16 posts tagged "Bottega Veneta"
Girls With Curls, Backstage at Bottega Veneta
Tomas Maier is the kind of designer who is incredibly particular about all facets of his collections, which is to say every inch of a Bottega Veneta show is carefully considered—hair and makeup included. “He really wanted a hairstyle,” Guido Palau said of the soft, seventies-meets-forties, “Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver” curls he obliged Maier with for Fall.
Cleaning hair with Redken Curvaceous Shampoo and Conditioner so it was light and airy, Palau rough-dried strands with its Guts 10 Volumizing Spray Foam mousse to add texture, before creating a deep side part and tightly coiling one-inch sections, which had been prepped with Redken’s Iron Shape 11 Finishing Thermal Spray, around a thirteen-millimeter iron. Then, just before the show started, Palau loosely spread out the curls with a boar-bristle brush, slipping a single bobby pin above the right ear.
Maier was equally specific about models’ “matte, matte, ultra lip,” as makeup artist Pat McGrath referred to the burnt-orange-brown pigment that she painted onto pouts. “We did look at fabrics [from the collection] for that,” she elaborated of the custom color. Dusting a brown-black eye shadow on the tops of lids and underneath the lower lash lines—”Just to give a little sexiness”—McGrath finished the look with a light-handed application of brown mascara.
Redhead Alert
Following two seasons of platinum blonde loyalty and a Fall outing that made shades of deep brunette the runway hair hue du jour, the Spring 2013 shows are at a little bit of a color impasse. Castings have been relatively equal opportunity, with a lot of designers—Alexander Wang and Roberto Cavalli to name a few—requesting deliberately dark and light-haired models for the corresponding black and white sections of their presentations; Marc Jacobs, who ushered in the graphic trend with his Edie Sedgwick sixties salute, went as far as to have Laurie Foley take models black or white-gold, accordingly. Which is why it’s been hard to miss Irina Kravchenko. The Ukrainian newcomer who, despite opening Wang’s show, had a slow start in New York is killing it in Europe—not least because she remains one of the only redheads in this season’s catwalking crew. After staring at her from afar at Prada, Bottega Veneta, Jil Sander, Marni, and Roberto Cavalli this week, we finally managed to get the scoop on those gorgeous ginger-auburn locks—despite some initial trouble understanding one another (beauty is an international language, don’t you know). “It’s blonde naturally,” Kravchenko revealed after we maniacally pointed and gestured to her hair (then ours). The word “salon” helped solicit the revelation that she has no need for one, as she does her dyeing herself with—get this—”chenna.” Henna? “Chenna—from grass,” Kravchenko reiterated. That’s right; those rich, show-stopping strands are the result of an at-home application of the plant that has long been used to dye fabrics, skin, nails—and hair. The style set’s superstar colorists are no doubt chomping at the bit to get their hands on this one.
Kinga Rajzak Models Fall’s Dark Makeup in Vogue Japan
We’ve been talking about the rise of neo-gothic beauty since the Fall shows, and the new September glossies are officially galvanizing the trend. In the latest issue of Vogue Japan, Kinga Rajzak appears in an editorial called “The Scarlet Focus” that highlights deep, black cherry-painted lips à la Gucci or Bottega Veneta and sepia-toned lids reminiscent of those at Burberry Prorsum and Givenchy. Petros Petrohilos was the makeup artist behind raven-haired Rajzak’s transformation for the spread. While starlets including Kate Bosworth and Lana Del Rey have already taken the dark look from the runways to the red carpets, we still find it fresh and wearable. We’ll have plenty more to say on this subject when our Fall Beauty Guide launches at the end of August.
Purple Haze
Matte lips have dominated the Fall runways this season, and more often than not they have been painted classic shades of red. Backstage at Victoria Beckham and Marc By Marc Jacobs in New York, lips were a perfect crimson hue, while a precise slick of scarlet ruled at PPQ in London and Rick Owens this week in Paris. But another pout color is starting to stake its claim on the season, and it’s gaining ground with each passing day: behold, the dark mulberry mouth. We got the our first glimpse of it in Milan, where Pat McGrath coined the “dark romance” effect at Gucci before creating “shading and contrast” at Bottega Veneta with paled-out skin and another burnt-cherry lip that she lined with a black eye liner and then filled in with a blackened-red pigment. Lucia Pieroni picked up on the idea at Rochas, where she crafted a dark wine-stained, “stamped-on” lip to complement the rich color palette of Marco Zanini’s collection. Then today at Viktor & Rolf, McGrath captured the enchanted show’s “witchy elegance” with a burgundy pout that she described as “gothic glamour.” This last incarnation had the addition of a high-gloss shine, which the makeup artist applied just before models hit the run way to avoid any, er, sticky situations.
The color is striking on a host of different complexions, but the real secret to pulling it off lays with a good lip liner. “[They're] brilliant!” Pieroni effused at Rochas of the colored pencils that can retain even the wiliest of lipstick bullets. Pro tip: For a true matte finish, apply your liner around the perimeter of the mouth and in the center before adding your lipstick. Blot with a tissue, dab with finger-patting of translucent powder, then apply the liner to the surface of the mouth again to thoroughly remove all traces of shine.
Tomas Maier Talks Bottega Veneta, The Fragrance
When word broke this summer that Bottega Veneta would be launching its first signature scent, fans of the brand rejoiced. Known for a certain polished chic sensibility and some seriously choice leather goods, the brand has been curiously quiet as its peers have entered the challenging world of designer fragrance, one by one. But creative director Tomas Maier was purposely biding his time, waiting for the perfect time to branch out into beauty. “If there’s no image of a woman, there’s no need for a fragrance,” Maier told Style.com in a recent interview. Having spent the last ten years honing the Bottega archetype—”she’s a woman who knows what she wants, is very confident, and is not about trends”—that need is now very real. The resulting floral chypre eau is steeped in Bottega culture; it is meant to smell like leather—old leather-bound books, stored in a house with wooden floors in the Veneto countryside, to be exact—and boasts masculine notes like oak moss, benzoin, and Indian patchouli that are softened by more feminine hints of jasmine sambac and plum. The unexpected aroma is at once spicy and sweet, masculine and feminine, statement-making and delicate. Just don’t expect a flashy celebrity campaign cameo anytime soon. “We don’t work like that,” Meier says. Here, on the eve of his Spring presentation, Maier talks creating scents that “lose time,” why he can’t stand “ghastly” bottle design, and what’s next for Bottega’s burgeoning beauty business.
So, where did this idea of the house in the Veneto countryside come from? Is it a real place?
It’s an original image—an idea, an input—because I didn’t want to lean on existing fragrances. So I imagined this old house, in the Veneto countryside—that’s where [Bottega] is from—and you have the big rooms; the wood floors; and you have the library walls filled with books, leather-bound books, old leather. It’s very open to the countryside, and outside there’s fresh-cut grass, hay, anything from the farm. I gave the idea to the creators, and eight different noses came back to me with their interpretation. From those eight noses, I picked the interpretation that seemed like what a Bottega Veneta scent should be about. You have to reach the perfect balance, and that’s what takes a long time.
Did you have a lot of experience going into this process, or was creating a signature scent a big learning experience for you?
I know a bit about fragrance&I like fragrance; I like that idea of recalling a memory through a scent, recalling a person, recalling a situation or physical place. I have many fragrances in my stores—fragrances that are not very obvious, and are not very distributed. For example, I’ve been working with Serge Lutens for a very long time because I love his fragrances. I think he’s very talented, and with this little fragrance company we carry from Santa Monica that is all oil-based. I also like some men’s aftershaves from little Italian barbershops—things like that, things that you have to travel to get. And that’s what I like to bring to the table in my stores because that’s why people come to me. But did I learn a lot? Yes. Do I know how to make a perfume? No, absolutely not, because that is a world on its own. It’s a magic world I will never know.
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