Chic – and scented – Paris venue? Check. Great music? Check. The coolest new make-up and hair that everyone wants to know about? Check. The autumn/winter 2024 show in question: Victoria Beckham.
The space was notably but subtly scented by one of Beckham’s candles – inspired by Paris date nights – from her Suite 302 fragrance line. As for the beauty, make-up artist Fara Homidi explained backstage that Beckham “really wanted the focus to be on this sort of suspended square gaze – so we’re using two different colours: a cloudy white kajal eyeliner and a sort of tangerine orange Eyewear stick. The whole idea being this sort of interesting placement – the suspended eyeshadow is a take on eyeshadow, essentially, in the inner corners. With Victoria, it’s always about modernity, strength and structure.”
Sadly, neither products are out… yet. (Beckham might have seen some lab samples that have been fast tracked to the production line.) On show day, the sunset orange and cloudy white, suspended, squared-off eyes were the main focus with just clean skin, cleansed with Beckham’s two cleansers. Brows lightly filled in with BabyBlade Micro fine brow pencil and lips taken down with concealer made “everything more nude and muted, so you really see the pop of the eyes.” Homidi added: “It still has this softness and femininity at the same time. There’s no hard edges, everything is just light and airy and soft while having direction.”
While choosing who wore the two different eye colours depended on the models’ characters, hairstylist Anthony Turner looked at the collection as a whole to inspire the hair. “We needed something that works with the high collars really well so we didn’t get balloons of hair,” he shared. “Anything loose wasn’t going to work, so we needed a small head. We went through all the motions – whether it was going to be wet and back – we did lots and lots of versions, and then we came up with this idea of the hair looking very much like silk. Very salon friendly, very aspirational, very expensive and very rich. A strong centre parting and then a beautiful blow dried texture in a very, very, very low ponytail.”
There was no room for a hair to be out of place. “It’s really tight – basically we wanted it to look a little bit like a fashion illustration – it’s very linear.” Using GHD’s new tool, the Chronos straightener, to make the hair as smooth as silk and Wella’s Ultimate Repair to help any hair suffering from end-of-season fatigue – the make-up and hair was a demo of modern minimalism.