Kenzo's Gang of California Cool Girls

“The inspiration really came from California, and living near water,” Humberto Leon said backstage at La Cité du Cinéma, speaking to reporters at the sprawling venue on the outskirts of Paris, where he and Kenzo collaborator Carol Lim held the house’s spring show. The design duo, who hail from the West Coast, brought those themes to life on the runway with wave-crest prints, aquatic illustrations, one politically minded sartorial statement (Caroline Brasch Nielsen’s “No Fish, No Nothing” logo tee), and a finale that placed their model lineup behind a wall of water. Leon and Lim even had nail artist Naomi Yasuda conceive white-water manicures that featured a black base of MAC Nail Lacquer in Nocturnelle tipped with frothy alabaster brushstrokes of Vestral White.

When it came to their models’ hair and makeup, however, things seemed to take a cue from a less literal source: the unstudied ease of California cool girls.

“[The girls] are really supposed to be a gang—a beautiful gang,” said makeup artist Aaron de Mey, who focused on the eyes of Kenzo’s model tribe, because, as he put it, “they’re the power of the face.” Following a preshow test that had included a few different lid looks, all of them in varying renditions of black—including a nascent color-blocking idea meant to mimic the show’s graphic opening crop tops, coats, and pants—de Mey settled on a white iteration. “It just felt younger, fresher,” he said of the “reverse sixties” technique he applied, etching a very thin, straight line of MAC Acrylic Paint in White across the upper lash line. Adding to the raw, modern feel of the face was the notable absence of color elsewhere, save for some luminescent highlights on the skin: no mascara, no shadow, no contours, and no overly groomed brows; in fact, models who arrived with bleached arches were allowed to keep them that way in order to convey a certain sense of effortlessness. “I like [that] it looks like she could do it herself,” he said.

Hairstylist Anthony Turner was hoping to achieve a similar DIY attitude. “[It’s] almost like a boy would do it,” he said of models’ side-parted strands, which were slicked back at the crown using L’Oréal Professionnel gel and Infinium Hairspray to impart a wet, high-gloss feeling. As a finishing touch, Turner used a curling iron to create an irreverent bend through the lengths, the kind of indentation you might get from wearing an elastic band for too long. The effect was one part urban beach babe, one part Parisian sophisticate—and 100 percent Kenzo original.

Anthony Vaccarello’s Graphic Eyes and Smooth Hair

“It’s minimalist, confident, sexy—but it’s also playful,” said makeup artist Tom Pecheux at the Anthony Vaccarello show in Paris this afternoon, referring to the deep midnight blue square of eyeliner he was carefully drawing onto the outer corners of each model’s eyes. He had settled on the look with the designe the night before. “We tried a red lip first, but it was too established,” he explained. “The collection is very graphic and there are a lot of triangular shapes. We wanted something sophisticated, rock ’n’ roll but still young. Anthony’s woman should have fun with her makeup.”

Models, a number of whom—like Anja Rubik and Malgosia Bela—are Vaccarello’s friends and supporters, certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves. Many of them slipped outside to a sunny patch of terrace with views of the Eiffel Tower before being coaxed back inside by members of his team, who were hard at work perfecting the tricky wedge shape. Pecheux was drawing it on freehand using a deep black powder (from Estée Lauder’s Pure Color Eyeshadow Duo in Moons) before going over it with a striking jewel-toned shade of cobalt (the company’s Pure Color Gelée Powder in Fire Sapphire).

To balance the rest of the face, he kept the complexion fresh—which was no small feat considering the steamy indoor temperatures. “I’m using a drop of Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair serum and mixing it in with the foundation,” he explained. “It’s a trick that makes it stick, even in the heat.” Afterword, he swirled a soft wash of the rosy bronze blush (Estée Lauder Pure Color Blush in Sensuous Rose) under the cheekbones and dabbed a bit of natural flesh-toned lipstick (Estée Lauder Pure Color Envy lipstick in Insatiable Ivory, out next March).

Healthy, glowing skin, of course, is a central part of the Anthony Vaccarello formula—and there was plenty of it showing below the neck, too, thanks to the designer’s cutaway blouses and slit-to-the-hip skirts for spring. In a way, said hairstylist Anthony Turner, that body-consciousness had even impacted the hair. “There’s something Amazonian about the girls,” he said of their long, gleaming limbs. “And there’s also something sporty. We were talking about early ’90s Cindy Crawford, a very American woman.” He wanted to create the feeling of hair that had been casually combed back away from the face with the fingers, “but still uptown rather than downtown.” After combing L’Oréal Professionnel Tecni Art Full Volume mousse through, he blew it “straight back” and then flat-ironed it for good measure. Before models took the runway, he applied the company’s Super Dust texture powder, then raked his owns hands through it for an authentic feeling.

The finishing touch before models walked down the runway? A coat of Estée Lauder Pure Color Envy Nail Lacquer in Red Ego (out in March) on toes—because, as Pecheux put it laughingly with a gesture toward their sky-high, lipstick-red stilettos for the runway, “this is not a woman who wears flats.”

Kohl-rimmed Eyes—and Rock 'n' Roll Attitude—at Versace

The aesthetic influence of California subculture—from the long, lank hair of West Coast skate kids to the bleached-out blonde of L.A. surf punks—was a recurring beauty reference at the New York shows this season. And from a quick survey of the backstage scene at Versace in Milan tonight, its gravitational force may be growing.

“It’s girl-boyish, that L.A. androgeny thing. Donatella was inspired by Stephanie Seymour and Axl Rose,” said hairstylist Guido Palau, referencing the notorious early-nineties couple, who embodied the hard-partying lifestyle of the Sunset Strip metal scene.

Still, it wasn’t Seymour—the famously bodacious model who appeared in more than a few house campaigns—that Palau was thinking of when prepping models for the runway.

“Remember how Axl had that long, straight, clean-ish kind of texture?” he said, referencing the Guns N’ Roses singer’s famously good hair, which he was loosely recreating by parting models’ freshly washed lengths down the middle, then drying it with his hands. Afterward, he blasted it with Redken Powder Refresh dry shampoo for a natural, lived in feeling. “It’s actually quite minimal for Versace, but it still relates back to the house codes in terms of rock ’n’ roll sexiness,” he explained.

Of course, what better way to channel the gritty, tough-edged cool of the Sunset Strip than with loads of black eye pencil? “We’re using it inside the eyes and then going back and tracing it along the upper and lower lashlines,” said Pat McGrath, who went back over it with a grayish brown shadow “for a more smoked out” finish. Of course, this being Donatella’s house, it still needed a dose of high-octane glamour. “We’re using false lashes—one set and a corner,” said McGrath of doubling up on the outer edges for extra impact. With a swirl of blush and a dab of lip balm, she sent models on their way to first looks, where racks of slim-fitted denim jackets, mid-riff baring leather crop tops, and tongue-in-cheek concert tees awaited their turn on the runway. “It’s cool, but still healthy,” she said of the look. “And very, very Versace.”

prom dresses | white prom dresses

The Beauty Report: Boyish Updos and Perfectly Natural Brows at Tom Ford

Models must surely breathe a sigh of relief when they’re booked for Tom Ford’s shows. Along with the honor of walking in his clothes come full-scale pedicures and manicures, plenty of attention given to prepping the skin, and an enviable payoff: incredibly glossy, well-cared-for complexions and natural, healthy nails that look fresh even under the harshness of the runway lights. But then what else would you expect from the designer? “I make terrific skin care . . . yes!” he agreed, referring to his Intensive Infusion Ultra Rich Moisturizer which was mixed in with his Traceless Foundation Stick. “I was going for powerful, strong women. Some of the girls have leg muscles that are quite toned; their shoulders are broad like a swimmer’s; they’re fresh, natural, and athletic.” The look—tousled hair, bare skin, and no-manicure manicures—worked in contrast to Ford’s embellished, form-fitting evening dresses and boyish, sexy leathers. “When you have open-toe sandals and bare hands, everything shows, and when you think about who our customer is and who we are, well of course they have to be immaculate! Wearing no polish is harder than covering everything up with a dark shade; your nails and toes have to be perfect.” In the end, the flawless appearance was accomplished with just one coat of Naked on fingers with a clear top coat, and one coat of Toasted Sugar on toes, again with a clear top coat—all made possible thanks to two hours of cuticle pushing and nail buffing by manicurist Liza Smith and her team.

Achieving perfection—without it looking too perfect—meant a delicate balancing act for hairstylist Orlando Pita and makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury. Mid-conversation, Pita was distracted by a far-too-polished updo across the room: “She looks like she’s about to walk down a couture runway!” he shouted. “Not too high, it’s too ‘madame!’” Pita’s eminently covetable updos are boyish, “not too strict,” the kind of party hair that looks effortless, but get it wrong and it’s instantly aging. It’s a favorite look of Ford’s, inspired by his mother, who in the sixties liked to wear a classic Tippi Hedren hairstyle. The key to keeping it more subdued, and therefore more modern, is to leave out the usual preliminary blow-out—Pita used Schwarzkopf Osis+ Dust It Mattifying Powder instead to provide texture, then pinned the hair at the back, to emphasize the natural, boyish shape of the back of the head, rather than the angular, square shape more typical of the traditional French twist, before spritzing with plenty of hair spray—Orlando Pita’s T3 Control. At the last minute, pieces were pulled out at the front, to keep things loose.

Meanwhile, after dusting models’ skin with Tom Ford Beauty Bronzing Powder in Terra and giving the lips a touch of natural color—Ford’s Sheer Lip Shine in Bare—Tilbury saw something that needs correcting. “Your eyebrows are a disaster!” she said to one model backstage, before expertly softening the shape with a deft stroke of a brow brush and a quick touch of Tom Ford Beauty Brow Sculptor and then finishing with a “There you go, sweetie!” What’s the difference between a “disaster” and the full brows requested by Ford, and inspired by Margaux Hemingway? “Everyone’s eyebrows are naturally asymmetrical—what you’re trying to do is bring as much symmetry back into the face as possible,” Tilbury explained. She held up eye pencils next to the eye to demonstrate: “It needs to start parallel with the nose; the brow then rises to a point that’s in line with the pupil; then it should taper downwards to the end.” Like Ford, she is passionate about brows, spending a good 20 minutes getting them right on each model. “Everyone backstage is going to have to take eyebrow brushes with them,” she shouted to her team. Which is reminiscent of something Ford himself said directly after the show: “A lot of thought goes into these things . . . a lot of thought.”

Beaded Sweaters

In an ideal world, you would never write about anything you hadn’t personally fondled, examining up-close its precious (and not so) fibers, stroking its winky embellishments to see whether they are worth even a minor commitment of time and money. That said, I am, like the rest of you, hardly immune to midnight googling. Which is how, doing a bit of causal research into fall’s plethora of beaded garments, I come upon a pair of decorated pullovers that are either refreshingly irreverent or in spectacularly poor taste: a sweatshirt at Matches in England offering a mother-of-pearl and crystal depiction of a cartoon bird in a coffin under a chandelier (don’t you love Farfetch? How else could you peruse the stock at Concept Store Riga and Gallery Andorra?) and from ASOS, a gray cotton extravagance from the designer Ashish with Shut Up You’re Not My Real Dad shining in bugle beads.

Before moribund pets and teenage misanthropy arrive on the scene, I have already perused bedecked bombshells all over Manhattan, many of which exude a whiff of Dries Van Noten’s current collection, which featured, among other dazzling, spangled suggestions, a heartbreakingly seductive muffler decorated with swirled beads and shots of gold, that, despite a price tag hovering near four figures, is sold out all over the world.

At J.Crew, I fall deeply in love with a pale pullover, whose neck and shoulders are coated in dark beads, and have a brief fantasy of layering this under a vintage dress in a facsimile of the mesmerizing Prada fall 2013 collection, until a colleague brings me back down to earth by pointing out that I never wear pullovers and the likelihood of this look actually succeeding is depressingly slim. Still, if I insist on trying, for $49.95, H&M has a sweater smattered with rhinestones; for $179.20, the Outnet has a dignified N.Peal bead and crystal-encrusted cashmere crewnecks.

An extremely fetching item at Anthropologie called the Sequined Firecracker Shift (it looks the way it sounds) obviates the problem of what to pair with these fancy feasts. (Well, it’s really a nonproblem—assuming you own slim trousers, a plain skirt, or even a pair of jeans.)

But perhaps you are drawn more to the historical roots of this trend—those pretty decorated shrugs meant to lend a bit of unironic, cozy warmth to chilly shoulders more than a half-century ago. If strict adherence to authenticity is important to you, there are currently on eBay over 1,100 beaded vintage sweaters, everything from ivory cardies to ebony shells, variously laden with polka dots and peonies, starbursts and sunflowers. But search as you will, you will not find an item that disses your father, real or presumptive: Behavior that now seems frisky and semi-adorable would have landed you in reform school 60 years ago.

prom dresses | blue prom dresses

Backstage at New York Fashion Week: The Rise of the Blunt-Cut Bob

When Karen Elson turned up backstage at Jason Wu earlier this week, it was hard to take your eyes off her. A flame-haired beacon in a steely jade satin dress, the nineties-era supermodel was making her New York Fashion Week debut—with a new blunt-cut variation of her chin-grazing bob. “I was on a cover shoot for Chinese Vogue, and the hairstylist asked me if he could cut it. I said, ‘Sure, give me a trim,’ and he just took my ponytail and chopped it!” Elson recalls with a laugh. “I’ve never had my hair all one length before. It’s easy.”

From a quick survey of New York collections, she’s in good company. British stunner Sam Rollinson opened Rag & Bone with a ruler-straight variation of her brunette crop that lent a hint of tough-chic attitude to the label’s easy slip dresses and athletic crop tops; runway favorites Catherine McNeil and Chiharu Okunugi kicked off the spring 2014 season with ends so uniformly blunt, they looked like they’d been cut with a razor. They wore their shorter lengths, which fall somewhere between the chin and the middle of the neck, slicked back tight against the head at Prabal Gurung, where the hair conjured the controlled cool of a 1950s mannequin.

“There is something very elegant about it,” backstage fixture Odile Gilbert explained of the shearing technique which imparts an otherwise nondescript bob with a spirit of intention, at Altuzarra, where she was busy giving model Ashleigh Good’s collar-skimming length a severe dead-center part.

If a definitive sign that last season’s intentionally choppy DIY crop is giving way to a more geometric incarnation, you only had to look at Karlie Kloss as she dashed backstage between shows this afternoon. A recent on-set touch-up left the model—whose jagged, wispy bob has become so popular that it is more commonly referred to as The Karlie—with a more linear variation of her signature look. “That’s what’s great about short hair,” she said brightly, ticking off the list of styles she’s embraced over the past year. “I've had my bangs more shaggy, I’ve had it shorter in the back, I’ve played a lot with variations.” Let the blunt-bob mania begin.

The Film Festival and Miu Miu Women's Tales Series

As you’ll notice, I’m not sending a communiqué from London this week. Instead, I spent the weekend at the 70th Venice International Film Festival (my first), whizzing up the Grand Canal by motorboat to and from the Lido, trying to make out what it’s all about. The occasion which drew me there was Miuccia Prada’s premiere of two new movies in her Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, the fifth and sixth movies she’s commissioned—with a free brief—to encourage the work of women film directors. The overt link between the pieces is that all the costumes are from Miu Miu collections, but the real communality lies in the subtle sidelights shone on the roles clothes play in women’s lives. “The real subject,” she said, with a subversive glint in her eye, “Is vanity. What it is for us. That’s interesting, no?”

The Door, by the L.A. director Ava DuVernay, is a lyrical blues piece in which a jilted Gabrielle Union is visited by women friends who insist on coaxing her to eat, get dressed, go out, and start living again (and with the curative availability of the entire Miu Miu spring collection in her wardrobe—who wouldn’t?). Le Donne della Vucciria, by the Palestinian director Hiam Abbass, shot in Palermo, opens with a more fashion-ambivalent image: a couple of marionette-makers dressing wooden puppets in miniature versions of the fall Miu Miu collection. The camera pans into the market square outside where adult women, clad in the same clothes, start clapping and dancing as a troupe of musicians arrive.

But trust Mrs. Prada not to be content with just putting together her own mini Miu Miu movie studio to give women directors’ a leg up in their career visibility. An entourage—Carey Mulligan, Freida Pinto, Michelle Dockery, Gabrielle Union—posed on the red carpet, wearing Miu Miu, but they also came at Prada’s invitation to share their brain-power, humor, and experiences. There were panel discussions with and about women in the film industry and a surprise dinner laid on (without paparazzi) at the Prada Foundation’s Ca’Corner della Regina palazzo on the Grand Canal. The Venice Biennale happens to dovetail with the film festival, and Miuccia Prada’s inquisitive mind—and power as a patron—naturally crosses both domains. Guests including Marina Abramović, Bruce Weber, Harvey Weinstein, and Franca Sozzani enjoyed a private view of the foundation’s new exhibition, “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013.” It’s a re-creation of a sixties installation-art show, which might shake purists to the core, but provocation, increasingly, seems to be Mrs. Prada’s pleasure. These days, like a twenty-first-century salon hostess, Miuccia Prada’s getting a kick out of stirring up social cocktails, putting interesting people together who’ll talk, think, break taboos, speak up, and be frank.

I strongly suspect that what we see happening on the Miu Miu today, and all the women’s ideas she’s championing, can only be the very tip of the plans she’s musing about behind the scenes. What will come out of it? “ I don’t know,” the designer shrugged with a huge smile. “It is an experiment!” And with that, she was off at a trot toward Milan. The spring collection for Prada, after all, is due to be on the runway in two weeks’ time.

cheap prom dresses | prom dresses under 100