Marc Jacobs has been exploring themes of childlike wonder in his last few shows. Two seasons ago, for example, the designer celebrated his 40th anniversary with models as “paper dolls” in ‘60s Diana Ross and The Supremes wigs.
Last season, the dolls rocked oversized eyelids and animated lashes. Most recently? Marc Jacobs’s dollhouse played out in a third iteration—this time held at the New York Public Library three days before NYFW began.
Remember old school dress-me-up felt dolls? For yesterday’s Spring 2025 show, fabric dots were pinned onto the cheeks and lips as play-pretend blush and lipstick. To bring these looks to life was none other than Pat McGrath herself. “Marc Jacobs’ Spring 2025 collection is a journey through dimension— where silhouettes shift from two-dimensional planes to sculptural, three-dimensional forms,” the makeup artist says in a press release.
According to McGrath, the makeup represents a deconstruction of classic beauty, turning the looks into a “graphic play on abstraction.” In reality (at least, as real as a Marc Jacobs show can get), the reference looked like “a bold red lip, precision beauty spots, and untouched skin [which] created a three-dimensional structure.”
Using a mixture of velvet and crystallized materials, which varied in sizes and colors, like burgundy, fuschia, red and black, McGrath created simple circles to button the models’s lips and cheeks. Before she applied the fabric lips, and on models without any at all, she applied a clear layer of the PAT McGRATH LABS Lip Fetish: Sheer Colour Balm to not interrupt the major lip moment.
Behind the iconic doll-like skin, however, wasn’t her new Glass Skin 001 mask (which was born out of her viral Margiela Couture porcelain skin), but a combination of her Divine Skin: Rose 001 The Essence and Skin Fetish: Highlighter + Balm Duo. To add to the show’s beauty, this season’s hairdos were neither as bouffant as the first iteration, nor as subdued as the last.
Instead, hairstylist Duffy styled their natural hair like a doll discarded at the bottom of a toy box. What began as a tight coil, achieved with a small clamp curling iron, was disrupted with an interwoven technique. Meanwhile, shorter ‘fros were sectioned into imperfect clumps, altering the dimension and height of the look.
“[We’re] reinforcing the collection’s progressive exploration of form, space, and perspective,” McGrath says. “[It’s] abstract beauty.”
