The greeting backstage at Marc Jacobs today was a cloud of aerosol hairspray so thick you could see and taste it. I caught hairstylist Duffy grabbing some fresh air moments before crew members lifted the Park Avenue Armory’s giant doors to vent the space. “My team, my lovely, dear, wonderful team who just came from Paris, exhausted, have worked literally 72 hours straight,” he tells me of many flying directly from Margiela couture to start building Diana Ross-inspired silhouettes out of 108 full lace human hair wigs. Jacobs is notorious for down-to-the-wire decisions, and the beauty for his 40th anniversary show was no exception.
Big pumps of Cetaphil and lash strips coated in nail polish were scattered on tables, and an entire dressing room was being slowly filled with styrofoam heads wearing cotton candy clouds of hair. “We still have five to go,” Duffy says. The show starts in four hours. It’s only been 48 hours since they got the “go-ahead” from Jacobs on the look, and sourcing, dyeing, styling, and layering (each model wears a 2-wig sandwich with a “hair donut” in between) this many XXL hair pieces would usually take weeks, not days. “We’re talking silhouette and we’re talking extremes,” he says. “The funny thing is, this started out with Marc sending me a music video of The Supremes.”
The makeup was equally stage-ready. “At first we were doing single lashes, then we doubled them up,” makeup artist Diane Kendal tells me of how the faux strips were layered much like the wigs after being coated in spidery, clumpy layers of black nail lacquer. “The collection, it’s cut out paper dolls,” she says of the season’s exaggerated proportions and thick fabrics covered in jewels and mirrors, noting that the doll lashes and hyper-contouring was a way of carrying the theme to the face. She prepped skin with Cetaphil Daily Oil-Free Facial Moisturizer SPF 35 as a primer for the layers of powder and theatrical makeup so that “it’s not dewy, it is matte, but when the light hits it, you get a natural healthy sheen.” She was considering bleaching brows at first, then decided to draw a simple line right at the top of arches and brush hairs up to give “definition, but it’s not too done.” The attitude extends to fingertips painted in shades of CND polish that faintly resemble cardboard. “He really wanted to have short, neutral nails,” says nail artist Jin Soon. “So we had to cut some beautiful nails short.”
Hanging around the catering table filled with Maman treats, models talked about the casting process. There are familiar faces, like Wali, who’s walked a handful of the designer’s shows already and describes the clothes this season as “doll vibes.” Anyier Anei agrees. “It’s giving doll,” she says of her first Marc Jacobs show look, a “pink knit with brown tights and really cute heels.” She woke up to the news this morning that she was going to be in the show, as did Ali Dansky. It’s Sam Case’s first show, too, and Anita Vida mentions it’s her first American runway, and she found out last night that she was confirmed after visiting Jacob’s Spring street headquarters a few times since Monday.
“Marc is not shy of a brand new girl,” says Dean Rodgers of IMG, who calls out newcomer Skylar Sheridan as the one to watch. It’s what’s made his shows interesting to watch over the decades thanks to casting choices like Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and a teen Kendal Jenner. “A lot of designers want someone who’s seasoned, who knows how to wear a difficult shoe, who’s not going to embarrass them on the runway,” says Rodgers. “But Marc loves that new unknown.”
