“It’s a look you would get if you were a bit chilly,” says makeup artist Dick Page backstage at Zero + Maria Cornejo’s Fall/Winter 2016 collection. “You want it to look as if the color came out of the skin.” He says this as he blends a deep pink cream blush into a model’s cheeks in a sideways V-shape so she does in fact look like she stepped out of the snow that’s pouring out from the sky outside of Pier 59 Studios in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. In addition to the flushed cheek, Page created a softly glossy eyelid, leaving the eyelashes and eyebrows natural. Lips were made to look slightly windblown with a soft red tone.
It was interesting to see, too, how well this beauty look blended with Maria Cornejo’s nature-inspired collection, that “freedom of being immersed in the outdoors [that] allows the eye to refocus.” That naturalness of being outside, then, was not just present in models’ faces. Her ever-present geometric shapes found a new home in weatherproof textures like polar tech and natural fibers like alpaca and merino shearling. The color palette included what the designer called “earthy texture of terrain,” which include deep pine green, beige, black, blush, olive green and more. It was as if Cornejo had taken her citified geometry to the wilderness for a winter vacation, boldly using striped patterns and textured faux-furs to invoke a change of scenery. A black leather kimono wrap waistcoat, a black angled, off-the-shoulder long sleeve top, and a long beige coat patterned with thick black vertical stripes and cinched at the waist with a black belt, for starters, took us to a place where winter was not slushy city streets but rather leafy forest paths covered in a silent snowfall. One’s cheeks flush just thinking about it.
Check out more of our Fall/Winter 2016 fashion week coverage here!