They Create the Faces of Fashion
MILAN — Like a painter examining his masterpiece, Gregory Arlt takes a few steps back and studies his work-in-progress.
In this case, it’s model Laurie Bird’s face, which the L.A.-based makeup artist has already moisturized and dabbed with concealer to even out her complexion. Now, Arlt brushes on a luminous golden eye shadow. He brushes on more, more and a bit more.
“Mascara, gotta have some mascara,” says Arlt, who works for MAC Cosmetics and is at his first Italian fashion show. He pulls out a brush thick with the stuff and paints on two coats. “You’ve got to have that ‘I just woke up’ look, kind of like Anne Bancroft in ‘The Graduate,’ ” Arlt tells his muse backstage at the Stefano Guerriero fashion show.
Bird, a pencil-thin 22-year-old model from Wilmington, N.C.--her hair teased to the high heavens--cracks in a very Southern accent: “Honey, I feel like I just woke up!”
Arlt finishes the Mrs. Robinson look with a dab here, a dab there of golden lipstick on Bird’s freckled cheeks; the application works as a blush and gives her face a glossy, wet look--just what Guerriero, a protege of Gianni Versace, wanted from the MAC crew of six, including Gordon Espinet of Trinidad, Bianca Alexander of New York, Michele Rack of Chicago, Tiffany Johnston of San Francisco and Bethany Karlyn, who moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago.
“You’re beautiful!” Arlt exclaims. “You know, you should be a model!”
By the end of the spring collections today, Arlt and his eyebrow pencil-pushing pals will have applied makeup on more than 100 models in about 10 shows and created looks designers want to go with their clothes.
“I love what the makeup artists have done,” Guerriero says approvingly before the show, himself a bundle of nerves. “The look is sexy and wild--you know, that late 1960s look, like Mrs. Robinson.”
Backstage, Arlt, 29, and Karlyn, 36, work side by side with their teammates and other MAC support personnel, pulling various cosmetics from opened silver metal cases that look like designer fishing tackle boxes. Only these are loaded with about $15,000 in MAC makeup: foundations, powders, pencils, lipsticks, blushes, concealers, fingernail polishes, lotions--most everything in every hue from the company’s spring 2000 collection.
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For Arlt, the experience of being in Milan is a dream come true and far away from his former work as a freelance makeup artist at Fred Segal in Santa Monica.
A graduate of Westchester High School in Westchester, Arlt attended college for only a brief while “because it fit me like a wrong-sized shoe,” he says.
But he was always interested in art. “It’s in my blood.”
His father, Bob Arlt, is a fine artist and runs his own company, Bob Arlt Graphics in Los Angeles. His mother, Ann, a musician who loved to play the piano, died four years ago.
As a kid, Arlt would join his dad in backyard weekend painting sessions. He surrounded himself with an array of paints, crayons and pastels to create swirly plant life, neon-bright fish and faces of women, brushing on the paint like makeup.
He recalls the defining moment when he knew he’d be a makeup artist, a profession his parents always supported and encouraged “because it was what I wanted to do.”
“My father always increased my perception level of beauty and artistic appreciation. One time he gave me a book by Francesco Scavullo, the famous photographer. It was filled with before and after shots of models, and I was particularly taken by pictures of Patty Hansen, a model in the ‘70s and ‘80s, how she looked with zero makeup on and with her face painted.”
Arlt decided to try his painter’s hand on the faces of women--and men. The latter performed in drag in L.A. and heard about Arlt’s creative reputation, such as using sequins and blue eye shadow to create Colette-style French looks of the 1920s.
After several years of freelancing and working at Fred Segal, “I felt I needed something different, something new.” He had friends who worked at MAC, and soon, he too joined the company as a technical artist and worked his way up to senior makeup artist. He often conducts makeup seminars and workshops in L.A. and across the country and has been called to apply makeup on famous faces, such as those of Lauren Bacall, Kim Coles and Gwen Stefani.
When he got the call to be a member of MAC’s Milan makeup crew, Arlt couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
“It’s great being here seeing the trends before anyone else and, to a certain degree, creating them on the faces of models,” he says, now touching up the makeup on Bird, who stepped away to chain-smoke some Marlboros.
“I love doing this because every face I do is a different challenge,” Karlyn says during a break between models.
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Originally from Boston, she attended Boston University and earned a degree in advertising and graphic design. An internship with an art director led to helping with the makeup on models at various photo shoots and eventually 13 years of steady freelance work as a makeup artist. She moved to Los Angeles in 1989 to do makeup for magazine fashion spreads and print advertising campaigns.
Three months after joining MAC in November, she was working fashion shows in Milan and Paris. Earlier this month, she was among MAC’s international crew working the hottest ticket at New York’s fashion week: the Alexander McQueen show, an elaborate extravaganza.
“That was the Super Bowl of all shows,” Karlyn says. “I did two girls, and both wore full-body makeup.”
When her break at the Guerriero show ends, Karlyn is back in action.
“It’s like being on a beauty SWAT team,” she says about the assembly work backstage. Models volley back and forth from hair stylists tending to every fly-away strand to makeup artists doing damage repair from a cigarette pressed between lips.
Arlt, meanwhile, pencils in a touch of black eyeliner and sweeps a bit of golden eye shadow on Bird’s eyelids.
“You’re a hottie,” he tells her, as she walks away to get dressed for the runway.
“You’re not bad yourself,” Bird chirps.
Michael Quintanilla can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.
