And now for a bit of eye candy (and because Instagram took care of the red carpet deluge from last night's Met Gala): Alexa Chung wearing Erdem for the China: Through The Looking Glass festivities, photographed before the big event at the Bowery Hotel. Makeup artist Tamah wrote us about the look:
Dear ITG,
I just finished prepping Alexa Chung for the Met Ball, and it was so much fun! The weather has been gorgeous in New York the past few days, so we were lucky enough to be able to get ready outside at the Bowery Hotel. Alexa and I have been working together for a while, so it felt more like hanging out with friends than anything else, but she was getting ready for a ball—how often do you do that?! So it was special.
We hadn't planned much in advance, but when we all got there, Alexa said she wanted to play up the gorgeous ethnicity of her eyes—her dad is Chinese—and quite literally work that angle. Our inspiration came from In The Mood For Love by Wong Kar-wai, which is set in China in the '60s. We used that as our jumping-off point and then reworked that to make it more modern. In the film, the women have pretty heavy cat eyes and a lot of highlight on their cheekbones, so we went in that direction. Alexa is famous for a cat eye, but with this one, we went really thick to pull the shape of her eye out visually. That was the first thing we did, and her face just completely changed. We started with the Eyeko Fat Eye Stick that gives you a bolder line that's a little bit shiny, so it looks great in pictures. Then we connected the shape under her eye to elongate the lower lashline as well, which we don't normally do. We used a little bit of a waterproof black liner pencil and blended that into the corner of her eye. From there, I used the right side from the Nars Dual-Intensity Blush in Craving and blended it under her eye with a liner brush.
We left the rest of the lid clean, but in the crease of the eye, we used the same side of Craving. It's an earthy, bronze-y brown that we used with a nice, fluffy crease brush, so it wouldn't deposit a lot of color but still made the eyes look brighter and wider. Because the eye was so strong, we didn't do anything to the brow beyond spraying a clean mascara wand with some hairspray and brushing them into place. We really wanted it to stay fresh even though the eye was so bold.
The skin we did last. She really does have the most perfect skin, so we only used a nickel-sized amount of the Nars All Day Luminous Weightless Foundationaround the bits that are naturally red like the eyes and the nose. That also let her own cheek color come through—but we still used a little bit of the opposite side of Craving along her cheekbones and up toward the temple and hairline. We're on our way to warmer weather, so a little blush photographs really nicely, but I think the days of a lot of blush are behind us at this point.
Oh, and lips! We prepped with Lucas' Papaw Ointment, and then for color, I used the Nars Audacious Lipstick in Brigitte, which is a really pretty muted pink. We applied it as opaque and then pressed it in to take any of the shine down, so it's just in there as pigment and not wearing her.
Diego da Silva did her hair—she rarely, maybe never, wears her hair back on a red carpet, but it worked so nicely with the dress and looked so crisp and fresh the way he did it. She was on board immediately. It's fun to look different—especially for a ball.
xTamah
Alexa Chung photographed by Emily Weiss at the Bowery Hotel on May 4, 2015.
