“It felt like we were really traveling through all of the eras of Italian creativity and each one has its own beauty language—we began with luminosity,” McGrath says of playing off of the “richness of the fabric” and textiles in the first act, The Artisanal Revolution. Models including Mariacarla Boscono and Fei Fei Sun wear this Renaissance-inspired beauty “with a lovely cheek, beautiful pale eyelids, and little stains on the lips,” says McGrath. “Very romantic, but just exquisite.”
For the second act, The Industrial Revolution, fashion went gray and beauty followed. “It’s a lot of suiting,” McGrath says of the wardrobe that Adriana Lima and actor Adria Arjona will stroll in down the Galleria. “What we’ve played with is the levels of smokey eyes,” she says, with looks ranging from “really, really strong blacks” to sooty eyes and dark lips. “Some girls have both, some girls have just an eye, and some girls will have just a lip. It’s very gorgeous.” And permission for more-is-more beauty when tailoring is in the mix.
A table across from us is dedicated entirely to an entire color spectrum of sparkling flecks and pigments laid out and meticulously labeled in tiny cups, and I find it hard not to reach out and touch them. Italian cinema and La Dolce Vita inspired the third act, embodied by Imaan Hammam’s bedazzled Versace Vogue catsuit and Jennifer Lopez’s sparkling strapless Dolce & Gabbana dress. “There are a lot of really strong, bold patterns, and what we’ve done is make our own rebellious wing,” says McGrath of tapping into her own archives of purple, pink, gold, and baby blue glitters to create a “beautiful color-blocked eye, very, very strong, very sharp” for the more colorful looks. I press her on her archival glitter collection on display. “I’ve got ones from the year 2000 all the way back to the ’90s,” she reveals. “Glitters that were used in some very iconic shows—and they’re back.”
Photographed by Sofi Adams
Photographed by Sofi Adams
Photographed by Sofi Adams
