If 2015 is the year of the cat-liner flick, then 2016 will be the year of the monochrome swoosh. Yes, it’s just eyeliner and yes, the difference is minor, but in beauty, it is crucial nonetheless. Adele, a woman whose eyeliner shtick is currently felt on four-fifths of the internet, championed the first look, and Winona Ryder – newly announced as the face of Marc Jacobs’s Spring 2016 Beauty campaign, here styled by makeup artist Diane Kendal, who made minimal makeup a thing at Alexander Wang and Marc by Marc Jacobs in 2014 – has nailed the second.
Marc Jacobs is a longtime commercial swerver when it comes to model casting, last year choosing Jessica Lange to front his beauty campaign. Of late, Winona Ryder has started to look less and less like Winona Ryder, which is handy because here, she’s barely recognisable, having been trussed up as French actor, Delphine Seyrig, in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad. The film, a surrealist dreamscape in which a hot man approaches a hot woman because, according to him, they previously hooked up, only to find out that, according to her, they’ve never met, made Seyrig and her look – slicked hair, nude lips and the liner – iconic. Think femme fatale, but a little more au naturel. A little bit 1960s, and now, a little bit 2016. So there you go.
