02 Oct “Extreme” Beauty, Backstage At Viktor & Rolf

Stick-on makeup cutouts like the kind we’ve spied at Gareth Pugh and Fendi may seem like a newfangled trick to beauty novices, but Pat McGrath’s unimpressed. “We’ve been doing it for 15 years,” she said backstage at Viktor & Rolf, where she broke out bits of high-shine pink paper that had been traced and snipped into the shape of winged-out eye liner. “It’s something we came up with as a way to get an eye liner on quickly,” for, say, another sweltering backstage show in Paris where slaving over a precise pigment application is nearly impossible.

To coincide with the designers’ “doll” theme for Spring, McGrath thought about what kind of makeup a modern Barbie would wear and decided it definitely wouldn’t be that sixties-era blue eye shadow-and-cat eye prototype. “It would be some kind of crazy angles or crazy color. The modern woman likes extremes,” according to McGrath, who was applying the paper pieces with glue over a brown smudged-out lid and adding both pink and black rows of false lashes for impact. Rosy, hot pink cheeks and a fluoro pink lip finished off the radical message to Mattel.

Hairstylist Luigi Murenu added to the modernization effort by bringing the “graphicity,” as he called it, with heavy, thick manes of pushed-back hair. “It’s dry, Victorian texture with an architectural touch,” Murenu said, coating strands with John Frieda Luxurious Volume Thickening Mousse, applying heat, imparting an “invisible crimp,” and brushing through for fullness.