Maison Margiela SS2024, Pat McGrath, haunted by other worlds
I stayed up late last night poring over every image and video coming out of the Maison Margiela SS24 show by John Galliano, with makeup by Pat McGrath. I am haunted.
Maison Margiela have posted the show in two parts on their Instagram. Others have written about this beautifully, like here and here. The show was, quite simply, otherworldly. Cinched waists, sheer dresses revealing the uncanniness of human form, exaggerated silhouettes, models with unlit matches between their teeth. Gauzey fabrics swaddling the body. Hunched over forms. The tension is palpable.
Pat McGrath reminded us of her truly sick genius. Her artistry here seems to be inspired by wax figurines. I need to know how she created this skin look.
Gwendoline Christie closed out the show. Just incredible.
(I am by no means a Galliano apologist, but this show made me feel something undeniable.)
I suppose this show helped me remember what truly inspired and unique creative vision is. Art, in all forms, creates worlds, opens portals to places familiar and entirely unfamiliar at the same time. New senses are awakened, old memories and feelings rush back and beckon us toward a different kind of now — remember me? follow me to what could have been, what might yet be.
I feel inspired, once again, to rage against the homogenizing machine of the media landscape.
Something I have noticed after years of content creation and Creative Labor, broadly, is that the pursuit of virality produces homogeneity and the impoverishment of our senses. The flattening of perspective, voice, aesthetic sensibility. This is true as both a viewer and a creative. The tension between art and capital is, of course, as old as art itself, but this question does seem particularly urgent given the massive media layoffs in just the last week alone. RIP Pitchfork, solidarity with all media workers.
This is obviously not a new observation, but it is particularly noticeable in the aesthetics of beauty because it is such a visual medium. This is how we arrive at Instagram face, TikTok voice, the same cadence in every video we watch, the same cosmetic procedures on everyone, etc. One product goes viral and everyone rushes to review it, chasing the high of viewership. It’s all we see for days until the next item takes its place, strategically engineered by PR and mined data. It’s a vacant pursuit. It doesn’t feel good. No one wins. Except big tech and corporations, I guess. I say this as a person who is now entrenched in this industry and often struggles to find another way.
How easily this clouds my creativity and voice. I am human, after all, and a lover of beauty and Beauty and beautiful things. And yet sometimes I feel trapped by this world of beautiful things, oversaturated and anesthetized. Every [lipstick, eyeshadow, insert product here] feels the same. Repetition is numbing. And this ecosystem collapses anything and anyone that is not a readymade commodity. Deviation is not rewarded. If it’s not marketable, you’re out, babe. And in a time of fractured realities and overlapping global crises, profit is the one universal metric. Extract value. Discard. This pursuit impoverishes us as humans, as creatives, as artists. Deep, material engagement with the world is forgotten. (In this regard, I actually feel grateful that my audience does not reward me with higher viewership when I fall for these traps, otherwise I really would be soulless. I guess we really are a little collective of weirdos in search of feeling something Real, so thanks for being here.)
This is evident even in the direction of Pat McGrath Labs, Pat McGrath’s own makeup line. The artistry of this show is striking, evoking something very old and also unlike anything we’re seeing right now. The exaggerated brows and the waxy skin bend our perception of human features. It’s doll-like and Victorian and also simultaneously alien. The show captures the liberatory promise of makeup artistry: I will challenge what you think is beautiful. In makeup, what you think is beautiful will be unmade and remade. In all honesty, I wish she would bring this energy to her makeup line. As an avid Pat fan, I have found myself disappointed by the sameness of her releases in the last couple of years, as I’ve discussed a bit here. I understand that the brand must market for mass appeal now, but I don’t want the lowest common denominator to dictate the brand’s artistic vision. And in my little parasocial heart, I want to believe that Pat wants to push artistic boundaries with her brand.
It’s not that I’m nostalgic for a romanticized past. Media and culture and art have always been at odds with its funders and its audiences. But there was a time when being a creative person online felt less captive, more unruly, more DIY. I think about the digital graveyard of weird little websites with shitty design and I want to be there (thinking here about the Schiaparelli dress and its ode to old technologies made new, actually). Quite simply, I do not want to be made into pulpy remains. I want to to live in an aesthetic pluriverse. More weird makeup. More portals to other worlds. More ways of imagining life in this one.
