before another light illuminated another performer elsewhere in the building.
The effect was not unlike scrolling through social media made into a live action role-play. Dozens of people competing simultaneously for attention, each presenting a different version of themselves.
And Zinko seemed less interested in using OnlyFans simply for shock value than in the transactional nature of visibility itself.
Who is watching whom? And how differently do people behave once they know there is an audience?
Not that Zinko was pretending the evening was prudish.
Asked whether sex could still shock in fashion, she said that, “we live in a time when people show everything, you know.
“Now everybody doesn’t care, you know. Like you show your plastic surgery, you show sex – you show everything.”
As for what guests were about to witness, she offered a fairly accurate warning.
“You’re going to see not sex, but close to it!”
In Zinko’s version of the internet made physical, everyone was simultaneously performer, audience and content.
And after three decades of understanding the value of being watched, Price looked entirely at home.
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