Just one month before Paris Fashion Week, cosmetics creative director of La Beauté Louis Vuitton Pat McGrath is teaming up with the House’s artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière once again. Except, this time, she’s not the only one on makeup. 

“Nicolas and I have been building looks together backstage at Louis Vuitton for so many years now,” Pat McGrath said in a press release. Since 2013, when Ghesquière first arrived at Louis Vuitton, the two have been telling a cohesive story of the House through fashion and beauty, separately. Now, McGrath is bringing Ghesquière all the way into her world for the first-ever La Beauté Louis Vuitton collaboration. 

“What we have created with this collection for La Beauté is the natural next step of that conversation,” she said.  Celebrating the 130th anniversary of the House’s famous monogram, McGrath says the new beauty collection is particularly meaningful: Two limited-edition capsule makeup collections, Monogram Dune and Monogram Infrarouge, each featuring new shades of LV Rouge lipstick, LV Baume lip balm, and LV Ombres eyeshadow palette.  

The Dune monogram is a lighter, desert canvas version of the classic 1896 monogram Ghesquière first introduced on handbags at his Cruise 2024 show. So, if the monogram was a makeup collection, it’d be the new limited-edition warm, rosy beige lipstick, a transparent balm with desert mirage sparkles, and an eyeshadow palette with four shades: icy white, rose gold, hematite grey, and delicate pink. 

The fairer of the two, “Monogram Dune is luminous and warm. She moves through the world with a stealth assurance,” McGrath said. “Her beauty is timeless, effortless—and all the more powerful for it.”

Meanwhile, the Infrarouge monogram was debuted in a collection nearly 10 years before Dune. At Ghesquière’s Spring/Summer 2015 show, he swapped the traditional brown-and-fawn monogram with something much more experimental: Red and black. That makes for a makeup collection of rich, blackcurrant lipstick, sheer black sparkling balm, and a four-shade eyeshadow combo: rosy beige, cool taupe, bluish anthracite, and velvety burgundy. 

Containing even more depth, “Infrarouge is the counterpart to Dune,” McGrath said. “Fearless, high-contrast, unapologetic. She does not ask for your attention. She commands it. There is depth, drama, and the kind of boldness that is completely mesmerizing.”

Best of all, the lipsticks, balms, and eyeshadows are wrapped in each monogram respectively. For Ghesquière, that means women are no longer carrying fashion exclusively within their grasps, but wearing it on their faces and on their compacts. “Beauty has always been complementary to how I conceive a silhouette,” he said. “It completes the character, the attitude, the emotion of a look.”

Unlike most beauty collaborations, “the products did not begin with a brief,” McGrath said. Instead, “they began with a feeling. The same feeling we always create together backstage before a show.” Now, just weeks before the next show, the first-ever collaboration will be seen in tandem for the first time. 

And, if the fashion is anything like the beauty, it’ll feel like two polar opposites existing as one. 

Author: India Espy-Jones

Read the original article on Essence.