“We consider males sporting make-up and embracing femininity as a contemporary idea, but it surely’s been occurring for a whole lot of 1000’s of years,” says make-up artist Darian Darling. All through her profession, Darling has channeled her encyclopedic data of magnificence historical past into daring and directional seems that defy standard concepts of gender and, in flip, have fun the spirit of the LGBTQ+ group. “As somebody that’s trans, I’ve all the time cherished gender bending,” Darling says. She grew up within the ’80s on a popular culture weight loss plan of glam rock and cult-classic movies akin to The Rocky Horror Image Present. “Make-up has no gender and might be for anybody and everybody. It’s all about self-expression and being free.”
This ethos is on the coronary heart of Darling’s collaboration with rising pop singer and sweetness shape-shifter Jake Wesley Rogers. In essence, they’re a modern-day David Bowie and Pierre La Roche, with Rogers’s evolving aesthetic honed with assist from Darling’s extraordinary imaginative and prescient. “Darian is my magnificence mentor,” 25-year-old Rogers says. He met the make-up artist via Justin Tranter, the Semi Treasured Weapons singer and songwriter whose label, Aspect Information, Rogers is signed to. In only a few brief years, the pair have whipped via a lineup of retrofuturist make-up statements for dwell performances and music movies, from rosy cherub cheeks and child’s breath-adorned lashes to glowing pores and skin and kaleidoscopic glitter eyes. Though Rogers is carving out a mode all on his personal, he’ll all the time pay homage to the gender-blurring trailblazers that got here earlier than him. “Darian educates me and makes me perceive that I’m a part of a lineage,” Rogers says. “The explanation I get to do it’s because individuals braver than me have been doing it. We stock the torch.”
Trying again over the previous couple of centuries, there are numerous actions in males’s make-up historical past that pioneered the traits of as we speak, from 18th-century dandies to ’90s membership children. “This wasn’t launched 10 years in the past…individuals fought like hell to specific themselves,” says Rogers, talking on the significance of celebrating queer historical past significantly amid the assault on trans rights in Texas. “There’s quite a lot of worry proper now as a result of we’ve come to date and are so seen,” he says. “Our tales are beginning to be proven, however there’s resistance to that. It’s all on the road proper now, and this can be a reminder, ‘Oh no, males have been expressing themselves in these methods ceaselessly.’”
By director Alana O’Herlihy’s lens, and with assist from hairstylist Allie Ellis and manicurist Britney Tokyo, Darling and Rogers are taking Vogue on a journey via males’s make-up historical past in honor of Delight month. “In an effort to be proud, you must be happy, sovereign, and highly effective sufficient to be who you might be,” Rogers says. “As Toni Morrison as soon as mentioned, ‘The operate of freedom is to free another person,’ and I hope that expressing my freedom frees others too—whoever they need to be.”
Let Them Put on Rouge!
“From the French courtiers of Versailles to the Macaroni of England, the 18th century was the beginning of males sporting make-up within the fashionable context as we all know it as we speak,” Darling says. She complemented Rogers’s towering powdered poufs with a pale alabaster complexion, cheeks swirled in pompadour pink, and a black vinyl and heart-shaped mouche (a fake magnificence mark) pressed on the higher cheek. “I don’t know if I used to be a dandy in my previous life, however on this look I stand a bit taller,” Rogers says. “It feels proper.”
Life’s a Cabaret
“With its free-love, anything-goes spirit, the Twenties Weimar Republic in Berlin was like San Francisco within the ’70s,” Darling says of the Golden Twenties in Germany. “It was an unprecedented period of queer liberation with LGBT individuals dwelling brazenly and reveling in hedonistic glamour.” This scene was famously depicted in 1972 musical traditional Cabaret, and in a nod to Joel Gray’s iconic portrayal of the Grasp of Ceremonies, Darling gave Rogers onyx smoky eyes, a set of pencil-thin brows, a burgundy Cupid’s bow lip, and scene-stealing falsies full with Artwork Deco wax lash beading.
https://www.vogue.com/article/a-trip-through-mens-makeup-history-with-darian-darling-and-jake-wesley-rogers