High Fashion Makeup Looks That Define Modern Runway Beauty

The cleanest single sentence about high fashion makeup looks in 2026 is that the working artists actually building them are a small, identifiable group whose careers have run alongside the designers they serve for the past decade or longer, and that the looks each of them produces across a season are coherent in a way that the consumer beauty market's seasonal trend reports rarely capture. Pat McGrath has run the makeup direction at Valentino since Pierpaolo Piccioli's tenure began in 2008 and continues through the post-Piccioli period, with the additional ongoing contracts at Maison Margiela couture (where she produced the 2024 porcelain-doll look that consumed beauty press for months), Prada, and her own Pat McGrath Labs brand work. Lucia Pieroni has built her career around Khaite (the Catherine Holstein brand that has redefined American minimalist luxury), Tom Ford, Givenchy, and the broader contemporary luxury cluster. Diane Kendal has handled Calvin Klein under Raf Simons and now under Veronica Leoni, Proenza Schouler, Tory Burch, and the New York editorial calendar. Tom Pecheux has run Saint Laurent under Anthony Vaccarello since 2016. Hannah Murray has built the makeup direction at Coperni, Schiaparelli, and the wider new-luxury wave of the past three years.

The shorter version, before the working detail: the makeup runway is run by approximately eight to ten lead artists across the four-city calendar, each of whom holds a stable of houses they have built relationships with across years and whose seasonal looks reflect both the designer's collection direction and the artist's broader operating signature. The consumer beauty press tends to read the runway as a single rolling trend; the working version of the same calendar is a collection of separate house-by-house decisions that hold internal coherence rather than collective consensus.

This piece is a working catalogue of who is doing what, what the specific looks were across the most recent seasons, and how the broader 2026 runway-beauty conversation sits inside the longer trajectory of the past decade.

Pat McGrath: Valentino, Margiela couture, Prada, and the operating empire

Pat McGrath has been the most consequential single figure in runway makeup direction since her work with John Galliano at Givenchy in the late 1990s and her concurrent work with Anna Sui produced the visual language that the rest of the industry has been catching up to ever since. The contemporary McGrath operating empire runs across the Valentino contract (every Pierpaolo Piccioli show from 2008 through his March 2024 departure, with the post-Piccioli direction continuing under Alessandro Michele as of his September 2024 debut), the Maison Margiela couture work that produced the John Galliano-directed Artisanal collection of January 2024 (the porcelain-doll, painted-skin look that Pat McGrath Labs subsequently turned into the Skin Fetish 003 Sublime Perfection consumer launch), the ongoing Prada beauty direction shared with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons since 2020, and the Anna Sui shows that have run continuously since 1993.

The Margiela Artisanal look from January 2024 deserves a longer note because it produced more beauty-press coverage than almost any other runway look of the past five years. The look used a stark, milk-white skin finish achieved through Pat McGrath Labs Skin Fetish Sublime Perfection foundation layered with the Skin Fetish Highlighter and a custom-mixed white pigment, with the skin's actual structure left visible underneath the paint. The eyes used a sharp black liner extended at the outer corner, dramatic false-lash work, and a wet-glass finish on the cheekbones produced by the Glass 003 Cosmetic Lip Highlight applied as a multi-surface gloss. The lip was painted in a slightly off-centre rose-blood-red and intentionally allowed to bleed at the edges. The look was a deliberate Galliano-era throwback to the surreal-doll aesthetic that defined his earlier Margiela work and his Givenchy and Dior tenures.

The Valentino looks across Pierpaolo Piccioli's final 2023–2024 seasons ran consistently into the territory McGrath has occupied for two decades: skin treated as luxe lacquer, lips coloured in saturated single tones that took their cue from the collection palette, eyes minimal or accentuated only at the lash line, brows softened to allow the lip to drive the look. The Spring 2024 ready-to-wear look in particular produced a strong cherry-red lip against an otherwise nearly bare face, with the McGrath team using the Mattetrance Lipstick in the Elson 2 shade as the working anchor.

The Prada looks have leaned into the opposite direction: skin allowed to read as skin (the Sublime Perfection foundation is used at extremely thin coverage so the actual texture of the model's face remains visible), eyes given the briefest possible definition (sometimes just a wash of pigment, sometimes a single line of liner traced into the upper lash line), and lips kept neutral. The Spring 2025 Prada show produced a face that registered as "almost no makeup" while requiring approximately forty minutes of professional skin preparation per model, which is the working irony at the centre of contemporary runway minimalism.

Lucia Pieroni: Khaite, Tom Ford, and the soft-discipline school

Lucia Pieroni has built the makeup direction at Khaite alongside Catherine Holstein since the brand's early seasons, and the working relationship has produced what is currently the most distinctive house signature in American minimalist-luxury beauty. The Khaite Spring 2025 ready-to-wear look from September 2024 used a washed-out, almost monochromatic face built on a single foundation tone applied evenly across the skin, brows brushed up but left undefined at the tail, eyes given only a thin smoke of taupe along the lower lash line, and a single sharp dark-berry lip drawn precisely along the natural lip line and filled with the Tom Ford Lip Color Matte in the Forbidden Pink and Smoke Red shades. The total face took roughly twenty-five minutes per model and registered with a deliberate stillness that read against the warmer, glow-finished faces that the rest of the New York calendar has standardised around.

The Pieroni signature on Tom Ford, which she has built across the contract years through to Haider Ackermann's 2024 appointment as creative director, leans into the opposite end of the same operating principle: skin polished to a high reflective sheen, eyes given more architectural definition, lips treated as a colour statement. The transition from Tom Ford the founder's direct creative direction through the Peter Hawkings interim period to the Ackermann era has produced a slightly tougher, more sculptural face that the Tom Ford Spring 2025 show under Ackermann's direction made explicit: a darker bronze finish, a graphite-and-bronze eye, and a deep wine lip.

The Givenchy work, which Pieroni handled during Matthew Williams's creative-direction tenure (2020–2024) and which has continued in modified form under the post-Williams direction, sat in the middle of the same spectrum: more sculptural than Khaite, less reflective than Tom Ford, with a particular emphasis on the cheekbone work that Pieroni has built her broader operating signature around.

Diane Kendal: Calvin Klein, Proenza Schouler, and the New York editorial spine

Diane Kendal has run the makeup direction at Calvin Klein since the Raf Simons era (2017–2018) and continued through the Veronica Leoni appointment that took effect with the Spring 2026 collection, alongside the long-running Proenza Schouler relationship with Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez that has spanned over a decade. The Kendal signature is the cleanest in the New York calendar: skin kept as skin, eyes given a single tonal wash that reflects the collection palette, lips left mostly neutral. The Proenza Schouler Fall 2025 show used a face that registered as almost completely bare with a single rose-tinted gloss on the lip and a soft cream blush worked into the apple of the cheek; the Calvin Klein Spring 2026 show under Leoni produced a similarly stripped face with a slight smoke at the lash line.

The Tory Burch shows, which Kendal has handled across the contract years, sit at the more polished end of the same operating principle: more visible foundation work, slightly more defined cheek structure, a peachy-rose lip rather than the Proenza neutral. The Marc Jacobs work, which Kendal has handled across most of his recent collections through the brand's creative resurgence, sits in different territory entirely: more theatrical, with the September 2024 Spring 2025 show producing a graphic-black liner moment that ran across the entire upper lash line and wrapped into a small wing.

The broader Kendal operating philosophy, which she has discussed across multiple interviews with Vogue and Allure, is that runway makeup should reinforce rather than compete with the clothing, and that the face should register as a coherent element of the styling rather than as a separate statement. The discipline this produces is more demanding than dramatic makeup work and is part of why Kendal has held the contracts she has across the years.

Tom Pecheux: Saint Laurent and the cocoon-eye continuity

Tom Pecheux has handled the Saint Laurent runway under Anthony Vaccarello since 2016 and continues to produce the most consistent house-makeup signature in the contemporary calendar. The Saint Laurent face under Pecheux runs almost without variation across seasons: a slightly transparent foundation finish, a softened smoky eye that wraps the entire socket in shades of brown and graphite without producing the harsh edges that older smoky-eye conventions used, a defined but soft brow, and a neutral-to-warm-nude lip. The Fall 2025 show in February 2025 used the smoky cocoon-eye configuration that has held across the Vaccarello-Pecheux partnership, with the Estee Lauder Pure Color Envy palette and the Maybelline Color Tattoo cream shadows as the working products. The Spring 2026 Saint Laurent show, which ran in September 2025, used a slightly lifted-and-elongated version of the same cocoon eye.

The Pecheux signature sits in the same operating philosophy as Kendal's (face supports clothing rather than competing with it), although the visual language is warmer and more sensual. The Saint Laurent woman, as Vaccarello has constructed her over the past decade, is closer to the European-evening-glamour archetype than to the American-minimalist one, and Pecheux's makeup work reinforces this positioning without producing the kind of heavy beauty that would compete with the typically architectural Vaccarello cuts.

The other major contract in Pecheux's current portfolio is the long-running editorial work with French Vogue and Vogue Italia, which sits adjacent to the runway work and which has produced some of the most-shared editorial-beauty imagery of the past decade. The Pat McGrath–Tom Pecheux generational pairing has dominated the French editorial conversation for over twenty years, with the two artists splitting the cover work of the major European fashion-and-beauty titles between them.

Hannah Murray, Aaron Henrikson, and the new-luxury cluster

Hannah Murray has emerged across the past three years as the lead artist for the new-luxury cluster of designers (Coperni under Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, Schiaparelli under Daniel Roseberry, parts of the Mugler and 16Arlington calendars), and her work has produced some of the most-discussed runway beauty looks of the 2023–2025 cycle. The Coperni Spring 2024 show that included the Bella Hadid spray-painted-dress moment in September 2022 (the show that effectively launched the wider cultural moment Coperni has occupied since) used a Murray face built on chrome-silver eyelid finish, defined brows, and a barely-there lip. The Schiaparelli couture shows under Daniel Roseberry have used Murray's increasingly surreal beauty work as integral parts of the collection's surrealist DNA: the January 2023 lion-head couture moment included a heavily defined gold-painted eye and a sculpted face; the July 2024 couture show included a chrome-and-mercury beauty moment that ran across multiple looks.

Aaron Henrikson has built a parallel signature at Khaite (sharing the contract with Lucia Pieroni across different seasons), Bottega Veneta under Matthieu Blazy, The Row under Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (the rare set of shows where the makeup is genuinely closer to no makeup than to professional intervention), and the broader American minimalist cluster. The Henrikson work at Bottega Veneta Spring 2025 in September 2024 produced a face that read as almost entirely unworked, with the Blazy collection's quiet luxury reinforced by the absence of any visible beauty intervention.

The other artists worth naming inside the contemporary cluster include Inge Grognard at Mugler under Casey Cadwallader (the graphic-black liner that has become a Mugler signature is Grognard's), Lynsey Alexander at Loewe under Jonathan Anderson and now under Proenza Schouler's Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez (the Spring 2026 transition), Sam Visser at the broader celebrity-and-young-talent calendar, and the Pat McGrath Labs in-house team handling the smaller-budget shows that the McGrath empire takes on across each season.

For the broader operating context, our coverage of fashion week beauty trends defining the 2026 runway tracks the season-over-season shifts in working detail.

The technical principles running underneath the looks

The runway looks across all the artists named above share a small number of working principles, which is part of why the beauty editors at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and the broader fashion press can identify the "house" of a look quickly even when the products and the visual specifics vary.

The skin preparation is more elaborate than the visible result suggests. A face that reads as "no makeup" at Bottega Veneta or Khaite has typically been prepared with twenty-five to forty minutes of professional skin work: a thorough cleanse, targeted exfoliation in dry areas, careful moisturising layered by zone, primer applied only where the foundation needs help to sit cleanly, sheer foundation worked in by hand, and pinpoint correction limited to the specific areas that need it. The Pat McGrath Labs Sublime Perfection Foundation, the Westman Atelier Vital Skincare Complexion Drops, and the Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Flawless Filter are the most-used backstage skin products across the cluster, although the actual application is more about the technique than the product.

The colour work is placed precisely. Blush sits where the artist has decided the face needs lift (high on the cheekbone for the Kendal and Pieroni faces, slightly lower and more diffused for the McGrath and Murray faces, almost absent for the Henrikson and Pecheux-on-Saint Laurent faces). Eye shadow holds to a single dominant tone in the editorial-leaning looks and to a more layered structure in the McGrath and Murray work. Liner, when it is used, is drawn cleanly without smudging unless the smudging is itself the design intent.

The lash work is more consequential than the consumer beauty market acknowledges. False lashes are applied selectively (clustered rather than as a strip) by Pat McGrath, Lucia Pieroni, and Hannah Murray; rarely used by Diane Kendal or Aaron Henrikson; almost always used by Tom Pecheux for the Saint Laurent cocoon eye. The lashes are part of the architecture of the eye look rather than a finishing flourish.

The lip is the part of the face that varies most consistently with the collection. A neutral lip (Kendal at Calvin Klein, Henrikson at Bottega Veneta) reinforces a quiet collection; a saturated lip (McGrath at Valentino, Pieroni at Khaite) carries colour into a face that has been left otherwise minimal; a textured lip (gloss layered over matte, balm pressed into the lip line) reads as more directional than a flat finish.

For the broader career framework that the runway beauty work sits inside, our model skincare routine secrets the pros swear by covers what the working models do underneath the professional makeup work, and our Paris Fashion Week beauty trends signal a reset covers the most recent Paris cycle in working detail.

Translating runway beauty into real life

The question most consumer beauty readers care about is whether any of this translates outside the runway environment, and the practical answer is that it translates better than the runway looks themselves suggest, provided the translation is done with editing rather than literal reproduction. The single most useful principle is that runway looks usually carry one strong element backed by restrained execution of the rest of the face; the consumer version of the same look should preserve the strong element and dial down everything else.

A McGrath-Valentino cherry-red lip translates into real life through a slightly softer wine-stained version (Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk Medium worked into the lip with a fingertip), paired with the rest of the face kept clean. A Pieroni-Khaite sharp dark-berry lip translates through a brushed-up brow, mascara only at the roots, and the same precision-drawn lip line. A Pecheux-Saint Laurent cocoon eye translates through a soft taupe-and-brown smoke at the upper lash line, with the rest of the face kept warm and neutral. A Kendal-Proenza skin-as-skin face translates through honest skincare, a tinted moisturiser, a cream blush, and the kind of restraint that requires more confidence than dramatic makeup does.

The other principle is that the lighting environment matters. Runway looks are built for the specific colour temperature and intensity of the runway lighting (typically cool-white LED with high CRI), and the same products and placement read differently under warm domestic lighting or natural daylight. A look that reads beautifully under runway light may flatten under restaurant light; the consumer translation needs to account for the environment the face will actually be seen in.

For the broader beauty-trend tracking that connects to this conversation, our coverage of why beauty trend trackers now matter to fashion models covers the working professional side of the same conversation.

A few quick answers

A handful of reader questions about high fashion makeup looks recur. The contemporary definition is beauty work created to support a fashion image, collection, or editorial story rather than to provide everyday flattery; the looks use stronger placement, deliberate texture contrast, and clearer visual concepts than consumer makeup, with each feature serving the styling rather than competing with it. Runway looks differ from regular makeup primarily through their design for distance, movement, and camera performance: artists use stronger structure, more intentional texture, and clearer focal points, and even when a face reads minimal the placement and product layering are highly controlled. The products most often used backstage are Pat McGrath Labs (the Sublime Perfection Foundation and the Mothership eyeshadow palettes), Charlotte Tilbury (the Hollywood Flawless Filter, the Pillow Talk family, the Magic Cream), NARS (the Climax Mascara, the Audacious Lipstick, the long-running Orgasm blush), MAC Cosmetics (the lipstick and lip-pencil range), and Armani Beauty (the Luminous Silk Foundation as the working backstage base for skin-as-skin faces). Bold fashion makeup can absolutely translate to real life if you preserve one statement element and simplify the rest, and the most-useful translation principle is that the runway looks themselves are built on disciplined restraint with one or two elements carrying the visual weight. Aspiring models can practise high fashion makeup for test shoots by studying face shape, skin texture, and strongest angles first, then working with a photographer and artist who understand editorial restraint, then building references around one concept at a time (skin, eye, lip, or blush placement) rather than trying to reproduce a full backstage face.

The shorter version of any of this is that runway makeup looks are house-by-house decisions made by a small group of identifiable artists whose careers have run alongside the designers they serve, and that understanding the cluster is more useful than reading the runway as a single rolling trend. For the broader fashion-week beauty context that this cluster sits inside, our coverage of the Paris Fashion Week beauty trends signal a reset covers the most recent Paris cycle in working detail.