Five Beauty Looks to Try From the Autumn/Winter 2019 Shows

Fashion month came to an end last Tuesday. It was a season that gave us a winter wonderland at Chanel; a celebration of dark romance at Prada, Alexander McQueen and Simone Rocha; a heavy dose of rubber fetishism at Christopher Kane; Jeremy Scott doing what he does best at Moschino; and the meeting of London’s East End boys and West End girls at Riccardo Tisci’s second collection for Burberry.

As for hair and make-up, there were also plenty of takeaways to inspire. Here, we present five of our favourites – including Anthony Turner’s wet-look Lego hair at JW Anderson and Aaron DeMey’s interpretation of bourgeoise beauty at Celine. 

Plastic Hair at JW Anderson 

At JW Anderson, hairstylist Anthony Turner created a contemporary twist on the 1920s and 1930s starlet. Think: The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan meets Betty Boop. Turner said the starting point was actually the plasticised heads of Lego figurines; hair was slicked and sculpted flat to the models’ scalps using wet-look gel and a tail comb, forming two-dimensional finger waves, loops, and curls. With the style setting rock-hard, we imagine it required several shampoos and a whole lot of elbow grease to remove – but totally worth it, nonetheless.

Plum Lips at Simone Rocha 

Sam Bryant daubed the lips of Simone Rocha’s diverse cast of women with moody, plum shades, fitting with the designer’s exploration of femininity’s dark side. Using Mac Cosmetics’ lip pencil in the shade Vino, with satin-textured lipstick in Cyber slicked over the top, models Chloë Sevigny, Lily Cole, Ugbad Abdi and Jess Maybury were given purple-hued mouths that starkly contrasted with illuminated skin, lightly defined brows and eyes that had been delicately smudged with a creamy, brick shadow.

Bleached Eyebrows at Prada 

Umm-ing and ahh-ing over bleached brows? Pat McGrath might have just convinced you to take the plunge at Prada A/W19. Complimenting and contrasting with Guido Palau and colourist Josh Wood’s peroxide blonde and liquorice black iterations of Wednesday Addams’ pigtails, McGrath gave models washed out complexions which highlighted the gothic overtones of Mrs Prada’s collection – one that mused on Frankensteinian themes of romance and fear. Ready your Jolen spatula to try at home. 

Glitter Eyes at Dries Van Noten 

At Dries Van Noten, Peter Philips took glitter eye make-up as far away from the glamour of Studio 54 as one could imagine, in keeping with the collection’s slightly sombre mood: it was set against the concrete backdrop of a grey bunker, whilst Roy Orbison’s 1961 ballad Crying reverberated around the show space. Employing a laidback approach, Philips glued chunky particles of multi-coloured and gold glitter onto eyelids using a brush – giving the effect that models had indeed been weeping – and mirroring the slept-in hair which came courtesy of Sam McKnight.

No Make-Up at Celine 

Every single model at Hedi Slimane’s sophomore collection for Celine wore a pair of aviator sunglasses, as though they had just woken up, thrown on the most pulled together look imaginable, but forgone cosmetics of any kind. After all, the women of the Parisian bourgeoisie do not care for such things. Certainly, Aaron DeMey gave the impression that the models wore nothing at all on their faces except the mark of an excellent skincare regime and a good SPF, with a beauty look that left us wondering ‘quel est son secret?’