"You never get to see a painter paint"

“I really wanted to bring it back to makeup being a performance and an experience.”  Alex Box.

Recently Alex Box  teamed up with MAC to turn to the performing arts, staging a live performance called “The Evolution of Surface” at London’s Louise Blouin Foundation Gallery.  As fantastical beauty looks becoming more commonplace in magazine editorials and on the street Box has an intriguing take on how we desire to interpret our individuality, “I think that when we move into a state of economic decline, that’s when people really want fantasy and…to be lifted out of a depression, and that’s when people look to adornment to tell a story”. 

Box is holding similar performances at New York’s New Museum, and at Milk Studios in Los Angeles.

 

Alex Does It Again!

 

Fantastic article on Alex Box in this months Sunday Times Style Magazine

"For me, the inspiration is having a model that can be transformed," she says.  "I don't really know what I'm doing until it pours out on the canvas, and that canvas happens to be the model's face."

 

Cosmetic Identity

There has been a wide range of creative make up applications seen on this blog so far, sometimes the link to cosmetic application has been incredibly subtle, and the materials used, symbols and representations have been as important to acknowledge as the ways in which the make up creatives share identities and distinguish themselves and/or their work as different from others.  In light of this, having recently re read an old article from the Independent on Sunday (September 2009) written by Rhiannon Harries, titled "In the Twinkling of an Eye', it is interesting to put her views in perspective.  She discusses the use of extreme make up as a feature of catwalk fashion, and the dissemination of the approach to avant garde beauty onto the high street via musical icons such as Lady Gaga, La Roux, Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine), and Beth Ditto.  In it, Alex Box (Illamasqua) is cited as believing that the experimental vibe that is transforming our attitudes to make up can be attributed to one person,

"There was a tipping point and it was Amy Winehouse", she says emphatically.  "A while ago she was absolutely the zeitgeist with her east London rockabilly look and I noticed the influence immediately.  Chanel did a take on it for one of its shows, Italian Vogue did a take on it.  Everbody took something from her look."

"Suddenly girls everywhere were going bigger with their eyes, their hair, their lips.  But not in a Jordan way - it wasn't just sexy glamour, it had an edge and people were putting their own personality into it.  In a short space of time, that has become so normal.  For me, it was a massive turning point in people's personal make-up."

However I am loathe to attribute the inspiration for the use of the avant garde within make up to popular culture alone.  Pushing the boundaries so that make up is used in ways that diverges from its traditional function of enhancing areas of the face in an attempt to define sexual attractiveness, is one that has also been explored within ClubCulture and by image makers for some time now.  In this sense, although as individuals we have to take up identities actively, those identities are necessarily the product of the society in which we live and our relationship with others. Identity provides a link between individuals and the world in which they live. Identity combines how I see myself and how others see me. Identity involves the internal and the subjective, and the external. It is a socially recognised position, recognised by others, not just by me.

The concept of identity encompasses some notion of human agency; an idea that we can have some control in constructing our own identities. There are, of course, constraints which may lie in the external world, where material and social factors may limit the degree of agency which individuals may have.  This construction of new representations, of new models, is a complex phenomenon, which implies several levels of analysis. The goal of this blog is to highlight the various social aspects, which might be related to the process of constructing an identity. The choice of such a goal is not an accident; it is repeatedly demonstrated that body representation, and especially feminine body representation, is the central pillar of any power relationship, either in the case of a man/woman relationship, or in the case of the more general relationship between politics and femininity.  It is one that popular music culture utilises for its own ends.  One only has to look to Bowie and the New Romantics/Blitz Kids to confirm this appropriation of style and attitude.

This is a fine line to balance, once the desire to construct a formal identification with beauty is removed, what are we left with?  As Box so succinctly puts it, "Where does doing something interesting and different tip over into ugliness?'

A Manifesto to Celebrate Difference and Self-Expression

After listening to the make-up artist Alex Box (Illamasqua) talk at the IMATS show this weekend, it is clear that she uses make-up as a language, and references her fine art background to investigate alternate methods of representing the self. As she so succinctly puts it, "I want to fly the flag for a very different way of wearing make-up". While fashion may have given her the context to develop the concept for identity as a make up artist, being told to dilute her work when first venturing out as a make up artist had the opposite effect and she vehemently opposed amending her vision. It is only now that the fashion industry understands that she is capable of saying so much more through make-up and that she herself has a vision for the future of make-up.

During the dicussion Alex proposed a new way of demonstrating beauty, and cited the Alexander McQueen Spring 2010 catwalk show and the film Avatar as symbols of the almost casual way society has begun to accept human augmentation and radical cosmetic transformation. This in turn has given the fashion industry a better understanding of how she intends to develop her work.

Used as a tool to subvert dominant patriarchal ideals of beauty, designed cosmetic bodies have the potential to be used to stage new non gendered identities. Refashioning the face and body opens up the possibility of highlighting the artificial nature of beauty while undermining neo-romantic conceptions of the body as 'natural'. Although conventional make up practices present the altered face as natural, it is possible to envisage the normalising of cosmetic practice that actively seeks the artificial construction of the face.

The New Playground is the Face

Alex Box
Pat Mcgrath at Dior
Alex Box

February Vogue UK is always an interesting mix of articles, on the one hand there is the new New Season, new collections to look forward to unveiling, on the other hand there is the hangover from Christmas, where we readers despair about our weight, our wardrobe and our bank balance. However the Editor's Letter by Alexander Shulman signalled something that is beginning to stir in the minds of the fashion consumer, the trend of the return to make-up. She says,

"Of course, make-up has forever been part of a woman's arsenal, but the enthusiasm for high-voltage, in your face details, such as eye-lash extensions and sweeping eyeliner, carmine-red lips and green nails, is new. Forget about doing either the eyes or the lips - it's pile-it-on time now. No longer is make-up about looking natural; now it's about the more-embellished-and-obvious-the-better..."

In an article later in the magazine, aptly titled 'The Return To Make-Up', Lisa Armstrong identifies women who now find the use of make-up 'liberating', and have a sense of 'experimental abandon' not found within their wardrobe choices. She quotes Terry Barber, director of make-up artistry at MAC,

"In this country, make-up trends often start as working class reactionary movements - whether it's glam rock or punk, make-up is a statement as much as a beautifier."

He also mentions that "Technology has moved on so much" and that the "whole process is just much easier and more mischievous". Barber might be referring to improving on the image of perfection, but it serves to highlight general attitudes to how we see the face. It has become the new playground, one where we can choose to examine how we portray identity in much the same way the fashion deconstructionists choose to create deconstructed clothes that are meant to be discomforting, even jarring, to behold.