NEW YORK -- If anyone can bring back bright blue eye shadow, it's Alexander McQueen.
The British fashion designer is a known risk-taker on the runway, but this season he's taken the Elizabeth Taylor-as-Cleopatra look featured in his fall collection and put it into the tiny graphite-colored boxes found at MAC cosmetic counters.
McQueen and MAC are longtime collaborators at fashion shows, but this is the first time there are McQueen-branded makeup products.
"People get into the whole look, the whole feeling of the show," McQueen says during a telephone interview from Paris. "I want to give to the people what's straight from the runway -- let them take the runway home."
Options for armchair fashion followers⢠Eye shadow in Nile, a royal blue; Pagan, a yellow lime green; and Haunting, a seafood green. There also are lipsticks -- in a dusty rose called Masque and a sheer light gold called Archetype -- and kohl powder eye pencils in black speckled with colored metallic shades.
McQueen understands that makeup helps portray a character, says Charlotte Tilbury, a top makeup artist and frequent backstage partner of the designer. She watched "Cleopatra" with McQueen, she reports, and then they played with several colors and application styles for the makeup.
"The look is youthful, magnetic, hypnotic," she says. "The end goal is a powerful impact."
Tilbury acknowledges, though, that it's a dramatic look to try to pull off on the street and she expects people to use the runway style as a starting point -- and then tone it down.
Is McQueen a cosmetics expert as well as a classically trained designer?
"I see everything in the collection: the concept, music, models, makeup, hair and clothes. I oversee everything -- I'm a control freak," McQueen says with a laugh.
