The Art Of Beauty

Artist Tina Barney takes inspiration from the old masters to showcase Gucci designer Alessandro Michele’s thoroughly modern makeup collection.

- Alexander Fury

I love a beautiful face, but what really captivates me is a story,” says Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele. This sentiment fits perfectly with his eclectic, electric vision of clothing for gender-bending romantics who live in plissé lamés and beaded cardigans with stories embedded in their very fabric. But we’re not talking about fashion today; we’re discussing the debut of Michele’s Gucci cosmetics line. Beauty is a multibillion-dollar industry all about faces, which makes his statement a little unusual. Yet just as the designer has reinvented everything Gucci from the Italian luxury brand’s ad campaigns to its store design over the past four years since he ascended to the top job, he has now reimagined makeup in his own extraordinarily creative image.

Michele’s Gucci Makeup is beginning with a precise focus: Three lipsticks— satin, sheer, and balm—in a dizzying array of shades packaged vintage-style in chased gold, a floral print, and a delicate turquoise, respectively. “A rugged preciousness” is the evocative turn of phrase Chloë Sevigny, one of the five faces photographed by artist Tina Barney for this shoot, uses to describe the packaging. Barney projected old-master paintings by the likes of El Greco and Delacroix over Sevigny and fellow actors Gideon Adlon, Asia Kate Dillon, and Pom Klementieff, and model Beverly Johnson to illustrate both his fascination with history and his idea of 21st-century beauty.