Have You Ever Seen an Eyebrow So Thin?
Last season at Marni, models walked the runway with pencil-thin eyebrows, the brow that makeup artist Yadim refers to as “demure” and a bit “discreet,” but this season Yadim wanted to lean into the thin brow look a bit more, in a camplike way. The look was inspired by actress Maila Nurmi, famous for playing Vampira in the ’50s, a goth icon. He wanted the makeup to contrast the bold colors and standout prints of the collection, but it’s a contradiction that Yadim calls “a fantastic tension.” The dark edge of the beauty and the fantasy of the clothing created the full Marni story on the runway.
Here, Yadim tells us about the five-hour-long process of creating a shaved eyebrow, a low brow, and what he dubs “the full stamp.”
What was your inspiration for the look?
From the beginning, Francesco Risso said to Carlos Nazario (the stylist), Paul Hanlon (the hair stylist), and myself on a group chat, “I’m craving to make a masterpiece with you guys. We should make a theater.” This really got the wheels turning and I knew it would be special. We shared a ton of references with each other. We were looking at photos of the Cockettes, Ballet Russes, nightlife characters and personalities such as Leigh Bowery and ’90s New York club kid Walt Paper. We shifted to photos of Claude Cahun, the great early 20th-century self-portraitist and artist. There was a bit of Fellini in there. We even looked at some vintage British fetish and bondage magazines. Finally we landed on actress Maila Nurmi, who is most famous for her embodiment of the camp character Vampira with her hiked, arrogant brows and stern face. In the end, we chose three makeup looks for the show, which my team and I aptly named, “the low brow, the high brow, and the full stamp.” A lot of people immediately assumed that the drag icon Divine was the inspiration for the brow, and I’m sure subconsciously that was there, too, somewhere, as Divine remains one of my personal heroes.
Tell me the process of achieving the thin, overarched brow?
Oh what a process it is! We start by gluing down the model’s natural brow using a glue stick. This has to be done perfectly as any texture will read once the makeup is applied. The idea is to make it look (even up close) as if the natural brow has been shaved. My team and I came up with a really good trick for this. We started using transparent tattoo-transfer film on top of the glued-down brow; this helps to really smooth out the texture and keep it from lifting. Finally, we cover the smoothed-out surface with a full-coverage concealer. This involves lots of color correction as the natural color of the brow under the glue has to be neutralized. Once the brow is fully concealed, we powder and begin the painstaking process of drawing the actual brow shapes seen in the show. The entire process is tedious and at times involved having to remove and redo multiple times until it looked just right.
Some looks also had dark eyelids — what was that process?
The process with the dark lid look, which we called the “full stamp,” was very similar to the above. We started with the brow covering and concealing steps outlined above, but the design of the brow and “stamped on” eye shadow was different, slightly more doll-like. These looks took the longest as the line work and positioning had to be obsessively perfect. I had my best and most skillful artists working on these looks for hours to get them right.
How many hours?
Creating the looks took two days. It was two days of doing hair and makeup tests and trials at the Marni offices. It was a process to arrive at the final looks approved by Risso. Once the looks were developed and approved, doing the looks backstage became a sort of paint by numbers. Once the blueprint was there, it was much quicker to execute. I’d say that backstage before the show each look took about 45 minutes to an hour. Longer if we had to redo because it wasn’t as refined or perfected as it needed to be. I had a team of about 30 assistants pumping out the looks in the hours leading up to the show. We had a total of about five and a half hours to get hair and makeup done backstage.
When you first saw the collection, was this the original makeup look you envisioned?
No, I don’t think it was. Last season we also did a brow; it was a more demure, sort of discreet brow, but it also involved covering brows and drawing a thin brow above it. Initially, I thought we should stay away from anything too similar to the season before, but as we started to try out many looks at the test and as I started to gauge Risso’s reaction, I realized he was responding to a similar type of character, a very specific character. Then it became about how far we can push that character. In many ways, the beauty was a sort of continuation of last season, an evolution of it. How extreme can this character get while retaining an elegance and sophistication about them? I think with Risso’s Marni, this is always the impetus for the beauty. Toeing that fine line between beautiful and slightly disturbing.
Tell me about that juxtaposition. The collection is described as a “fantastical realm” with rose prints and bold colors, but the makeup look is opposite of that.
It’s really that line between beauty and horror, that juxtaposition creates a really fantastic tension. You could feel that tension in this show — it was palpable. This is the genius of Risso, he understands innately that both beauty and ugly are two sides of the same coin, and one can become the other with just the slightest tweak and shift in perspective or attention. What is beauty? What is ugly? Why? Says who? All very interesting, if uncomfortable, inquiries.
The show notes start off saying, “Beauty is a white rabbit scampering across your yard. You chase it.” What does that mean to you?
I think Risso is alluding to the ephemerality of what we call beauty. Backstage he also added “You chase it, though you fall short in capturing it.” In the famed Lewis Carroll book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the white rabbit symbolizes the fleetingness of time. No matter how much we try, we can never quite seem to catch up to it. Time, like beauty, is always just outside of reach. Maybe that’s what makes it so precious. Maybe Risso is asking us to rethink our relationship to beauty. In a world obsessed with capturing beauty and youth, maybe true beauty was never meant to be captured but rather just allowed to exist. Maybe it’s the chasing that’s pushing it away. After all, if we are chasing beauty we are inherently inferring that we are somehow lacking it, aren’t we?