What did Dame (Mother!) Pat McGrath bring to Vogue’s 2024 Forces of Fashion? An airbrush machine, for one, to deliver a live tutorial of the glass skin that shattered the internet—and changed the backstage beauty landscape forever. It’s a post-Margiela Couture world and we’re all living in it. “We did over 340 looks to get to this moment,” she revealed of the months-long process (and hundreds of coats of specially mixed peel-off mask) spent building up to the most-talked-about runway beauty moment of all time. Stay tuned, she says, for her next glass skin product–in the meantime, her holiday 2024 Luminous Legends: Mega Eye Shadow Palette is the newest star in her kit.
Of course, a surprise cameo by superstar Meredith Duxbury, who modeled the “glittery cupid’s bow that really took off” and walked the Miu Miu runway this season, dazzled the audience. “It’s kind of punk rock, but built with joy,” McGrath explains of the look that read like molten-metal mouth jewelry against her signature spa-fresh skin. “Every time I think of Meredith, I always think about your major glow,” she said of “just enhancing what she already has.”
Next, McGrath taught us all how to create her eternal runway beauty staple: “So one thing we always say at every show season, there’s always a version of a smokey eye, right?” she asked before delivering a mermaid-pretty version in minutes. “Don’t be afraid to get dirty,” she joked. And if you’re wondering which runway beauty moment from our Vogue reader vote was brought back to life (as if it ever left our inspo boards!), it was her Valentino Couture Spring 2019 feathered eye look that fluttered past guests and into the spotlight. She reminisced with her “mind melded” team about how the hand-dyed Japanese feathers the house shared with her would “take on a life of their own” with the gentlest gust of air conditioner backstage. “It was crazy.” In the end, “it was almost as if the face had to represent a flower,” she said. “It really was a bloom.”
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Photographed by Emily Malan
