Beauty

When two people have have spent decades building looks together backstage, there’s always a kind of curiosity that builds around what they’re working on next. And this curiosity is the foundation of LA BEAUTÉ, Louis Vuitton’s new chapter. It is the Maison’s first-ever beauty collaboration between the artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière and Dame Pat McGrath, and the label’s creative director of cosmetics.

The two have worked together on the Louis Vuitton runway for over two decades, with McGrath translating each collection’s mood into looks that complete the personality. “Nicolas and I have been building looks together backstage at Louis Vuitton for many years now. There is a shorthand between us, a true and a creative cohesion,” McGrath says. For Ghesquière, the project is a way of extending his design language beyond runway. “Beauty has always been complementary to how I conceive a silhouette; it completes the character, the attitude, the emotion of a look,” he says. “With La Beauté Louis Vuitton, we are extending that vision beyond the runway. It’s a way of allowing the Louis Vuitton woman to carry that expression into her everyday life.”

To mark the 130th anniversary of the Monogram, the limited edition collection is built around two of the house’s most recognisable canvases, reworked as a study in contrast. Monogram Dune takes its warm, luminous beige into a palette of sun-warmed nudes and soft, icy neutrals, a nod to the ever-shifting light of the desert. Monogram Infrarouge does the opposite, translating the canvas’s saturated red-on-black into a collection of blackcurrant-toned lips and smoky metallic eyes.

“Monogram Dune is about a poetic, luminous woman; minimal, warm and expressed through soft beige and nude tones,” Ghesquière explains. Monogram Infrarouge is its counterpart, a fearless heroine defined by intensity, bold reds, and striking contrasts. McGrath describes the pairing as two sides of the same woman, rather than two different women altogether.

What’s in the collection? Each world comes with its own eyeshadow palette, satin lipstick and glow-giving lip topper. The packaging carries the duality through to the vanity, too. For the first time in La Beauté Louis Vuitton, both canvases appear on a beauty compact, each finished to reflect its world: warm rose gold hardware and matte off white aluminium for Dune, deep matte black and lacquered red precision for Infrarouge. True to the line’s philosophy, every piece is designed to be refilled rather than replaced, with recyclable eyeshadow, lipstick and balm inserts.

A matching edit of small leather goods extends the collection beyond the makeup bag: a mattifying paper case, lip and eye brush set, Nice Beauty case, cosmetic lipstick Pouch and poche toilette, each available in both Dune and Infrarouge.

It is, as McGrath puts it, less a collaboration than a continuation of a conversation that has been running for 20 years. Just now, for the first time, one that lives on the vanity as much as it does backstage.

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Images: Supplied