LIGHTS, CAMERA, VAL!
Meet fashion’s favourite makeup artist
As she intimately clutches my face and “gets right in there” with her mascara brush, I recall the other faces Val Garland has got this close to. The English makeup artist has used a decorating roller to smear a line of red paint across Cate Blanchett’s visage, turned Scarlett Johansson into Whatever Happened to
Baby Jane’s Bette Davis, stuck a giant prosthetic nose on to Erin O’Connor, and prepared Cara Delevingne for her Paris runway comeback.
“You walk into a room and see a really big celebrity for the first time, you have to go straight up to them and make them feel safe and confident in your hands. It’s a really big ask,” offers Garland of the reams of faces she has painted in her 30-year-plus career. Yet her easygoing enthusiasm and touch of the eccentric is a key part of why she has become one of the most in-demand editorial and backstage transformers in the world.
Kate Moss is a regular. “She likes a giggle,” says Garland in her Bristolian burr. “I’ve never seen her have a tantrum. She loves a narrative, if you give her a story, she can play with it. If you give her no makeup and real hair then she’s probably bored.”
Garland, 61, is a chameleon when it comes to producing a look. She can go from creating pure, fresh-faced skin with just moisturiser and her softly kneading fingertips, to artistically rainbows-plattered eyes, or striking avant-garde looks. She does it all. Her first book is more than the usual banal coffee table fare, offering a window into an often opaque world, and insight into how a young girl from Bristol left school at 15 and went on to have an extraordinary, generation-defining career. She’s worked with top brands, name photographers and a changing array of models, making her a keen observer of the politics of fashion and shifting standards of beauty.
In compiling Validated: The Makeup
of Val Garland, there were some images that she had wanted to initially include, “I loved them, but some were quite controversial. I had to take them out, it’s just not the right moment,” she explains, of the way that the lens of hindsight and the backdrop of the #MeToo movement has altered the reading of fashion imagery.
For the late designer Alexander McQueen, she explored a darker side of her repertoire, creating some of the most striking looks from his shows — from the ghoulish to the magical. Once she covered the entirety of Bjork’s face in small