These Portrait Girls Possess the Rare Beauty of a Great Work of Art

These Portrait Girls Possess the Rare Beauty of a Great Work of Art

The hackneyed expression “pretty as a picture” crumbles into dust when you look at these young women, whose deeply felt style may be reminiscent of the great portrait artists of the past, but whose drama, whose fierce attitude, is light-years away from stuffy museum corridors. Though Yasmine Baiou, a stylist based in Paris, says, “I like to get high on paintings . . . The work of Gustav Klimt, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Léon Bakst, and the Orientalist movement obviously inspired my world,” she quickly adds, “I think that the essence of my style is really ’70s,” and she is not talking about the 1870s. She cites “Cher for her disco and hippie style and Frida Kahlo for her folkloric and traditional style,” and confesses that she is obsessed with Les Eaux Primordiales’s gorgeously named fragrance, Let’s Murder the Moonshine.

These Portrait Girls Possess the Rare Beauty of a Great Work of Art

Velma Rosai-Makhandia, a Kenyan artist, takes inspiration from “my mother’s old photographs from the ’60s and also the women captured by photographers like Jean Depara, Malick Sidibé, James Barnor, and Seydou Keïta, and Jenn Nkiru’s film, Rebirth Is Necessary, a summation and collection of beautiful archival imagery of the black experience.” Her beauty routine relies on equal parts cold water and coconut oil, as well as, she laughs, wine and chocolate.

These Portrait Girls Possess the Rare Beauty of a Great Work of Art

The London-based model and proud feminist Jess Maybury says her style icons are Grace Jones, Jean-Paul Goude, and even the John Waters actor Divine—“so super glamorous and extreme.” Maybury finds her soul in vintage Jean Paul Gaultier, especially his costumes for Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. She claims she is so lazy that “I never even blow-dry my hair—I just wash my face,” but we bet she would gussy up for a night at her dream destination; asked what decade in the past she would time travel to, she picks the late ’70s, early ’80s, to visit the vogueing ballrooms of New York: “People used to party more!”

These Portrait Girls Possess the Rare Beauty of a Great Work of Art

Leigh Nishi-Strattner, an ethereal model who goes by the Instagram handle @Ex__Waifu, insists that she is drawn to classic beauty and classic fabric, to inject “some luxury and elegance into my everyday life.” She doesn’t have to look far for influences: “My elegant grandmother in the 1950s—the nipped-in-waist sundresses and the little jackets.” She loves horror films and film noirs; the 1960 flick Eyes Without a Face is a favorite. And speaking of eyes—she looks back with longing to the 1980s, before she was born, when “you could wear blue eye shadow up to your eyebrows.” As for her face, she is such a sunscreen devotee that she even puts it on “for the computer screen.”

These Portrait Girls Possess the Rare Beauty of a Great Work of Art

Devan Díaz, a writer who works in partnership with the New York City Department of Health, focusing on HIV prevention and care, is a Latina of Peruvian descent. She grew up in Tennessee, where, she admits, “My family stood out!” Early on, Díaz was captivated by the exaggerated glamour of movie stars like María Félix, Gena Rowlands, and Dolores del Río, and the heroines of Mexican cinema. She remembers studying her older female relatives, recalling fondly that they loved “a little too much lipstick, perfume, and ruffles.” (The smell of her grandmother’s Pond’s cold cream is Díaz’s Proustian madeleine.) As a trans woman, she took all these influences to heart, and now, she says, “I know what works for my body. It’s more about feeling good versus looking good.”

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