Runway Beauty: Chanel's Bold Brushstroke Eyes At Spring 2014

One look at Chanel’s Grand Palais show space turned art gallery this morning provided a charming window into what was to come on the house’s spring runway: Around the room, dozens of towering large-scale sculptures, tapestries, and paintings—some, like an overlapping pair of double framed canvases, marked with a circular red “sold” sticker—provided a joyful dose of color against the graphic white-walled set.

Backstage, too, a painterly palette was in full effect, from the watercolor box patterns of designer Karl Lagerfeld’s vibrant dresses to the feathery, Rothko-esque edges of a pearl gray frock. Even models’ bold brushstroke eye makeup seemed a study in art school chic.

“The look was inspired by the gallery theme, something playful,” said backstage pro Peter Philips, who was standing near a makeshift arts-and-crafts table dotted with tiny jars of brightly colored face pigments and brushes. “And also by a sample card that Karl showed me of his favorite print from the collection, which had inspired him.” During the makeup test a few days earlier, Philips explained, he’d started dipping into the primary palette of purples, blues, greens, yellows and pinks, then painting them free-form along the upper and lower lids and even into the browline.  “Karl loved it immediately. He said ‘Just go for it,’ ” recalled Philips, who, perhaps not so coincidentally, graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in his native Belgium before switching into makeup artistry. “Eventually the look got bolder and bolder until it became this.”

Before re-creating the look on the actual morning of the show, however, Philips prepped the skin much like a canvas by evening it out with Chanel Vitalumière Aqua foundation, then dabbing a bit on the lips, too, to take down their natural pinkish color slightly. Next, he filled in the brows with a pitch-black paint and traced the eyes with a combination of black Chanel liners (including a thick rimming of the company’s Ligne Graphique de Chanel and Ecriture de Chanel liquid pens along the upper lashlines) to create a framework for the color. Once he’d established the base, it took “about six to ten minutes to do one girl,” Philips said of applying the vivid, colorful pro pigments with quick, informal strokes using Chanel’s #21 makeup brush. “The idea was to have symmetry, but with a few calculated mistakes.”

There was a certain spontaneous quality to the look of hairstylist Sam McKnight’s feathered black-, brown-, and platinum-colored wigs—although getting them ready for the runway was anything but. “We need them to be as stiff as possible so that they’ll keep their shape,” he said of blowing all 80 of them dry using gels, hair spray, texturizers, and dry shampoo, then adding extensions for thickness before finally fitting them to each model and cutting them to frame her face. “At first, Karl was thinking of an Iroquois, or a Mohican quality to the hair. I was thinking of the kind of slightly eccentric, downtown New York woman on the art scene, a little bit eighties, definitely nonconformist. Then we started talking about the paint strokes in the clothing. At some point, the hair started to resemble a paintbrush,” she said of its splayed ends and rigid-yet-fluffy quality.

There was, of course, one more literal form of painting going on—in the form of Chanel’s Black Satin nail polish, which was being stroked onto nails in fine inky layers for a hint of tough-edged chic. Already a cult classic, it suddenly seems poised for another sold-out run come spring.