Extreme Cat-Eyes! Iconic Red Lips! Marni’s Retro-Futurist Beauty Is a Runway Win
Backstage at Marni’s Spring 2019 show, makeup artist Pat McGrath was inspecting every nuance of the graphic wings traced precisely around the bedroom-eyed gaze of rising model Jess Maybury. “Francesco [Risso] wanted the girls to look like modern, punk versions of Grecian statues,” said McGrath of the directional makeup look that was to support the ancient Greece-inspired collection—side draped skirts, laced-up corsetry, collage-y prints that called to mind the iconic Venus de Milo statue thought to represent Aphrodite.
With an emphasis on the strong, individual characters casted by the designer—from Karen Elson to ’90s fashion fixture Guinevere van Seenus—McGrath served up three different makeup looks, with the majority of the girls wearing fresh, clean complexions supercharged with washes of McGrath’s Skin Fetish Highlighter. There were four other girls in addition to Maybury who sported thick, jet-black strokes of geometric negative liner. Slashed from the inner corners along the upper and lower lash lines, the statement eye extended out just beyond the outer edge of the arch and back toward the bridge of the nose along the brow bone in a serpentine shape that recalled the intricate, kohl-rimmed eyes of centuries past.
To create the shape, McGrath first etched it out with her waterproof and long-wear PermaGel Ultra Glide Eye Pencil for staying power, then her Perma Precision Liquid Eyeliner for tighter, inkier lines. “It’s brave eyeliner and the girls look incredible in it,” she beamed, adding that she took a bespoke approach to each wing according to individual eye and brow shapes.
Then, for a select few at lip-level, there were stamps of red on the mouth. But not just any crimson shade. It was McGrath’s bright, warm orange Elson 2 MatteTrance Lipstick, which was inspired by her longtime friend and muse who was among the five models who wore the glow-inducing shade on the catwalk. “Pat is one of my oldest friends since [we met on the set of] my first Vogue cover 21 years ago,” explained the 39-year-old English supermodel. “She’s made two lipsticks named after me, and I obviously love that I have one of them on today. I love all things Pat. She’s such a renegade.”
Nodding to the chiseled, statuesque silhouettes of Greek mythology, hairstylist Duffy sculpted the manes of more than half of the girls as if he was carving marble, first adding extra-long extensions and razoring the ends for stringiness, then executing a glossy, drenched texture—“almost like you’ve had two tons of water poured on the head,” he said with a laugh—by soaking the strands in L’Oréal’s TecniArt Styling Gel Glue and slicking it back taut to the head for a “strong, straight, and high-shine effect.”
From the equal parts ethereal and hyper-futuristic clothes to the idiosyncratic cat-eye designs and powerful pouts, Risso’s show stoked both the romance of the past and wild imagination of the future with a distinctly bold confidence. Perhaps McGrath put it best: “The Marni woman knows how she wants to wear makeup; she knows how she wants to dress. She has no fear.”
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