Lifestyle Mirror

Backstage at Marc Jacobs, press was huddled into a room with a glaring yellow light at its center. "It's almost sepia-toned," one reporter noted, looking at the clothes of her companion. "We're all completely black and white."

Indeed, all of us were rendered in greyscale. We were standing smack in the middle of the test room, where models' makeup, hair, and nails would be seen as they would on the runway. "We have two different lightings," François Nars explained, "the real lighting and the runway light. We tried to find makeup to look good with the lights. The idea was to stay non-colorful and keep using grays and blacks."

"It's a black eye with white on the inside, a very matte powdered face, and the lips are pale with a hint of natural color." Before the girls hit the runway, Nars was dabbing on Triple X Lip Gloss for a bit of shine on the lips, plus the new Black Valley Eye Paint onto the lids (which he called "grease").

"Marc wants the girl to look sexy and the makeup to have an edge. We like when it gets a bit destroyed."

And as for the lack of color, the inspirations proved en pointe. Again, the sixties ruled: "Back then, the makeup was black and white, so we kept that spirit without copying it... There were pictures of Marianne Faithfull and Joan Jett for hair... It's a very underground girl, a bit rock 'n roll."

Getting the look seemed to be more of a minimal process: "We tried to make it what we like. We kept the skin tone... maybe even a bit paler. No shine, very powdery. We use the liner in black and some black shadow, and it's about blending and the crease. I always want the girl to still look beautiful. That's always my motto. I never want to sacrifice the girl for the look." 

And, of course, the brow was defined (every girl wore practically the same color eyebrows) perhaps to help the look work with the dramatic hair by Guido Palau, who custom-razored every single wig for the show. But the hair was, perhaps, less specifically derived than the makeup. "It was lots of different things," Palau said in the ten seconds he was able to spare before rehearsal, "it was girls from the 90s, but it was the cool girl Marc always likes."

Finally, just before we walked out the door—Team Sephora was there to announce the Enamored Hi-Shine Lacquer in "In Shiny and Jezebel" (a top coat and a scarlet red, respectively) which made their debut on the runway. A full color range will be hitting Sephoras near you in the fall, but that was all the information we could glean from the tight-lipped publicists. Another little tidbit? The topcoat was inspired by Marc's coffee table, which was lacquered thirty times. Talk about high shine. —Phillip Picardi (@pfpicardi)