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.