No Makeup Needed: Pat Mcgrath Uses Fabric as Lipstick and Blush on the Runway

By Biel Arevalo February 07, 2025

After Margiela’s porcelain skin, Pat McGrath’s latest move for Marc Jacobs F/W 25 involves fabric, scissors, and pure creativity

Pat McGrath is the name on everyone’s lips come fashion week—fitting, considering she just swapped actual pigment for fabric for her latest trick. At Marc Jacobs’ spring runway, blush, lipstick, and even beauty marks weren’t painted on but pasted onto models’ faces like couture appliqués. The effect was both surreal and strange, as if its beauty direction was a forthright migration of the runway’s mood board to the runway.

Pat McGrath isn’t one to do conventional. This is, after all, the same visionary who once shellacked models in gold leaf for Prada’s Spring 2016 and turned Maison Margiela’s cast into glass-skin phantoms. But with this latest move, she proves that, in her hands, makeup is more constructed than it is applied.

How did the look come to life? It bears looking at Marc Jacob’s designs. Obviously over-the-top this time, it was a study in exaggerated proportions, inflated looks, and a doll-like distortion, a signature of his that Pat McGrath matched with an equal uncanny beauty approach. It was a “graphic play on abstraction,” as the makeup artist said in a press release—the kind that reduced traditional makeup to precise, deliberate, two-dimensional shapes.

It then makes sense why the ‘makeup’ looked like a cut-and-paste experiment, almost elementary in its execution, but that is at first glance. Look closer and the mix of velvet fabrics and sparkly materials were used to make sticky cutouts in different colors. Like paper dolls with their pre-cut wardrobes, makeup here was a playful reading of the deconstruction of beauty itself, then assembling it with intention.

Under the stickers, McGrath kept it simple and skin-focused. She only used the Rose 001 The Essence and a mix of her Sublime Perfection Foundation and Concealer. Other than that, she put the slightest definition on the brows and some eye shading.

Pat McGrath has done it again. Besides making beauty a wearable art, her craft makes what’s often seen as only an accessory to runway clothes an art form, a layer of texture, and an extension of fashion, leaving us curious about what sorcery she’ll do next.

_{Featured Image and Photos: MARC JACOBS (via Instagram)}