Taken from the Autumn/Winter 2014 issue issue of Dazed:
Make-up artist Val Garland is a long-standing rebel of the beauty world. She worked on Alexander McQueen’s groundbreaking early collections, is a fixture backstage at Vivienne Westwood, and her first shoots for Dazed in the 1990s were steeped in punk spirit. Today, her anarchism is subtler; on these pages she expresses her rebellion by hiding the face with a liberal smattering of freckles, switching the role of the much-maligned blemish from the concealed to the concealer. The transformation is an amplified version of the look Garland created, using M·A·C, for London-based designer Mary Katrantzou's AW14 runway show.
FETISHISING THE MISTAKE
“I’m not afraid; I don’t mind if I’m wrong. I was a skinhead, a punk, and a New Romantic – I belonged to so many different tribes when I was growing up. I’ve always been a rebel, so if something’s wrong then I’m going to like it. There’s something about England that makes you not afraid to take a risk.”
OUT OF THIS WORLD
“In fashion, there’s been so many references to the alien, such as taking off the eyebrows, that it would be quite amazing to put make-up on a real alien – or paint a fish and see how that reacts underwater. I would have loved to have done make-up on Veruschka because she camouflaged her whole body, or be the make-up artist to a Pharaoh, or Marie Antoinette – that would have been great.”
FRECKLE FACE
“I know what Mary likes from her shows and invariably it’s fairly minimal. For the show it was really translucent and real, so for this transformation shoot I took the idea of realness and amped it up. I used a natural russet colour to give her a blush, then there’s metallic and a smudgy, grungy green like mustard. But at the end of it all it’s just freckles. I like that heightened sense of nothing and everything.”
Embroidered badge dress by Mary Katrantzou AW14; hair Alex Brownsell at D+V Management using BLEACH London; model Lisa Verberght at Elite; photographic assistants Richard Pilnick, Fabian Nordstrom; hair assistant Scarlett Valentine; make-up assistant Veronica Martinez; digital operator Neil Pemberton; studio manager Holly Cullen
