The Whole Picture: Fashion and Beauty’s new authentic alignment
Vogue Australia, August 2023 (PDF)
Emerging from the artifice of filters, Zoom meetings and on-screen socialising, both fashion and beauty are aligning. So, are we entering a new age of authenticity? Noelle Faulkner investigates.
Beauty influencers want you to know they get it. You’re exhausted by the hyper-speed of flash beauty trends that infiltrate our lives at every point. Actually, they are too; “like really, really exhausted”. Slide into the DMs of a handful of content creators, offer full anonymity in exchange for an honest description of the state of beauty under the reign of the algorithm, and they will say things like: “Fear- mongering gets views, sadly.” “We’ve all become shop girls, selling shit people don’t need.” “I used to love beauty.” “I can’t talk about the things I want to talk about if I want views.” “It used to be about expressing myself, but all I think about is what is trending or what could be trending.” “Trying to keep up with it all is making me feel bad about myself.” And a most devastating response: “I have lost myself in this.”
Trend fatigue has been a growing sentiment across both beauty and fashion. Three years of viral looks and turbocharged trends, fast fashion and fast beauty has left a lot of us with drawers full of unused product and racks of clothing that have dated like chopped avocado. Throw in a cost-of-living crisis and geopolitical unrest, and it’s no wonder the prediction of the “roaring 20s” has given way to movements like “de-influencing”, quiet luxury and a more solemn examination of our habits. Frankly, the growing disgust surrounding our consumption, questioning of how we view identity beyond the algorithm and a desire to go back to basics is starting to crack the industry wide open, allowing beauty for the first time to fall in line with fashion’s new mood of authenticity, rawness, near-minimalism and elevated essentials. And with this comes a rare opportunity to reframe how we think about beauty, and what its place is in our lives.
Traditionally speaking, beauty and fashion have always been out of step. Sure, beauty is an accessible gateway into a high fashion house’s world, but, due to timing, manufacturing, supply chains, licensing, retail and other factors that include the reshuffling of creative directors, it’s incredibly difficult for the two categories to align. The colours you see in a new YSL Beauty palette are not necessarily what Anthony Vaccarello envisioned for the Saint Laurent season, for example. Even Gucci Beauty, the highly successful poster child for cross-category world-building, was so connected to the creative signature of Alessandro Michele, it’s unclear how it will evolve for the house’s next chapter.
As a former beauty editor during the peak street style era of obscured faces, dishevelled hair and short, nude nails, I recall with all the clarity of The Ordinary Niacinamide serum, the great divide between the tribes of beauty and fashion. While the beauty girls were destroying their skin barrier with chemical peels and harsh exfoliants, the fashion set was adopting the “French-girl approach” of water-only cleansing followed by a few drops of Rodin Luxury Face Oil, but nary was there an SPF, nor a conversation around the science of skincare in sight.
How far we’ve all come. Now, fashion is recognising the power of alignment: the Kering group, which owns Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Yves Saint Laurent, has established a new beauty arm; LVMH (Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi, Loewe, Celine and more) appointed a former L’Oréal executive to front its division. Meanwhile, in a more organic sign of the times, Into The Gloss, the fashion-beauty bible founded by Glossier’s Emily Weiss made changes, too. Having single-handedly platformed fashion’s anti-beauty beauty archetype, it admitted it needed to evolve into a more scientific and discerning platform to cater to how our relationship with skincare has matured.
The thing is, three years of spending all our time looking at ourselves and the faces of others have left a lasting mark. Beauty is bigger than ever. It dominates our feeds, our cabinets, our conversations and even our office furniture. And it’s predicted that by 2027, the global beauty industry will record more than $877 billion worth of retail sales. Skincare, the sector that continues to grow in both volume and technological advances, is expected to lead the charge. “There’s a real shift happening where, instead of trying to look as young as possible, we’re trying to live longer, better and healthier,” says Dan Hastings-Narayanin, deputy foresight editor of trend intelligence platform LS:N Global. “So it’s no longer about just getting Botox or even plastic surgery. It’s really about thinking, ‘Okay, I’m going to live into my 90s, how am I going to make sure I can walk properly, make sure my heart rate is okay? How am I going to stay healthy?’”
Our proximity to experts via a flick of the thumb (not to mention a renewed trust in science and experts post-covid), plus a growing desire for simplicity in our lives has also led to an awareness of the value of skin barrier health, and has pushed science-backed dermatological brands to into a new stratosphere of cult status. “We’re noticing, more than ever, consumers are more educated on the importance of a healthy skin barrier and the role of the microbiome in overall skin health,” says Holly Roach, marketing manager of La Roche-Posay Australia. The French brand’s organic viral success across beauty channels on TikTok, Instagram and Reddit has seen its hero healing product, Cicaplast Baume B5+, achieve a mind-boggling global success, pushing it into triple-digit growth in Australia upwards of 113 per cent. On TikTok, the franchise globally has 110 million mentions, of which Australia accounted for 41 per cent. According to Roach, the balm is so popular that one tube is sold every minute worldwide. Why? Because it’s a scientifically backed multi-tasker. “We have seen a big uptake of aesthetic procedures and skin-cycling routines, and therefore there’s a need for post- treatment and maintenance solutions,” says Roach. “At the same time, given the state of the economy, consumers are wanting to simplify their skincare routine, without sacrificing the efficacy of the products they use.” Next up, you might have noticed already, is a focus on the body’s skin barrier health – a category Hailey Bieber is currently hunting down with Rhode Skin.
“Ten years ago, the skincare ritual wasn’t a thing – it was an annoying chore to take your make-up off,” notes fashion editor and author Navaz Batliwalla, who explores the intersection of fashion and beauty, and the rituals at the centre of that relationship in her book, Face Values (Laurence King Publishing). “But now we take so much pleasure in the care of skin, our knowledge has increased around why we need to look after it and the products themselves are much more enjoyable to use, especially the protection products. The textures are luxurious and the branding is more sophisticated and desirable, in a kind of fashion way. If it looks good on your shelf, you’re more likely to reach out for it, and that is part of where fashion and beauty are coming together.”
Batliwalla refers to a person she calls “the new Garconne”, a nod to her 2016 book of the same name. This fashion archetype is not someone the make-up industry has traditionally embraced, but a slew of incredibly agile brands, some more established than others, are now finding their people. Rooted in minimalist, everyday and multi-tasking make-up, this moment in beauty is aligning with the current season mood seen at The Row, Bottega Veneta, Miu Miu, and, dare I suggest, also aligns with the rise and rise of Skims. Just as intention, purpose and refined basics are allowing us to take a breath from the dizzying fashion cycle, this refreshed, effortless and skin-enhancing movement in make-up is a return to centre and elevates healthy skin as a base. It’s functional for everyday wear and made for living both off and online. Think of it this way: where Glossier flopped for leaning too millennial, too saccharine and too plagued with controversy, brands like Jones Road Beauty, Ami Colé, Westman Atelier, Victoria Beckham, Rose Inc, Rare Beauty, Fara Homidi Beauty, RMS, Violette_FR and YSL Beauty’s recently launched Nu Collection are picking up the no-make- up make-up/make-up-as-skincare beat. In many cases, these brands are developing products and platforms that specifically challenge beauty ideals and representation across age, ethnicity and gender. Some, like Ami Colé, are helping to decolonise the very Caucasian-centric aesthetic that exists in minimalism, while others, like Selena Gomez’s brand, Rare Beauty, are using make-up as a gateway to a wider conversation around mental and physical health.
Innovation and technology have governed how we explore and experiment with identity, and whether we like it or not, beauty has been at the centre of it all. The proliferation of filters, for example, has increased our awareness of artifice and the one- size-fits-all, prescriptive and highly problematic and often Euro-centric “Instagram face” is now tired. Recently, we’ve watched several highly augmented celebrities move to soften their looks, dissolve their fillers and Brazilian butt lifts, forgo Botox and claim to embrace the real. “If we talk about what quiet luxury is in beauty, at the very high end of what is happening, two things are going on,” comments Hannah Collingwood-English, a pharmaceutical scientist, beauty content creator and author of Your Best Skin (Hardie Grant). “One is, let’s call it the Shiv Roy effect. There is this idea that effortlessness or a lack of care factor is almost now a display of wealth. She might have a few wrinkles, but she doesn’t care because she’s so rich, booked, busy and unbothered.” And then, says Collingwood-English, there is what’s going on behind closed doors. “There is this new type of injectable called Profhilo that everyone is talking about. It’s a biostimulator and it’s hyaluronic acid in the same way as filler, but it’s very different in structure and it doesn’t puff up under your skin.” Instead, the product spreads more evenly and stimulates collagen and elastin in the skin. “So the effect is, you look like yourself, just more well-rested, rather than ‘filled’. There is a lot of demand for it right now in the US and Australia, but it’s just one example of how technology is moving away from this sort of puffy, frozen, artificial face, into a more authentic, ‘you but better’.”
So many of our interactions with others continue to be face- to-face and from the waist up. So the frame within which we express and style ourselves and the hierarchy of fashion and beauty has shifted for good – beauty has become fashion itself, and the two intertwined. But, as Laura Mulcahy, director of cultural strategy at research agency TRA and a former cultural and societal researcher at Nike points out, social media and the digital worlds we exist in now offer a fresh perspective. “Nothing exists on its own anymore. It’s not about categories of things, it’s about the whole picture of how we view ourselves and others,” she says. “If you think about your phone as the canvas – which is how we see the world now, through our phones – then you now see everything as being equal. So when we’re looking at a person, we’re not just looking at an outfit, we’re looking at them in terms of what location they’re at, what they’re eating, the jewellery they’re wearing and we’re dissecting that whole picture. And that includes beauty. All these things are now part of a world, and part of the same canvas.”
At the autumn/winter shows, several designers cited the street as their muse, and a major talking point across many facets of culture of late has centred around “real life being back”, and for many it is. However, we can’t deny that the URL and the IRL are now intertwined with our identity and our style, and that’s where artifice, aspiration and authenticity come to a tricky head. Where beauty, and specifically the speed at which it churned through trends and moments, once thrived off the patriarchal business of female self-betterment, the influence of fashion, culture and a back-to-basics ethos offers a new way of talking about beauty that sees it become an authentic extension of self, instead of the dizzying pursuit of perfection.
