In Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, A Bigger Splash, Tilda Swinton plays Marianne Lane, a magnetic—if largely silent—rock star recovering from vocal-chord surgery on the rugged Italian island of Pantelleria. If the Mediterranean locale is all sun-soaked idyll, the flashback scenes give a glimpse of the musician’s harder-edged onstage life, complete with a silver sequined Dior jumpsuit and futuristic eye makeup. The look—a metallic, mask-like rectangle painted over her eyes—undeniably harks back to a certain glam-rock androgyny that seems poised to take over this year’s festival circuit. But any shades of Ziggy Stardust were purely coincidental. “Luca talked a lot about Chrissie Hynde, Roísín Murphy, and PJ Harvey,” the film’s lead makeup artist, Fernanda Perez, says of her primary reference points during a phone call from Crema, Italy, where she is working on the director’s next film. That said, Perez adds, “I think David Bowie is in everybody’s subconscious.”
The key to that full-volume eye makeup: a crisp application of Make Up For Ever’s Flash Color Stick in Silver, topped off with matching pigment from MAC. “We wanted to make the face disappear,” Perez explains of the otherwise bare skin, smoothed with little more than Laura Mercier’s tinted moisturizer. (This, she explains, was in full contrast to the character’s carefree Pantelleria look, which called for the alabaster-skinned Swinton to be both bronzed and protected with layers of La Mer’s self-tanner and sunscreen.) The glittering rock-star look even got a proper road test before a packed amphitheater filled with 70,000 screaming fans. “We shot during a real concert in Milano of an Italian singer called Jovanotti,” Perez recalls. “He gave us the stage for 15 minutes and asked the public to shout, ‘Marianne Lane, Marianne Lane.’ ” For those musicians—or festival-goers—who dare to give the silver streak a try this summer, we can only expect a similarly enthusiastic reception.
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