April 1, 2026 |
There’s something a little uncanny about Fecal Matter. At once hyper-constructed and eerily organic, the duo will undoubtedly make you do a double take. Not because they chase shock for its own sake, but because they contort and destabilise the very language of beauty until it slips into something feral and unfamiliar.
Almost like something born from a horror video game, the pair – Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran – who are partners both in life and in work, exist in the overlap of fetish, fantasy and fear. From mad make-up to gorgeously grotesque clothes, they render their bodies monstrous, magnetic and impossible to ignore. Just look at their bald heads and shaved eyebrows, the eyeliner so sharp it could slit your throat. Dalton’s face is usually painted white in a careful gradient towards her chin, with a pink or red lip smudged on with her fingers. On my screen, they appear demonic: a demonic duo, even. Perhaps a little off-putting, but in the best, most evocative way. They’re repellent and offensive to some, intoxicating to others. Trigger-happy keyboard warriors love to hate them. And us fashion folk, predictably, love them.
At first glance, the pair look like something aggressively post-human, all noxious imagery and unpalatable references to decay, infection and bodily waste. Yet spend five minutes talking to them and the illusion collapses. They might look like they’ve crawled out of a cyberpunk hellscape, but they speak with warmth, humour and startling openness. They are surprisingly down to earth. It starts with themselves, they tell me, everything does. The work, the looks, the philosophy: it’s all lived, earned and tested on their own bodies first.
From Montreal, the Canadian couple met while studying fashion design, though their meeting was anything but cinematic. “The first time I saw Hannah was at our school,” Bhaskaran recalls. “It was January… I came in the fourth semester because I dropped out before.” They laugh, setting the scene: a drawing class, a teacher who already knew them as a “bad student” and Dalton, sitting between two other girls. “I was like, ‘Okay, who’s that?’ But Hannah looked very different at that moment. She was like a Burberry girl, and very conservative.”
Hannah wears MATIERES FECALES SS26, shoes by MATIERES FECALES FOR CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN SS26
“I was totally different,” Dalton says in agreement. “I had Barbie-blonde hair, no make-up. I was very against it, very prim and proper, girly, always in pink.” Bhaskaran, meanwhile, arrived in what Dalton remembers as faux fur (they insist it was army camouflage). Their friendship didn’t spark immediately, though. “There was nothing that I felt like we could even communicate about or connect on at that point,” Dalton says. The shift came later, through details: a necklace made of animal teeth that she wore with a librarian’s outfit; playing with make-up at Bhaskaran’s mum’s house; conversations about how much they hated fashion; the realisation that they shared the same anger at the industry and the same desire to dismantle it.
What followed was slow, organic and, Bhaskaran says, inevitable. “It felt like a missing piece in my puzzle.” Dalton nods. The pair bonded over imagery – her laptop’s wallpaper of dead whales with their innards hanging out – and over a shared sense of not fitting in. Before becoming Fecal Matter, both were trying, in different ways, to disappear. “We were really searching to fit in,” Bhaskaran says. “Trying to be invisible… because we were scared to be vulnerable. I had a whole moment where I was like: ‘I’m just gonna do my thing, otherwise I’m gonna kill myself.’” But finding each other created a safe environment where their fantasies could become real. “Why don’t we do it?” they remember thinking. “Why not just try it out?”
Their distinguishing looks didn’t develop overnight, nor was it an easy process. “This is like 10 to 12 years of growing into what we look like now,” Dalton says. Early experiments were messy, playful and DIY, sometimes based on drawings by Bhaskaran (“Since I was maybe 10 years old, I would sketch people that looked like Hannah, basically”), wrestlers, Marilyn Manson videos and hardcore rock. “It was never trying to be perfect,” they say.
Fashion school, ironically, proved hostile. The pair were told by a teacher that security guards had pinned photos of Bhaskaran on the walls “to protect the students”, because he was perceived as visually confrontational. That type of abuse followed them onto the streets. “It was super intense,” Bhaskaran says, plainly. Gender, race and visibility all shaped how that bullying landed. “When I shaved my head and my eyebrows, nobody really cared. But when Hannah did it, it was a huge deal.” With that, though, defiance became survival. “It would be easier to just not do it,” Dalton says. “Once you get a taste of that freedom, you don’t want to go back.”
from left: Hannah Rose shaves her head six days out of seven and can apply her signature look in just 10 minutes and Hannah wears shirt by MATIERES FECALES AW25, skirt by MATIERES FECALES SS26, shoes by MATIERES FECALES FOR CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN SS26
Freedom arrived in fragments: underground parties in Montreal, like the illegal club night Poisson Noir (despite their straight-edge sobriety); then New York in 2015, where the club kids’ scene, drag, early Instagram and brands like Hood By Air and Telfar created a new visual language. “Nobody was giving what we were giving [though],” Bhaskaran says. “We were giving Galliano, McQueen.” Eventually their look sharpened, crystallised and became distinctive. And now, once you’ve seen them, you’ll recognise them everywhere.
That same philosophy extends beyond the face and into their fashion brand, Matières Fécales, which made its debut in March of last year and operates as a direct continuation of their own bodies. Launched as an outlet for ideas that felt too confrontational or too personal for traditional systems, the brand treats clothing as wearable extensions of skin, muscle and bone. Pieces cling, distort, compress or exaggerate the body much in the way their make-up reshapes the face: it’s never decorative, always structural. “It’s about material doing the same work as make-up,” Dalton explains. “Changing how you read the body.”
Today, their aesthetic is inseparable from their bodies. Dalton’s make-up fits her like a latex glove; Bhaskaran’s eye shapes stretch and lift his face into something alienesque. “We always say it’s fearless beauty,” Bhaskaran says. “There’s beauty in being fearless… whether people think it’s ugly or gross or disturbing.” It’s not designed to be sexy – it’s designed to be honest. “I’m doing this for me,” they say. “I love what I look like, whether people accept it or not.”
Despite the extremity, their process is instinctual and practical, almost mundane. Dalton’s look takes 10 minutes to put on and the products have remained unchanged for a decade: Kryolan foundation in 00 for her porcelain white base, M.A.C blushes and “sparkly stuff” for cheeks and Ink Velvet by Peripera, a Korean lip tint that lasts from 8am to 8pm. The eye is built with a round brush for speed and fine brushes for precision. “It’s like a sport,” Bhaskaran says with a laugh. They don’t always wear it, though. Dalton leaves the house bare faced when she needs to. “There’s Hannah and then there’s also Hannah,” she says. “They’re both equal.”
from left: Steven wears MATIERES FECALES AW25 and “Part of being human is not always being pretty or glamorous,” says Steven Raj Bhaskaran of the thinking behind their confrontational look
That duality matters. So does agency. When asked about the red or pink lip – such a loaded symbol of femininity – Dalton is pragmatic. “The red lip is something classic and so I love putting it on with my finger and just smudging it around… It’s also just practical, faster and easier to do than making this perfectly crisp lip.”
What’s striking, given how extreme the end result appears, is how methodical and almost domestic their routine is. The pair used to do each other’s make-up but now they’ve got it down to an almost formulaic, self-applied process. Dalton shaves her head almost daily, letting it “breathe” once a week to avoid irritation, before applying foundation primarily to the scalp rather than the face, creating that seamless, porcelain continuity. “We’re not balding, we still have hairlines,” she says, “so it’s all about the transition.” Bhaskaran, whose skin tone requires multiple shades (they’re of Guyanese and Sri Lankan descent), relies on Charlotte Tilbury foundation set with Laura Mercier powder. They both finish their looks with M.A.C setting spray. Touch-ups, meanwhile, are minimal, with longevity built into the process. That means they rarely carry anything more than a lip product. Removal is equally unglamorous: oil-based cleansers, repetition, patience. There’s no mysticism in it. The ritual happens every morning between coffee and emails, like brushing your teeth. Over time, what began as transformation has become maintenance, the face less a mask than muscle memory, trained over a decade of daily repetition.
Public reaction remains volatile. “We’ve been spat on just because of our looks,” she tells me. Death threats, harassment and resulting trauma have come their way. And yet: “The bad ones motivate us to go further in our work in hopes to create more tolerance in the world.”
Part of the cult of Rick Owens, the pair are close friends with the designer, in his sixties, and his ever-fearless accomplice Michèle Lamy, in her eighties, figures who model longevity without compromise (“They’re fearless at whatever age,” says Bhaskaran). Ageing, they believe, doesn’t have to mean softening. “It’s more about how the make-up will morph. Will it still take 10 minutes?” Dalton says. Bhaskaran adds, “You have one life to live, and for us, it’s always gonna be about having fun and enjoying it.” Agreeing, Dalton says, “When it stops being fun, I’m gonna stop doing it.”
Their name, confrontational as it is, reflects this refusal of ‘prettiness’. SHOWstudio described it as a mission to capture both the beauty and the grotesque of being human. “Part of being human is not always [being] pretty or glamorous,” Bhaskaran says. “We think it’s important to show both sides.” Repellent to some, liberating to others, Fecal Matter’s work insists on that dichotomy.
Ultimately, the point isn’t provocation for its own sake. It’s freedom. “Do it for you. Don’t give a shit,” Dalton says, summing up her philosophy of beauty. Bhaskaran goes further: “Beauty should be challenging… when you can create something that makes people question things.” Sitting there on my screen, bald, painted, utterly themselves, they make a convincing case.
Photography by Francesc Planes. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out NOW. Order your copy here.
Steven wears MATIERES FECALES AW25, Hannah wears MATIERES FECALES SS26, shoes by MATIERES FECALES FOR CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN SS26
