FASHION Magazine

See our top picks from the Nars Guy Bourdin holiday collection »

Long inspired by Guy Bourdin’s luscious, glossy work, François Nars pays homage to the photographer with a high-wattage holiday collection.

Growing up, François Nars didn’t waste his affection on teen idols and pop stars. While others were tearing pages from Tiger Beat magazine to make Donny Osmond-themed collages, Nars’s bedroom walls were papered with the cinematic pictures of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, ripped from Vogue Paris and Harper’s Bazaar. “I was such a fan when I was a kid,” recalls the makeup artist. “I woke up to the fashion world through his images.”

Since launching his namesake collection in 1994, Nars has honoured the late photographer through palette colours, shade names and advertising campaigns, but now he’s paying a bigger tribute to his hero with a holiday collection inspired by some of his favourite shots. “I was really inspired directly by the makeup in those photographs,” says Nars, who translated it into intensely pigmented lipsticks, nail polishes and eyeshadows (from $21, narscosmetics.com).

It’s a fitting homage, given Bourdin’s reputation for being heavily invested in the beauty looks for his pictures: He would inspect the hair and makeup before he even began shooting. “It was a big production, and it always started with the model and the makeup,” said Bourdin’s son Samuel at a preview of the collection in Paris.

After the success of last year’s Andy Warhol collection, Nars Cosmetics announced today that they’re launching a collaboration inspired by French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. The collection, created on behalf of the Guy Bourdin Estate, will feature Bourdin’s innovative and provocative work in a set of unique Nars beauty products. Specific product details have not been released yet, but the collection is said to include new packaging, formulas and shades based on Bourdin’s photos.

Fashion Television (RIP) was ahead of its time in several ways, and here is one of them: In 1985, when executive producer Jay Levine launched the program, he imagined it might become a channel for short narrative videos about clothing. Fashion films, now so inescapable a phenomenon, were then just a thought without a name: if music videos could revolutionize the way we consume pop, couldn’t a little cinematography do the same for clothing? The ’70s had seen then-living legends Guy Bourdin and Richard Avedon experiment with the moving image, and as film-recording cameras became less expensive, it seemed likely they’d land in the hands of younger, emerging lensmen. As MTV was to music videos, so might Fashion Television be to this new mode of image-making.

“Those girls started riots, because Chinese people thought they were ugly,” says Phillip Ing, vice-president of global retail and special events for M.A.C. He’s describing the public’s reaction to a series of images by Beijing-based photographer Chen Man, published in 2003 on the covers of Vision, an avant-garde Chinese fashion and art magazine. OK, so they weren’t actual riots, but there was plenty of hate mail; resistance is a common repercussion when one is blazing a beauty trail in a conservative country. Her images were arresting and fantastical, and they instantly garnered attention, as did the artist herself. At the time, she was only 23 and still in school, but she represented the next generation, who no longer felt constrained by many of the limitations their nation imposed.

Continue reading about Chen Man »
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