“Eighties Linda Evangelista meets the Beatles—with a Japanese thing thrown in,” said Sam McKnight backstage at Fendi this morning, explaining the inspiration behind the choppy, jet-colored wigs he was custom-cutting to suit each model’s face shape with a slim men’s razor. “Karl [Lagerfeld] sent a sketch last week. He wanted short black hair, something graphic. From there, it evolved into something boyish and a bit messy,” he said of the bowl-shaped silhouette, which featured heavy blunt-cut bangs that hit just below the forehead, nearly obscuring the eyes. Currently on his eleventh girl of the day, he was snipping away furiously at a section near the ears. “It’s a bit shorter at the sides and back, and it’s not supposed to be perfect,” he emphasized, finishing each model’s hair with Oribe Dry Texturizing Spray before adding with a devilish smile. “You know, Karl likes a look.”
Even in the light-filled upstairs space of the house’s Via Solari compound, the uniform hairpieces rendered models like Joan Smalls and Lindsey Wixson all but unrecognizable, save for their famously pillowy lips—now rendered in a punchy shade of neon coral.
“I keep calling it chemical peach,” said makeup artist Peter Philips of the bright pastel pigment he was using to carefully fill in models’ mouths. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he came up with the vibrant hue. A few feet away, the fashion houses’s spring 2014 show invitation—featuring a series of color-block motifs in an identical shade—was propped up along the makeup mirror. Philips said his choice of color also made reference to a tongue-in-cheek written brief about the collection that Lagerfeld had sent him in the days before the show, a quirky play on words inspired by the now all-encompassing reach of today’s Internet culture. “It’s quite futuristic, almost synthetic,” he explained of the similarly manufactured shade, which he achieved by using Make Up For Ever’s brightly colored pencil in #18C all over the mouth as a base, then going over it with the company’s matching lipstick in #39. “The shape is classic,” he said simply of its precise outline, “but the color is not.”
The same could be said of Lagerfeld’s lineup of streamlined silhouettes—simple chiffon shifts in fluorescent sherbert hues, tailored pencil skirts with eye-catching pops of color at the hem, and, perhaps most memorably, a discreet midi-length cocktail dress rendered in what appeared to be a bright, bold bolt of cardinal red fur.
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