Glitter on the Runway! A Closer Look at Loewe’s Golden Half-Moons and Silver Wings

Giant screens backstage at Loewe showed celebrities arriving in style (Ayo Edibiri and Josh O’Connor carpooling!) outside the Chateau de Vincennes this morning. Inside, makeup artist Pat McGrath’s team bustled to perfect the sparkling beauty looks that played off of Jonathan Anderson’s SS25 collection of sculptural sheer florals, liquidy sequin minis, and graphic tees dedicated to artists like Édouard Manet and Johann Sebastian Bach. “He said ‘modern couture,’” Pat McGrath told me (already donning her black cateye sunglasses as the models prepared to walk) of her conversations with Anderson that inspired the glittering eyes set to walk the runway.

On 2 models, golden arches extending all the way to the brow bone were “really a take on half moon eyes that we did on Karen Elson from the early nineties with Steven Meisel for Vogue,” said McGrath. “And then we did 8 silver graphic winged eyes—beautiful, right?” Truly, and on models reading paperback books, the light caught the silver glitter (from McGrath’s personal archives) like perfect gleaming swooshes. To create the look, “we have the Luminous Legends: Mega Eye Shadow Palette, she’s being launched today,” McGrath said with a cheeky smile. The Golden Muse and Lunar Luxury pigments were used on the half moons and graphic swooshes, respectively, “with real good glitter impacted on top” of both and, for the gold, “a little bit of cut foil.” Just “a tiny bit of Fetisheyes mascara on the lash for enhancement” and SkinFetish: Highlighter + Balm Duo on the face for “luminized skin,” true to her signature.

Not far away, Guido Palau lounged on a cushion, ready for the show. It was a chiller hair day, overall, at least compared to last season’s neon anime bangs. “So it seems that here we do hair moments, then we don’t do a hair moment,” Palau said of creating a balance with Anderson. “He has a great beauty sense of knowing what’s right for Loewe, and Pat’s makeup is the kind of fashion moment this time.” For hair, it’s natural and cool. “It’s small things, you know what I mean?” he says. “We’re looking at the girls’ hair and just seeing if it needs a little kind of a touch up: Is the parting right? Does it need a little bit of cream in it to take some of the frizz away?” When it does, he’s adding “a little bit of Zara Hair Light Hair Balm” and letting models look like themselves. “Individuality” is always at the top of Anderson’s mind.

Holding back from gilding the lily, as they say, can be its own challenge. “I think women, real women, find it difficult to know if their hair looks good or messy when it’s being natural,” says Palau. “It’s easier to take the curling iron or blow your hair out because you’ve done it then—I think women find it a little bit harder to work out if their hair looks great natural.” Today, “effortless” is right. “This season, Jonathan’s clothes are quite out there, this ease just compliments it and makes it feel very modern,” Palau adds, noting that this is what a good red carpet moment would really look like. “Women will wear beautiful gowns and then have beautiful natural hair in different ways: undone, wet. It’s a naturalness that looks so cool.”