The spring/summer runways usually highlight beige pouts and pastel-hued eyes. But Dior is betting on dark lips for the upcoming spring season. At the brand’s 2024 show, creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri collaborated with pop artist Elena Bellantoni to riff on stereotypes about women. “Maria Grazia wanted witchy lips, but not in a horror way—more gothic,” Dior makeup creative and image director Peter Philips says. “She wanted to [respond] to women being seen as witches in a male-dominated world in Italy for generations.”
You may recall Dior dabbling in dark lips on the runway, at the Fall/Winter 2016 show, where Philips presented bordeaux lips inspired by the former Rouge Dior lipstick in the Poison shade. Philips just brought back the grungy lip, but with an understated, modern twist.
To create the wine-stained lip, Philips chose black eyeliner, which he applied to the center of bare lips, right where the top and bottom meet, so it would bleed out to create a barely-there dark pout. “I used the [Diorshow] On Stage Crayon, which is a combination of gel and kohl liner—plus, it’s waterproof—so it stays the best,” he says. To effortlessly fuse the black eyeliner into the models’ bare lips, he blended a touch of Rouge Dior Forever lipstick in Forever Night, a deep matte purple, around the black eyeliner, before going in with a rosewood shade like Forever Nude near the edges of the lips.
With most of the focus on the lips, Philips kept the rest of the face minimal. “The show set has pink, orange, lots of color, so we kept it quite simple,” he explains. “We didn’t want to do any highlighting or contouring.” To give the skin a natural glow, he prepped the skin with the Dior Capture Totale Le Sérum and the Dior Forever Glow Veil, and added the Dior Forever Skin Correct concealer and Forever Skin Cushion to give the skin an even tone and reduce unwanted shine. He skipped mascara to avoid the look from becoming too “sexy or Halloween-y,” he says.
In true French fashion, lead hairstylist Guido Palau created an effortless version of the already low-maintenance French twist. “The goal was to create the classic shape of the twist, but it’s not totally dry and has some pieces sticking out, so it doesn’t look so classic,” he says. “Maria Grazia doesn’t normally do one universal look so that we can show the different haircuts and textures. But this time, we’ve done one idea to show that the collection is more definitive and refined.”
