Getting into Natasha Zinko’s SS27 show took real effort. The crowd outside her north London venue was thick enough that guests had to shoulder their way through a single narrow doorway. But it was worth it once they got inside and saw the cavernous atrium cutting straight through Collins Music Hall, a brutalist building in Islington, with mezzanine levels split into rows of square openings stacked floor to floor. The venue choice was intentional.
Zinko titled the collection “Pay Per View,” and the concept traced back to her own preoccupation with modern surveillance like big tech watching through AI glasses, ordinary people watching each other through algorithms, and basically everyone simultaneously observing and being observed. Show notes revealed she’d been reading Foucault while developing the collection, and the venue’s grid of square cutouts turned out to be a deliberate echo of the panopticon, Foucault’s famous prison design where inmates can be watched from a central point without ever knowing exactly when. Zinko put her audience in that central position, cast as the jailers, while her models occupied the illuminated cells around them.
But it was the cast populating those cells that was the real headline. Katie Price appeared in a tight black waistcoat and matching shorts. “Sopranos” alum Drea de Matteo posed beside a director’s chair bearing her own name, cigarette in hand. Kelly Osbourne showed up in a sleek black bob, wearing a bat pendant as a tribute to her late father. Cowboys, cleaning ladies, opera singers, footballers, and sailors rounded out a cast built less around a single aesthetic than around the idea of the fully surveilled modern persona, in all its costumes. “Like the prisoners in this ingenious construct, we the Modern Humans walk out of our homes into a world where any one of us may be under numerous kinds of surveillance anytime, whether that be from the state or some schmo with a camera,” Zinko said, framing the show as commentary on constant, unwilled visibility.
That theme is exactly why the collection doubled as an official collaboration with OnlyFans, complete with branded shorts and “Pay for View” pants making their way down the runway. Zinko connected surveillance culture directly to monetized visibility. In her telling, the people who thrive in an attention economy are the ones who’ve figured out how to convert being watched into something they control and profit from. Casting real OnlyFans-adjacent talent inside a literal panopticon wasn’t an accident. It was a staged argument done as a fashion show.
But it went even further as the models eventually broke free from their individual cells and moved down into the audience. They wove through a crowd who was packed tight enough that the runway itself was barely visible through a mass of nearly touching knees, leaving attendees with the exact discomfort of being inescapably close to observation that the whole collection was built around.
Drea de Matteo’s presence in particular was notable, because she’s one of the prominent mainstream actresses (best known as Adriana La Cerva on “The Sopranos”) who has since joined OnlyFans and experienced continued success on the platform. The platform has given her the financial freedom to try other projects, including her podcast “Ultrafree.” Walking Zinko’s runway in a champagne velvet ensemble and aviator sunglasses, looking remarkably close to her Sopranos-era self, de Matteo embodied exactly the transition Zinko’s concept was built for: a public figure who found a way to keep being watched profitably, on her own terms, after Hollywood stopped calling.
That’s ultimately what made the show more than shock-value stunt casting and an overblown collab. Zinko wasn’t just putting recognizable faces on a runway for buzz. She built an entire architectural argument about surveillance and consent, then cast people who’ve each, in different ways, had to decide how to survive being looked at constantly. Yet you can’t escape capitalism even as a progressive artist, which is why you can buy your own piece of the OnlyFans x Zinko merch for just $100 for a baseball cap.