“Maryam loves to celebrate her friends and women she’s interested in,” hairstylist Tamara McNoughton declared backstage this afternoon, moments before Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s Spring 2020 show. (For proof, look to today’s runway, which featured members of her creative circle, such as actress Hailey Benton-Gates, baker Lexie Smith, and even one long-legged intern.) So it should come as no surprise that when it came time to decide on the beauty equation for her thirteenth collection, the designer needed not look far and wide, but rather right in front of her: “Maryam and Haley [Wollens] were like, Oh my god, we love that!” remembered makeup artist Susie Sobol, whose own gold-flecked lashes served as inspiration for the season’s subtle glints of color at eye-level—no two alike.
“It’s a very tailor-made look,” Sobol said, as she swirled a fan brush in red Mehron pigment, coating it onto the very ends of artist Raina Hamner’s curled fringe set. To wit, a flick of apple green was given to a glowing Lili Sumner, fresh off of vacation with Nassir Zadeh herself, while a pop of blue went to Jane Moseley. Meanwhile designer Susan Cianciolo received a different chromatic treatment entirely: a soft tangerine mouth courtesy of Make Beauty’s Matte Lipstick. “We’re looking at these girls as their own individual characters and then choosing as we go.”
The same could be said for hair, which was primed with Oribe’s Foundation Mist and then left loose, thrown up into a haphazard knot, or quickly braided and festooned with mixed-and-matched scrunchies and scarves. Just before the cast, dressed in python-print boots and barely-there bottoms, descended on Chinatown’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park, McNoughton was still fast at work, pulling out baby hairs to create a halo of flyaways. “The directive I was given was: Everyone needs to look like they were able to do it themselves,” she noted. A runway rooted in reality? Now that’s refreshing.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
