For Christian Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first New York runway show, the designer returned to her first visit to the city to inspire both her Pre-Fall 2024 collection and the show’s beauty looks. The result echoed the raw glamour of the bustling city, a mix of masculine and feminine beauty.
“Maria Grazia wanted the look to be about duality, mainly between masculinity and femininity,” says Dior makeup creative and image director Peter Philips. Aside from that duality—whose two sides also represent New York and Paris, Philips says—Chiuri had a specific person in mind when referencing the beauty for the show. “The inspiration was Marlene Dietrich,” he says, ”and the fact that she could be extremely glam, but also dress in men’s suits and reinvent her sexuality in a very controversial way, during that era.”
The star of the androgynous look was a wine-stained, just-bitten lip—a continuation of the “witchy” lip Philips created for last September’s Spring/Summer 2024 runway show in Paris. The “sexier” version of the vampy lip was produced with a pair of Rouge Dior Forever lipsticks. First, Phillips dabbed Rose Blues, a cool-toned pink, all over the lips and a little beyond the natural lip line to create a soft edge. Then he brushed Forever Night—the same deep matte purple shade he used to create the witchy lips last season—across the models’ closed, smiling lips. “This created an almost ombré shadow effect,” he explains.
The eyes also played off the show’s androgynous theme, as Philips skipped eye makeup and kept the eyebrows strong, neutral, and elongated, to show a hint of “glam without being too feminine.”
Even the skin was kept minimal, with a touch of glamour. “Maria Grazia didn’t want to see any pearlescence, texture, or pigment on the face—nothing that looked like makeup,” Philips says. Dior’s new Forever Glow Star Filter made the skin luminous (but not shiny) when applied all over the face and to the high points. “If you keep the raw skin and makeup a little undone, you think, ‘Who is that girl, and where is she coming from? Is he coming from a party or work?’ You don’t really know.”
While the show’s makeup appeared “raw,” hairstylist Guido Palau pulled from the opposite end of the spectrum to create super-sleek pinup waves.
“It’s not a retro show, but Maria Grazia liked the idea of old glamour hair. The 1940s hair was masculine, with the side part and swoop at the front, so it really is masculine and feminine at the same time,” Palau says.
He curled the hair, brushed it out, and then pinned it up to set the loose, almost S-shaped ’40s-style waves. For models with shorter styles, he left them as is or even added braids. Of course, Palau relied on hairspray—everything from L’Oréal Elnett to Bed Head Hair—to keep the soft waves intact. “I wanted the hair to move on the runway,” he says, “and not feel so stiff.”
