Richie Rich goes virtual for beauty
His new site, Btykwn, bills itself as a place for makeup fanatics
NEW YORK — Richie Rich sauntered into Cafeteria dressed to thrill. Heads spun to take in his arrival at the deluxe Chelsea diner last month wearing a crimson fedora, a mottled green leather jacket and lavender shades, which he dropped to show off blue-tinted lids slicked with generous lashings of glitter.
“This is my day look,” he said. “For night I just put on more makeup.”
Day or night, he likes to make an entrance, a habit he perfected during the ’90s, when he was a marquee member of the Club Kids, a raffishly inventive post-Studio 54 clan fanning its plumage at Limelight, the Tunnel and other fabled New York City nightspots.
Long before the arrival of internet influencers, they lured fans and raised eyebrows, flaunting their gender fluidity and homespun fashions on talk shows and in the tabloids.
By the early 2000s, Rich had parlayed his fame into a stridently subversive fashion label, Heatherette, that drew Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Debbie Harry as fans. The line shuttered in 2008.
There were gap years, decades in fact, during which Rich supported himself mostly, he said, by stitching custom designs for a clutch of lesser-known private clients including YNG Zuck, a music artist, and Pachi Lake, a TV and fashion personality.
Now he is back, courting a new breed of style renegade with a virtual club of his own. His latest venture is Btykwn (pronounced “beauty kween”), which bills itself as a metaverse for makeup fanatics, improvised beauty lab and, come late spring, a purveyor of gender-free makeup. Rich envisions the platform as an ad hoc collective where beauty enthusiasts of every gender and stripe can release their inner diva.
“Whoever you are, we want you to be you, we want you to feel fabulous,” he said as he sipped a virgin mary.
A sweet-natured promoter, he was addressing an imagined fan base of “freaks, punks, princesses and outcasts,” as Btykwn’s promotional copy proclaims, who he hopes will flock to the site as a safe space. Its motto: “If you don’t fit in, stand out.”
Because the community is virtual, “you can join on the phone from any part of the world in the privacy your bedroom,” he said, urging fans to “be at the party,” and, in the lingo of extreme-makeup enthusiasts, “Boom! Beat your face.”
He teamed up with Mister D, the cosmetics and events impresario who helped make makeup artist François Nars a household name and who is funding the new platform through Ultra Access, his brand management and investment company.
“People will sign up, share their stories, talk about social issues, fashion, style and TV,” Mister D said. “They’re not coming to us as a typical purveyor of nail polish.” Since it started in March, the site has drawn about 10,000 members, Rich said.
Rich, the irrepressible ringmaster of this online circus, has hardly abandoned his over-the-top aesthetic, one that, in retrospect, was well ahead of its time. Built on futuristic fantasy, its impact is discernible now in pop television fare like “Euphoria” and “Glow Up,” a British television competition in which aspiring makeup artists show off their flair with neon tints and blush.
It is also visible among a constellation of computer-generated “It” girls including Lil Miquela or Imma, and evident in the kind of surreal effects — jeweled eyes, vinyl lips and iridescent skin — proliferating on the metaverse. And that is to say nothing of the influencers peddling their makeup wizardry on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram who are catching up with Rich.
Somewhat demurely, he acknowledged his legacy. “We were not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “We just, without realizing it, did something that’s real to a new crowd of kids.”
Rich hopes eventually to enlist a roster of pop entertainers, celebrity makeup artists and influencers willing to share their beauty routines and perform online.
Not easily daunted, Rich is adamant that beauty is the style world’s next frontier, a promising arena for giddy theatrics and nervy self-invention. “Real innovation is happening in beauty, not on the runway,” he said, its elements more adventurous and accessible to the young.
He is banking on the adage that what goes around comes around, a notion he has nurtured since arriving on the scene. As he declared in a 1993 interview with the talk show host Phil Donahue, when it comes to self-expression, “We’re all future superstars.”
How prescient was that statement? We will find out soon enough.