The A/W 2024 show season finally came to a close last week (12 March 2024), with Celine presenting its latest collection via film (it had been shot across several different art deco locations in Paris). The house also announced the imminent arrival of its first-ever beauty line, Celine Beauté, designed by Hedi Slimane; a pale pink lipstick in the shade ‘La Peau Nue’ was applied to models by Aaron de Mey, providing the perfect teaser of what’s to come.
Prior runway collections, which were staged across February and early March in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, also brought forth a wealth of stand-out beauty moments, of course. They saw designers reuniting with long-time collaborators across hair and make-up – Guido Palau, Anthony Turner, Lynsey Alexander, Peter Phillips, Pat McGrath, and Diane Kendal included – and also pairing up with skincare and nailcare brands, such as 111Skin, Augustinus Bader, MyBlend, and Biosculpture.
Here, we recap A/W 2024 beauty highlights, from curly grey wigs at JW Anderson to gilt eyeliner at Chanel, and perfectly manicured nails at Hermès.
1. The Skin
16 Arlington
16Arlington paired up with 111Skin for A/W 2024, with products providing the models with a discernible glow, before make-up was applied. (Any bare-faced beauty look, created by make-up artist Lauren Parsons in this instance, requires a meticulous, skincare-first approach). Prep began with mini facials, featuring lymphatic drainage to tackle the all-pervasive fashion week puffiness and fatigue, which was then combined with the Harley Street-based brand’s ultra-hydrating yet lightweight Y Theorem Repair Serum Light NAC Y2 serum, which is scientifically formulated to repair stressed-out skin.
Isabel Marant
At Isabel Marant A/W 2024, the runway was treated to the coveted ‘Glow by Bader’, with Augustinus Bader, responsible for skin prep backstage. Facialists from the Paris-based Académie des Facialistes worked with hero products such as The Face Oil, The Cream, and The Rich Cream (which all contain the brand’s patented Trigger Factor Complex, a cell-renewing technology featuring a blend of natural amino acids, high-grade vitamins and peptides) before key make-up artist Lisa Butler took care of product application.
2. The Make-Up
Dries Van Noten
Dries Van Noten’s A/W 2024 show (which turned out to be his final womenswear collection, after the designer announced that he would be leaving his namesake brand in June 2024) saw Lucy Bridge create ‘strange’ but beautiful make-up looks, which combined unusual colour palettes – such as grey and caramel-toned lipstick and bleached false lashes - using products from the Dries Van Noten beauty line.
Chanel
Chanel A/W 2024 by Virginie Viard drew inspiration from Claude Lelouche’s 1966 film A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), starring Anouk Aimée. In it, Aimée wears a make-up look emblematic of the time, with winged liner and false lashes framing her eyes. Make-up artist Lisa Butler nodded towards this in the beauty for the A/W 2024 show, creating statement liner with a contemporary twist, using Chanel Beauty products in hues of pink, pale blue, orange, and gold to mirror the clothes.
Dior
Peter Phillips, creative and image director of Dior Beauty, combined pared-back, dewy skin (using the brand’s latest product Dior Forever Star Filter and the Dior Forever Skin Glow Foundation) with painterly pops of raspberry pink pigment in the corner of the model’s eyes, for Dior A/W 2024. This was inspired by the palette that Marc Bohan used in his collections for the house, and provided visual contrast with the latest, designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, which comprised a neutral palette of black, white, beige, and blue denim.
Rabanne
At Rabanne A/W 2024, Diane Kendal (who has been heading up the fashion house’s beauty line since it launched in 2023) created glossy finishes on eyelids and lips, using moisturising products such as Rabanne Beauty’s tinted lip balm, which contains hyaluronic acid and pomegranate to moisturise and plump. The final effect was beautifully subtle, with lashes heavily coated in the brand’s deep black Famous Volumising 5-in-1 mascara to add definition to the model’s faces.
3. The Hair
JW Anderson
In line with Jonathan Anderson’s vision of British suburbia for the JW Anderson A/W 2024 collection – which included riffs on thermal underwear and subtle nods towards curtain twitching – Anthony Turner created a series of curly grey wigs that referenced the ‘blue rinse brigade’; the sort of styles that were once hugely popular by women of a certain age. To bring the look up to the present day, Lyndsey Alexander used a velvety, matte lipstick in the orange-red shade Vermillion from Merit Beauty’s latest range.
Loewe
Guido Palau worked with colourist Antonia Cometa on the hair for Loewe A/W 2024, which took the shape of futuristic bowl cuts inspired by anime. Using extensions that were dyed black, red, turquoise, and blue, with a single plait at the back of the head, Palau set the looks with one of the new products from his Zara haircare range, a delicately scented, fine mist hairspray that leaves barely any residue.
Issey Miyake
‘For this show, I was looking at a picture of how the fabrics were dyed. They twist them and they twist the twists around themselves. I want to bring that into the hair, twisty and knotty but very fluid and beautiful. Enveloping and beautiful,’ said Anthony Turner of how the clothes at Issey Miyake A/W 2024 influenced his concept for hair. Using Dyson’s new ‘Supersonic r’ hair dryer ensured that strands (first prepped with mousse and treatment oil) were sleekly blow-dried, before being sculpted into knots using a weaving needle and secured with kirby pins.
4. The Nails
Roksanda
For Roksanda A/W 2024, session manicurist Georgia May worked with Biosculpture – the cult nail brand used by professional nail artists, which has the staying power of a hard gel but simultaneously strengthens and cares for nails. The models’ fingertips were matched to their make-up look, designed by Sharryn Hinchcliffe using M.A.C: either a dark berry and black twist on a French manicure, or a nude shade tailored to individual skin tones.
Coperni
In keeping with the codes of Coperni, which tread the line between sci-fi fantasy and real-world technology – nail artist Marie Rosa used huge acrylic tips, painted matte black, to form alien-like talons for the Parisian brand’s A/W 2024 show. Opening with John Williams’ score for Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of The Third Kind, models carried sealed ‘Ziploc’ bags with ‘top secret documents’ contained within them – as though they were clutched in the grip of extraterrestrial life forms, running away with the evidence of their arrival on Earth.
Molly Goddard
Pleasing partnered with Molly Goddard on the A/W 2024 show, with nail polish shades that provided a strong cohesion between the vividly coloured collection (described by the designer as ‘smushing, blobs upon blobs, two become one’). The look, created by Saffron Goddard, was based on the idea of trialling out multiple nail polishes at once, with two different hues painted abstractly on fingertips. This included ‘Borgonha Acai’, a glossy burgundy, paired with ‘Beach Ball’, a deep, opaque, and ‘Syrupberry’ (a vibrant pink) placed on top of ‘Don’t Lady Bug Me’, a rambutan red.
Hermès
At Hermès, nail artist Anatole Rainey created an impeccable, clean manicure, using polishes from the house’s beauty line. Products included Les Mains Hermès enamel base coat, followed by two shades of delicate pink (one slightly deeper than the other) before finishing with a Les Mains Hermès enamel top coat. A soupçon of Les Mains Hermès complete hand care cream, which contains white mulberry extract, moss and passiflora precious oil, and a plant-based emollient complex enriched with Pistacia lentiscus L. sap nourished the skin before the runway show began.
5. The Scents
Burberry
Burberry’s A/W 2024 show was held in a vast and dimly lit tent in London’s Victoria Park, adorned with dark green matting that was designed to look like grass. Daniel Lee had said that the collection was inspired by ‘Burberry’s heritage of the outdoors’. To enhance the verdant ambience, Perfumer H (the British perfume house founded by nose Lyn Harris) scented the space with its Ivy fragrance, which evokes an English garden in autumn, through notes of red berry, rose, frankincense, and musk.
Tom Ford
Tom Ford’s fragrance Vanilla Sex – which is described by the brand as a ‘beguiling, deeply seductive scent of vanilla resinoid, mahogany wood accord and roasted barley’ – set the olfactory tone of Peter Hawkings’ sophomore collection for the American brand, and was sent to guests with the show invites. Such names included the likes of Alec Wek, Uma Thurman, Dominic Sessa, and Sharon Stone, who sat front row as the show opened with the Basic Instinct soundtrack playing.
Jacob Cohën
At Jacob Cohën’s latest presentation in Milan, a sprinkling of snow fell from the ceiling of the Teatro Lirico and onto the model’s heads. As owner and creative director Jennifer Tommasi Bardelle let Wallpaper* know from the sidelines, each piece of the paper snow had been spritzed with Jacob Cohën’s signature denim scent, mixed here with a transporting note of pine, recalling Alpine forests.
