Stockholm Fashion Week

THE SPOTLIGHT

ANN-SOFIE BACK ON BEAUTY

FEBRUARY 04.2013 by AIMEE BLAUT

I headed to Stockholm Fashion Week to get the full story on Swedish beauty. Before heading behind the scenes of Ann-Sofie Back's Fall 2013 presentation, I visited the intellectual designer in her home. Get all of the designer's pretty insights below and see the stellar hair and makeup looks from backstage at the show.

“My relationship to beauty and aging is problematic at the moment. I don’t think I’ve ever felt really comfortable in my own body and skin and that colors my view on fashion and beauty a lot. I don’t own my body; I live in my head. Maybe I owned my body when I was ten or eleven but it doesn’t feel like its mine. It is probably the feminine thing that I find annoying. After eleven you become a woman and you get breasts and hips and I never wanted to deal with that at all. I want really straight proportions. I’m not one of those women who say I love women and the female form. If you’re a designer and a feminist you’re supposed to cherish women. I don’t think my clothes are sexist and in that sense they are feminist, they don’t make women into objects. Women who dress for men won’t buy my clothes. Every designer says they are designing for a strong independent woman who knows their style, but that’s really bullshit. The best customer is someone who has no self-esteem, no idea of her own style and lots of money.

I prefer a matte look so I use Chanel powder. I am constantly putting more on, I can’t stand when my face gets shiny. I tend to only like one color at a time. It used to be turquoise now its red or yellow. Lately I’ll use either my MAC red liner or Dior Rouge lipstick. There was a Miu Miu show a few seasons ago with really dull skin and no lip color but massively red eyes. After that I had to get my own red. I like the red from MAC because it goes on easily and doesn’t smudge. I used to use MAC Aqualine a lot last spring because it matched the collection I was working on. It’s waterproof and a metallic turquoise with some shine. It really sticks if I put it on I have it on my eyes for days.

I used to use a lot of red lipstick at the end of the eighties and early nineties when the House clubs were big. Back then you couldn’t really wear anything on your face or eyes just bright red lips. You had clear colorless mascara as well. I just started wearing red lipstick again.

In the main line (Atelje) I work with grander themes like porn or God or violence things like that. The Back collection is more of a style than based on different themes every season. I have to start with something that I dislike and then turn it into something that I do like. This collection I worked with work wear which I always found a bit itchy and couldn’t stand and now I cant get enough of it, that’s how it sort of works for me (laughs).. I don’t know any other way.

I had normal people in my shows for many years, and it wasn’t like I was on a crusade or wanted to make normal people feel better, I had no interest in that. It was because I thought it was more beautiful because it was more interesting to me. In the end I realized that people didn’t really see the clothes because they thought it was so strange I had normal people and my strange music. I’ve gotten used to models now, they are a blank canvas and I realize that.

Sometimes I don’t have any idea at all about the beauty look for my shows, so I talk with the stylist and makeup artist about my inspiration and they sort of give me an idea. I tend to not like a heavily made up face. Its either eyes or lips for me. I don’t like when the makeup and hair take over and distract from the clothes.”

Makeup Artist Ignacio Alonso designed the look with Anne-Sofie for the BACK show. They went for an old fashioned “lady look” working with layers of powder to get a matte finish. The lips were also layered starting with a base of MAC cult lipstick Ruby Woo. To add warmth to the lips they applied orange and red blush along with the MAC Pro Red lip pallet.