AS YOU ARE
If backstage beauty taught us anything this season, it’s to embrace individualism.
176 If backstage beauty taught us anything this season, it’s to embrace individualism.
Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th streets. It’s February in New York, and bitterly cold. Backstage at Marc Jacobs’s autumn/winter ’16/’17 show, the closing runway of the week, legendary make-up artist François Nars has a sizeable task on his hands. “Marc said that he wanted all the girls to have a different look, to express their individuality,” he says of the various goth-inspired looks he painstakingly face-painted onto 65 models, each one completely unique.
While Marc Jacobs was an extreme case of individualism, both in the application and the epic task at hand, it echoes the tone that’s been resonating backstage for the past few seasons. In the fashion and beauty cosmos, a trend is a tool we use to package things into neat and tidy boxes, which made this season’s unconventional and individualistic attitude an outlier, albeit one we welcomed. It seems, where beauty is concerned, trendless is trending.
“It’s an anti-trend,” says make-up artist Hannah Murray, who cherry-picked models to don fuchsia lips for Topshop Unique this season, while others mimicked 90s rock chicks with eyes winged and rimmed in heavy-handed liner. Likewise at MaxMara, Tom Pecheux let models choose their own lipstick (“A red for every woman,” he declared), while at Isabel Marant the brief was to ensure models looked the best versions of themselves – which in most cases was with next to no make-up and feathery, bold brows.
Whether coincidentally or not, make-up artists and hairstylists are taking a less cookie-cutter approach by embracing natural features such as untamed frizz, left-field haircuts, perfect imperfections, which is also reflected at a casting level. Where previously models were made to look like real-life mannequins, uniform and undeviating, the new norm is that quirk or feature that demands attention. Hairstylist Paul Hanlon, who was responsible for the slickedback styles at Giambattista Valli, sums up the mood of the season: “It’s all free, it’s confident, because the scale of the woman is broader. They’re not clones.” And while the world of beauty is now embracing it, individualism has been embracing beauty for decades. Offshoot groups – the punks, goths, rockabillies, heavy metal revellers, even cute-as-pie Harajuku girls and geishas – have stretched the parameters of hair and make-up, as evidenced by the fact that they continued to crop up on moodboards backstage, and eventually wielded their influence on our beauty bags.
MAKE-UP ARTISTS AND HAIRSTYLISTS ARE EMBRACING NATURAL FEATURES – UNTAMED FRIZZ, LEFT-FIELD HAIRCUTS
“THIS SEASON IS ONE OF ABSOLUTE CLEAN RAWNESS, OR IT’S ‘LET’S GO FOR COLOUR’”
Take the tar-toned lipstick at Christian Dior’s show, which make-up marvel Peter Philips teamed with buffed-out skin and spidery, one-too-many-coats lashes. A little outlandish, perhaps, but when the lipstick arrived on my desk a couple of months later it drew gasps of admiration and double-takes from those passing by. When I gave it to a friend (whose go-to lip colour is akin to red wine) to trial that evening, it drew similar endorsement from friends and lingering looks from strangers.
Similarly, Burberry, a brand steeped in English history and whose bread and butter, the trench coat, is a traditionalist’s safety blanket, took an uncharacteristically futuristic approach. Droplets of glitter cascading down cheekbones of models felt all the more modern with a punky topknot drawn forward to masquerade as a fringe. That was the case for most of the models save for Ruth Bell, who gave hairstylists no choice but to leave her buzzcut exactly as it was. Which was all the more refreshing.
It’s also the attitude Bell took with her agent, who cried when hairstylists lopped off inches of her hair on the set of an Alexander McQueen campaign shoot. Truth be told, Bell’s new distinctive style did exactly what it was meant to do: separated her from the pack (which includes of her twin sister and fellow model May) and says matter-of-factly: “This is me, take it or leave it.”
The idea of embracing individuality in beauty isn’t always enabled by a make-up brush, a lip wand or a pair of scissors. In fact, doing absolutely nothing can be just as impactful. “Sometimes a girl will walk into a show and we’ll be like: ‘She looks great: leave her alone.’ Literally not touching,” says Anthony Turner, the hairstylist responsible for the divisible approach at Erdem, Peter Pilotto, Proenza Schouler and J.W. Anderson, to name a few. “Every single show I’ve done [this season], the big trend is individuality.”
If there was a poster girl for the current mood, it’s Cara Delevingne, model, actress, rebel, muse. Her devil-may-care aesthetic is what ultimately makes her more appealing to similarly nonconformist beauty brands like Yves Saint Laurent and, most recently, Rimmel. And in her most liberal display of take-itor-leave-it ’tude she brought her dog – that’s right, a puppy – to a Chanel haute couture show. I rest my case.
Shouldn’t we all take a leaf out of Delevingne’s book by throwing caution to the wind? Why do we so often nestle into our comfort zone and get so cosy we never push the boundaries? If there’s ever a time to experiment, surely it’s with something as temporary as make-up? Val Garland, a master with a make-up brush who has worked with the extravaganza that is Lady Gaga, noted backstage at Giambattista Valli the yin and yang between squeaky clean and off-kilter is where the genius lies. “This season is one of absolute clean rawness, or it’s ‘ let’s go for colour’. It’s a bit of a free-for-all: you’ve got this perfect make-up, but then you want to put something funny somewhere. It all depends on what tribe you belong to.”
My tribe is the one that is experimental, yes, but ultimately safe when it comes to beauty. I place lipstick in the same category as Ferrero Rocher chocolates, freshly washed linen and swims in the ocean: things that instantly make me feel better. While a drastic haircut might be semi-permanent, throwing tangerine on lips is a foolproof way to try something on without having to commit to it come morning. Occasionally, I’ll up the ante, my beauty equivalent of that eye-wateringly expensive show-off dress that will only see daylight once annually but demands attention when it does. And I assure myself, like the tower of ol’ faithful cashmere sweaters in my wardrobe, the basics will always be there, so why not embrace the flipside for a change?