News feed
London, like New York, is a hotbed of raw, grungy, recusant culture. Its fashion week echoes this; strong, spirited, subversive fashion which marry the tough and the fragile in unexpected – but welcome – harmony. It has bite, but it also has beauty, and a lot of it.
Here, the scene-stealing beauty trends to try, or at the very least, admire from London Fashion Week.
Tricked-up eyes
If anyone is going to get the party started, it’s Isamaya Ffrench. The makeup renegade betrayed any kind of beauty rules and delivered perfectly cracked gold lids at Halpern. But her party didn’t stop there. At Ashish, where disco is always the modus operandi, Ffrench drenched faces in glitter; with lids, lips and brows sparkling in incandescent colour with a “‘Dolly dragged through a hedge backwards’ and still looks like a queen” mood. While at Fashion East, fake lashes were cut up and stuck on the outer eye only, like fluttery wings.
Chic Helmut heads
Slicked hair started back in New York, with iterations of wet-look hair palpable on both gritty and glamorous runways. In London, damp hair returned, with Fashion East sporting soft slicks, Mary Katrantzou haphazardly gelling down fringes and wet sculpture reigning supreme. Gold medals go to Guido Palau’s intricate coiling at Burberry, Richard Quinn’s lacquered fringes and JW Anderson’s sculptural side coifs straight out of the barber shop.
Just-cleansed skin
If there was one shining light to come out of London Fashion week, it was skin. Truly. At Victoria Beckham, Ryan Lo, Christopher Kane and Emilia Wickstead skin gleamed with the kind of glow one would get post-facial.
Fancy wings
Winged lined and London go hand in hand like fish and chips, pubs and lads, Kate and Wills. The pulsing, creative subculture of East London love a cat-eye as much as they love an underground gig, and the beauty staple was reinvented with a subversive London rigour. At Erdem, Val Garland played with chunky block colour and styled her wings with strength and masculinity, while Asai danced delicately with the negative eye trend. As for Alexa Chung, she doubled down with a smoked-out, protracted double wing.
Rainbow streaks
Mary Katrantzou has always loved colour. For Fall 2019, she took her kaleidoscopic intentions literally, as rainbow-coloured hair pieces were clipped into model lengths by hairstylist Anthony Turner, with colourist Josh Wood on dye. Softer hues of mint, mango and lemon played off against bold fuchsia, violet and crimson, as hair was left textured and fashioned into messy, sticky fringes.
