"Marc follows his gut and does what he likes—he doesn't care whether the press likes it or not," François Nars told the editors encircling the once fresh-faced 19-year-olds, now hauntingly goth women, backstage. "I really am the same when it comes to makeup. Hopefully you like it; it's okay if you don't." And we'll admit, when it comes to a beauty look inspired by shock rocker Alice Cooper, the man who used boa constrictors and execution devices in his stage performances, "like" is a leap. But we get it, because that philosophy—that the show is just as important as the fashion, that the word 'trend' should be erased from the vocabulary and that perfect and pretty is, frankly, really uninteresting—has always ruled onstage and backstage at Marc Jacobs. You don't get to be the kicker of New York Fashion Week without proving you know how to go out with a bang and get people talking.
We tend to forget that makeup is first and foremost art, and that going back and forth over whether a shade of lipstick is work-appropriate or not, and how many coats of mascara it takes to get to a clumpy lash, kills the spirit behind it. Each season, Nars reminds us to feel. All black everything—black eyes, black lips, black hair—is unsettling, and this season, I felt scared. (For American Horror Story fans, Lady Gaga was a no-brainer casting decision.) These were women you would cross the street from at night, women you'd never pick a fight with in a bar. We're not them, and we probably wouldn't want to be them for more time than the models pretended to, but we're sharpening our eyeliners and putting a little more stomp in our step because of them tonight.
