It’s Elemental: Chanel’s Rock-Embroidered Statement Brow

Photo: Luca Cannonieri/GoRunway.com

If one look at Karl Lagerfeld’s epic runway set didn’t clue you in, the designer had minerals on his mind for fall. The pale, pebble-strewn landscape was spiked with towering crystal sculptures that called to mind a modern-day Planet Krypton—except that this being Planet Chanel, it was ruled not by Superman, but by an army of glittering, leggy Karl-ites with glittering eyebrows to match.

“Three weeks ago, [Lagerfeld] sent a quick sketch,” Peter Philips, Chanel’s creative director of makeup, said backstage. “It was a sort of impression, with lots of blush and stones floating on the face. I wanted to translate it into something that would look great on the girls. Contemporary and a little bit military—a kind of strong textural element.” He began dreaming of graphic arches made entirely of real, twinkling stones—but with 67 girls walking in the show, “I knew I didn’t have time to sit and [glue them on] one by one,” he said. Searching for a solution, he called his friends at Lesage—the storied French atelier now owned by Chanel and responsible for its legendary embroidery work. Together, they fashioned a pair of slim, rectangular fabric strips that could be pressed on with one simple gesture. “Each one has a base of organza that’s covered in hand-embroidered sequins,” he said. On top of that incandescent backdrop, the house’s artisans sewed dozens of miniature rock fragments into the fabric to create a dense, shimmering mineral effect on the runway. “There are 75 pairs in purples, greens, blues, grays,” said Philips, gesturing to a table of carefully marked fabric arches attached to a white heavy card bearing each girl’s name. “Saskia, Anja, Josephine. They’ve each been color-coordinated to what each girl is wearing.”

Naturally, such statement pieces called for a well-prepped canvas. Before gluing them onto the skin with theatrical adhesive at a sharp, horizontal angle, Philips blended Chanel Mat Lumière foundation onto the skin for a soft, natural finish. “It’s very cold today so a lot of the girls are coming in with red noses and cheeks. We need to even them out,” he said. In the spirit of Lagerfeld’s original sketch, he used a generous swirl of a cool, unexpected mauve-ish taupe powder, (the shade: Notorious), due out next fall. “I’m using it to sculpt the cheekbones and also as a veil on the eyelids that disappears all the way into the hairline.”

That pale, slightly punkish color also turned up on the nails in the form of Frenzy—a lavender-taupe polish plucked from the fall collection, as well. “With the Chanel girl, said Philips with a smile, “there’s always a bit of a twist.”

by Catherine Piercy for vogue.com