Rodarte’s Striking Flower Hair Sculptures Bring the Wow at New York Fashion Week
You could hear the collective intake of breath as photographers, editors, hairstylists, and makeup artists filed into the multipurpose room on the second floor of the Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in the East Village this afternoon. As a cold, early Fall rain fell outside, seamstresses hand-stitched fresh rosebuds into tulle veils, and Odile Gilbert wove fresh roses into models’ hair for Rodarte’s Spring 2019 show.
Petals from individual buds, and garlands strung up by Los Angeles-based floral designer Joseph Free in shades of scarlet, yellow, pale pink, and spray-painted metallics, covered the wooden floor alongside loose bobbi pins as Gilbert’s team worked feverishly. The French hairstylist completed this exercise 48 different times, on 48 different models, finding new ways to blend the flowers with Art Deco-inspired metal crowns and birds, as directed by designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy. Asked when she began the “extravagant” undertaking for the 6 PM show, Gilbert took a long drag off her e-cigarette before replying. “1 PM.”
“It’s good for New York,” she added of the hair haute couture moment, which gets high marks for imagination and creativity in a city where no-makeup makeup and untouched strands often reign. It was a fitting return for the Mulleavys who brought their tulle and sequins-encrusted show back to Manhattan after decamping to Paris two seasons ago.
“We wanted to bring a look,” confirmed makeup artist James Kaliardos, who referenced modern art—the recent Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy show at the Tate Modern, specifically—as the starting point for the “graphic but softly geometric” blocks of NARS eyeshadow in Domination, a bright fuchsia; Baby Jane, an aqua blue; and Douro, a bright yellow that he pressed into models lids in abstract rectangle shapes.
The bold color palette, which included not one, but three different blushes, and a blue-red mouth slicked with NARS Powermatte Lip Pigment in Don’t Stop— a crimson that Kaliardos insists works on every skin tone— didn’t match, as much as contrast with Gilbert’s organic headdresses. “It throws things in a different direction,” he insisted of the way the saturated colors played with the romanticism on the rain-soaked runway. “That’s what makeup is all about—to surprise. [Kate and Laura] understand the subtlety,” Kaliardos continued of the sister duo's beauty sensibility, which is a much-appreciated addition to the New York calendar. That is to say, welcome home, Rodarte.
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