Stick-on makeup cutouts like the kind we’ve spied at Gareth Pugh and Fendi may seem like a newfangled trick to beauty novices, but Pat McGrath’s unimpressed. “We’ve been doing it for 15 years,” she said backstage at Viktor & Rolf, where she broke out bits of high-shine pink paper that had been traced and snipped [...]

Seeing as how that striking image of a matte red lip, bleached brows, and texturized sleek hair from Rick Owens’ Fall show is still burned into our brain six months later, the backstage scene for Spring drummed up more than a little bit of déjà vu. “He really likes a pale woman,” makeup artist Lucia [...]

Beholding the backstage scene at Gucci was something of a serious flashback—and we’re not just talking about the overt references to Surrealist artist Man Ray and Blondie front woman Debbie Harry. There was Pat McGrath, brow bleach in hand, calling to mind her blocked-out arches phase circa Fall 2009, when an all-forehead, all-the-time mandate swept [...]

If you’re unfamiliar with Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki’s work, the retina-burning ombré pink lips at Prabal Gurung were likely a bit of a jarring site. But put in the context of the photographer’s vivid images of exotic blooms, the mouths made perfect sense. “It’s like there is an intoxicating flower coming out of her mouth,” [...]

If we had to call it right here, right now, spider lashes would be the trend we are most excited about for Fall. We loved them at Alberta Ferretti and ogled them at Lanvin, but it was Charlotte Tilbury’s mastery with the mascara wand at Chloé that really sealed the deal. “It’s a hybrid between [...]

“She’s been through a lot,” hairstylist Luigi Murenu quipped of the Viktor & Rolf woman for Fall. “The rain, the dust. They’re heroines—modern Joans of Arc!” While most people would take that reference and conjure images of the French patron saint’s heavy fringe, Murenu went in a different direction completely, opting to channel his embattled [...]

“Please drink with straws!” came the desperate pleas from casting directors backstage at Rick Owens, where makeup artist Lucia Pieroni was painting on a painstakingly perfect red lip. “It’s 80 percent glamour, 20 percent spooky,” Pieroni said of the look—the outline of MAC Lip Pencil in Redd and the slashing of its Lipstick in Lady [...]

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the old saying goes. That seemed to be the underlying philosophy at Frida Giannini’s Gucci presentation this morning. The clothes harked back to the flashy, Seventies vibe that was such a hit for Spring. And so too went the hair and makeup, both of which bore resemblances [...]

“These are brilliant pencils,” face painter Charlotte Tilbury said at Chloé yesterday, where she was using MAC’s Brow Pencils in Lingering and Fling to create the crux of her makeup look. “You can do everything with them because they have a waxy texture that blends so well,” she continued, creating a slight, highlighted contour across [...]

At its show this weekend, MaxMara did away with the decadence from a host of seventies revivals that have preceded it this season by embracing something altogether cleaner and leaner for Spring. And so it began backstage with makeup artist Tom Pecheux, who wanted to “erase all the flavors and features of the skin and [...]