Leave it to Isamaya Ffrench and Collina Strada to create New York Fashion Week's most viral beauty moment: a series of surreal prosthetics that morphed models into dolphins, rabbits, dogs, and other members of the animal kingdom, a masterclass in special effects makeup that spread across social media like wildfire.
Starting off Fashion Month Fall/Winter 2023 with a bang, Hillary Taymour, Collina Strada's creative director and founder, debuted "Please Don't Eat My Friends," a collection inspired by the ecosystem that unites all creatures, big and small.
A model made up in frighteningly convincing horse ears pranced down the runway in a pair of ruffled hot pants with a built-in tail, made of recycled yarn. Another catwalker, face entirely concealed by a white dog mask, donned a pair of cargo shorts printed with Taymour's whimsical take on camouflage: a melange of daisies and puppy faces. And the designer's own canine companion, a Pomeranian named Pow, made an appearance in the arms of a model and on a mesh blouse bearing her likeness.
Taymour, whose work often mines the natural world for inspiration (last season, she took over a butterfly sanctuary in Brookyln), enlisted Ffrench — whose face-transforming work often verges into the bizarre — to create prosthetics that would serve as extensions of her sartorial homage to the furry, feathered, and otherwise four-legged.
"The idea was to have some creatures that were not human but not animals either, so half prosthetics made sense," Ffrench explained. "We decided to paint [the prosthetics] in the colors and prints of the collection — it was a fun and fresh take on prosthetics, which are usually always meant to look very realistic."
Executing the transformative looks was no small feat: "We had a great team of makeup artists for this show, half of them specializing in special effects," Ffrench said. "It took two days of prep before the show to pre-paint all the prosthetics according to the outfit they were going to be worn with, and a very early call time on the show day to glue them on model’s faces."
Ffrench and her team pulled everything off with aplomb. Applied over bare, dewy skin prepped using products from Dieux, the prosthetics — some accented with colorful face gems and glitter, others mottled with faux fur and spots — created an unsettling hyperreality, one almost impossible to tear your eyes away from. Flaunting stringy, grunge-y hair executed by Evanie Frausto using Bumble & Bumble, models resembled something like high fashion Animorphs.
For an onlooker like myself, it's difficult to choose a favorite animal from the night: the lime green lizard with a pierced eyebrow? The pig, forehead accented with a glittery star? For Ffrench, the answer is easy: "The dolphin. It was by far the weirdest."
