Wanna bone? Simone Rocha does. The Irish designer skimmed the sea for her fall 2020 collection, surfacing with wreckage like shark teeth, shredded nets, pearls, scales, kelp, and yes, bones.
"It's one of the first things Simone said to me," said hair stylist Gary Gill. "She saw bones in the girls' hair," but not like Pebbles and Bam Bam. Instead, Gill wove figure 8 plaits that mimicked spiny ribs and spiky cartilage, spraying them with mousse, searing them with a flat iron, and then unwinding most of them to let the hair form its own kind of current. "We leave a few of the bones to frame the face," Gill explained. "Like accessories."
Meanwhile with makeup, Thomas de Kluyver—who was named Gucci's first-ever Global Makeup Artist last year—referenced the slap! that your skin feels "when you go swimming in the cold ocean, and you put your head all the way under." Complexions were bright and alert, lips were bare. "But we wanted to make almost another accessory on the lids," de Kluyver said. "To reference the ways Simone uses jewels and headbands and all that. So we took a flat black foil, a little thicker than you'd think, on some girls. We took a red metallic foil on others, and a pink one, you'd say it's like one of her headbands, but for your eyes."
The effect was like a lure on a deep sea fishing pole, diffused and glimmering. In a sense, Simone Rocha brought the ultimate mermaid makeup—but not the iridescent girl crush of Splash. This was more like the Irish selkie or the Greek siren: a spirit whose only job is to tempt, destroy, and feast on the weakness of men.
Including, of course, their bones.
Faran Krentcil Editor at Large, ELLE.com "Her beauty and her brain go not together." —William Shakespeare
