Fashion’s favorite makeup artist builds a dream within a dream at Vogue World 2026: Milano.Fashion’s favorite makeup artist builds a dream within a dream at Vogue World 2026: Milano.
Getting backstage at Vogue World 2026: Milano is about as easy as the Met Gala—it’s not! And securing some one-on-one time with fashion’s favorite makeup artist Dame Pat McGrath as she and her team prep a cast of over 300 models, dancers, actors, skateboarders, musicians, and more? Well, that is simply a multitasking masterclass of its own.
Over here, Iris Law checks to see if her angelic, sparkling gaze is good to go (everyone loves it!) and over there, Vittoria Ceretti is barefaced and ready to be transformed. “Now we know we’re at the last few girls and we’re doing very well,” McGrath tells me as she makes her way through the rows of glam tables a couple of hours before curtain call.
Inside the Palazzo Giureconsulti, models in black La Perla robes tap tap tap their phones with nail artist Eri Narita’s rainbow of Italian manicures as McGrath and team create a symphony of makeup looks to illustrate the many acts of Vogue World: Milano celebrating Italian craft and innovation. And who better than the Dame herself, who’s been handcrafting innovative beauty looks for many of the houses we’re celebrating, from Versace to Valentino? Down the historic hall, hair artist Cyndia Harvey is busy wrapping low ponytails and slicking buns to support the vision.
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“It felt like we were really traveling through all of the eras of Italian creativity and each one has its own beauty language—we began with luminosity,” McGrath says of playing off of the “richness of the fabric” and textiles in the first act, The Artisanal Revolution. Models including Mariacarla Boscono and Fei Fei Sun wear this Renaissance-inspired beauty “with a lovely cheek, beautiful pale eyelids, and little stains on the lips,” says McGrath. “Very romantic, but just exquisite.”
For the second act, The Industrial Revolution, fashion went gray and beauty followed. “It’s a lot of suiting,” McGrath says of the wardrobe that Adriana Lima and actor Adria Arjona will stroll in down the Galleria. “What we’ve played with is the levels of smokey eyes,” she says, with looks ranging from “really, really strong blacks” to sooty eyes and dark lips. “Some girls have both, some girls have just an eye, and some girls will have just a lip. It’s very gorgeous.” And permission for more-is-more beauty when tailoring is in the mix.
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For the “cinematic beauties” in the more tonal looks, “we’ve done a gorgeous eye and a little structure with an eyeliner, then we’ve got different levels of lips ranging from burgundies to reds and nudes.” It’s a much more surprising range as the show goes on to the fourth act, The Age of Intelligence, where MGK strolls past model Victoria Fawole wrapped in her blue quilted Moncler x Pierpaolo Piccioli and matching mouth. “It’s all about a color pop on the lips: Purples, blues, navy blues, acid oranges, a real smorgasbord of color,” McGrath laughs.
I get a taste of the making of our fifth and final act, The Imagination Age, as McGrath instructs one of her team members to take “just a little bit of silver glitter and apply it to a model’s lid like a fingerprint. “What we’ve done is created almost like a doll’s eye, an otherworldly eye, white lashes, white and beautiful gray browns around the eyes, lots of beautiful sparkle, and perfect skin stains on the lips,” McGrath says. “It’s another world. Dreamy.”
And it truly is a dream world to see it all in motion, every cup of sparkle and trunk of treasures. How many trunks of beauty did she travel with this year, I wonder, after hearing the lore that for past Vogue Worlds it was in the hundreds. “For this one, it was 30,” she says. “Traveling light!” I praise. “Yes, we were backpacking,” McGrath says with a laugh. “We were being very streamlined.”
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