For the better part of the last few years, beauty has been on its best behaviour. Skin was expected to look seamless, brows brushed into place, lips lacquered just enough to suggest effort without confessing to it. The clean girl aesthetic made restraint feel like sophistication and polish pass for personality. But Nicola Formichetti, the creative mind behind some of fashion’s most electric image-making, has never been especially interested in beauty that knows how to sit still.
After more than two decades in fashion, Formichetti’s move to M·A·C does not feel like a detour, as counter-intuitive as it might seem. “I always like to challenge myself,” he tells me in the middle of a day-long shoot, unruffled in the way only someone fluent in chaos can be. Makeup, he says, was never foreign terrain. His closest friends are makeup artists, he has collaborated with M·A·C before and the brand has long existed in his creative orbit.
For Nicola Formichetti, beauty is no longer a supporting character in fashion’s larger drama. It is where culture is concentrating its gaze. “Beauty is the place,” he says. “We were always so obsessed with fashion before. We still are, but today we are all consumed with beauty.” The face, in his telling, has become a more immediate canvas than the body: visible, alterable and endlessly available for reinvention.
What he wants to protect is not just a product legacy, but a philosophy. “All ages, all races, all genders” remains, to him, the brand’s essential charge. “The brand always stood for individuality and inclusiveness, but also celebrating difference,” he says. The reinvention he imagines is not cosmetic in the shallow sense. It is about making M·A·C feel contemporary again: more digitally fluent, more locally relevant, more connected to the way younger consumers actually discover desire, taste and identity. He explains it to me by means of his favourite metaphor: “M·A·C is a toolbox of art supplies, filled with beautiful things you can carry, smudge, layer, misuse and make your own – until you think your masterpiece is perfected.”
He makes it clear that he’s not arguing against minimalism outright. But his own allegiance is clear. “The clean girl aesthetic is finally dying down. And now, the maximalist is back. Thank God!” He confesses, “I admire the girl who wants to have fun.”
That instinct has followed him since adolescence, when fashion was his escape route. “I used to use my mom’s red lipstick and put it on my eyelids. I thought I was David Bowie,” he laughs. “I felt like the coolest person on the planet.” It is also why he encourages young people to experiment and not be afraid of replicating or copying the styles that they like before they find themselves. Taste, for him, is not born fully formed. It is assembled through observation, imitation, mistakes and nerve.
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