Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Cosmetics line honours Warhol's silver factory

Francois Nars had Andy Warhol coffee table books in his living room and Yves Saint Laurent in his closet growing up in the '70s in the south of France.
img-0-7361434.jpg
Warhol's Factory studio with its silk-screened stars is memorialized in a limited edition cosmetics line.

Francois Nars had Andy Warhol coffee table books in his living room and Yves Saint Laurent in his closet growing up in the '70s in the south of France.

"I always feel so terrible for the people born after that era, because there was something really in the air that was unexplainable," the makeup legend said, lounging in a hotel lobby for a recent interview.

"There was something very, very free. Today, everything is so much more controlled and so much more prepared," he said.

Fear not, post-Baby Boomers. In this, the 25th anniversary year of Warhol's death, Nars's namesake company has taken on the pop cult icon's silvery Factory, silkscreened superstars and avant-garde films in a limited-edition cosmetic collection, exclusive to Sephora stores until Nov. 1.

It's the first time the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has collaborated on cosmetics, and the 29-piece Nars line coincides with Regarding Warhol: 60 Artists, 50 Years, an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art running through Dec. 31.

Michael Hermann, licensing director for the foundation, said it decided to venture into cosmetics with Nars because of the latter's "fearless approach."

"For Warhol, makeup was an arrow in the quiver one could use to embody his democratic approach to beauty best embodied in his own words when he said, 'If everybody's not a beauty, then nobody is,' " Hermann said.

Nars, who is in his late 40s and moved to New York in 1984, missed out on meeting Warhol, but has visited Andy's world in the past with his Chelsea Girls lip lacquer and other homages.

This time he went big with an Edie Sedgwick screen test on a miniature film can for one gift set. Lip glosses are packed into a soup can and bright greens and blues are intricately shaped into one of Warhol's famous self-portraits in an eye palette etched with the Andyism: "I believe in low lights and trick mirrors."

Nars has scaled back his runway work to a few designers he admires, his friend Marc Jacobs included. Working backstage in September, Nars created big eyes for Jacobs's own '60s moment, a pop-inspired spring collection at New York Fashion Week.

"If Andy was still alive we probably would have met at a certain point and I would probably have photographed him for a book. We would have connected, definitely," said Nars, who remains creative director of Nars cosmetics, acquired in 2000 by Shiseido, and still shoots the company's ad campaigns.