INSPIRATIONAL
Faye Toogood, the lauded British designer, is known as much for her attention to handmade craft as her capacity for seeing beauty in raw materials. “It’s an unconventional take and one, at its root, that gets back to nature...The application of this palette is not about following rules or using professional brushes,” says Toogood, “but should be painterly, primal, instinctive and gestural.”
PALETTE
Overall, the textures and the colors go from a very dark rust, black, smoky, quartz colors through to a bright, uplifting turquoise. Almost like a melting ice lake. For the eyes, matte shadows come in (from Left to Right): Woad, Darkness, Cast Iron, Ultramarine.
CONCEPT COLLECTION
// NEW MEDIEVALBritish designer Faye Toogood never fails to surprise. Whether it’s the whimsy of handmade fabrications or her confident embrace of rawness and irregularity. MAKE asked Toogood to create the concept and palette for our first collection, New Medieval.
Artist Collaboration
MAKE is a colour cosmetic brand that finds beauty in inspiration. Each season MAKE pairs two unlikely artists to create our collection and palette. Interior and furniture designer Faye Toogood looked to the darker side of natural world working with MAKE’s Resident Makeup Artist, Ayami Nishimura, to translate the concept into three distinctive looks. Aptly called New Medieval, beauty takes on elemental and primal qualities, referencing the icy and harsh beauty of icebergs in metallic turquoise, moody sea blue and matte black eyeshadows. The collection features “dark, deep pigments and powders that can be layered around the eyes and highlighted.” “For me, makeup is synonymous with self-expression, reinvention, fragility, ornament and femininity,” says Toogood.
RESIDENT MAKEUP ARTIST
MAKE’s Resident Makeup Artist Ayami Nishimura is unconventional, creative and liberated. Having worked with the industry’s top fashion photographers – Sølve Sundsbø, Mario Testino and Ellen Von Unwerth to name a few – the London-based makeup artist has been challenging traditional notions of color, texture and application since the 1990s. Informing that vision, Ayami’s scope transcends traditional silos. Like MAKE, she believes there are no beauty rules. That each woman is driven by an artistic approach to her own personal reality. It’s that open spirit that Ayami brings to collaborating with the multi-disciplinary experts MAKE brings together.
NEW MEDIEVAL
For our first Concept Collection, Faye Toogood’s vision for New Medieval was translated to the face by expert makeup artist Ayami Nishimura. These looks were then captured in moving cinemagraphs by Jaime Beck for MAKE. “Sea ice, volcano smoke, water, sky...I wanted to somehow keep that kind of quiet and poetic feeling.“ says Nishimura.
INSPIRATION
As a MAKE collaborator, Faye Toogood envisioned the New Medieval collection, drawing upon the works of two Romantic landscape painters, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. “For these two British Romantics, nature was the primary vehicle for the sublime: sparkling starry skies, stormy seas, turbulent waterfalls and rocky mountains all alluded to a future determined by the overriding force and mechanics of nature,” Toogood describes. “I would like to transpose the beauty of the natural landscape to the landscape of the face.”
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Each season MAKE pairs two unlikely artists to create our Concept Collection and palette. We also have a program, the MAKE Contributing Artists Program, that supports makeup artists early in their careers, providing a showcase for them to create beauty looks that channel their inspiration onto the face. Twelve have been chosen for our first year who will also be available to provide advice online. Our vision is to incite a continual, never-ending journey of collaboration.
