September is the year’s reset button. The fashion magazines’ September issues land on every newsstand in the first week, the New York Fashion Week shows for Spring 2014 take over the city for the second week, and the back-to-school energy carries everyone forward into a fresh routine even if you have not been a student in twenty years. By the first Tuesday of September 2013 we already had three magazines on the kitchen table, a notepad of fall purchases, and the strong sense that the second half of the year was going to be louder, deeper, and more pigmented than the first. Below, what we kept reaching for in the official start of fall.
NYFW Spring 2014: a return to soft focus
The Spring 2014 shows on the New York runway in early September were a meaningful tonal pivot from the harder NYFW Fall 2013 looks of February. Where February had served matte skin and graphic eyes, September went for a softer, more diffused vibe — skin that read luminous in the front-row photos, eyes kept clean and bare, lips occupied by a slightly stained pink-coral that looked like the natural color of someone who had just finished a glass of red wine. The brand most often name-checked in backstage notes was M·A·C, sponsoring more than a third of the shows, and the makeup artist whose name kept coming up was Diane Kendal at Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford.
The Marc Jacobs show was the moment that crystallized the spring-fall handoff for everyone we knew. Backstage, models had what looked like nothing on their faces — a fine sheen, the slightest pink at the cheekbones, mascara so subtle you had to look twice — and that look read like a deliberate counter-argument to the over-engineered NYFW Fall 2013 maximalism. The new Marc Jacobs Beauty line, freshly stocked at every Sephora, did the supporting work.
Charlotte Tilbury arrived at Selfridges
The launch was British — Charlotte Tilbury opened her makeup line at Selfridges in London in mid-September 2013 — but the US conversation about it was loud from the start. The packaging was rose-gold and Old-Hollywood-glamorous; the shade ranges were organized around personalities (The Dolce Vita, The Vintage Vamp); the founder herself had been one of the most respected backstage makeup artists in fashion for two decades. The US distribution would not begin until the following year, but every American beauty editor we knew came back from London Fashion Week with a Charlotte Tilbury bag, and the Pillow Talk lipstick was about to become the most-photographed nude lipstick of the next five years.
The other thing the launch did was redefine what a celebrity-backed-by-skill makeup line could look like. Charlotte Tilbury was not a celebrity in the actor-fronted sense — she was an established working makeup artist whose name was in every Vogue masthead — and the launch made the case that the next wave of US prestige beauty would be brand-as-personality without the actor middle layer.
Fall lipstick went deep, with one big exception
The fall lipstick conversation in 2013 split. The deep camp — wines, plums, the occasional black-cherry — was the obvious continuation of what had been happening since January. Tom Ford’s Lip Color in Black Dahlia was the prestige reference, a forty-eight-dollar lipstick we did not buy lightly but did, eventually, all buy. M·A·C’s Diva, the matte deep red-brown that had defined the Met Gala carpet in May, kept its position as the cooler-tone alternative.
The exception was the soft-pink revival running underneath. NARS Dolce Vita and the new Marc Jacobs Beauty Le Marc lipstick in Slow Burn — a beige-pink with the slightest warm lift — were keeping a barely-there nude conversation alive against the tide. By late September the smartest editors had one of each on the desk and were rotating between them depending on the meeting.
The fall foundation reformulations finally landed
The drugstore foundation launches we had been waiting for in August showed up early September, and 2013 was a real upgrade year for the category. Maybelline’s Fit Me Matte + Poreless reformulation extended the shade range and improved the longevity; the older Fit Me had been the workhorse for a few years and the new version closed the gap to prestige finishes meaningfully. L’Oréal Paris’s True Match foundation was getting a quiet shade-range expansion that would not get full credit until 2014, but the September 2013 conversation about it was already starting.
The prestige tier kept its standards. Giorgio Armani Beauty’s Luminous Silk continued to be the foundation editors stockpiled, and the September Sephora restock pattern around it was its own quiet status indicator. NARS Sheer Glow held its position as the second-most-recommended.
Allure Best of Beauty set the holiday list
The October issue of Allure landed in mid-September with the Best of Beauty list, which had become the de facto US gift-buying guide for the rest of the year. The 2013 winners that mattered most for the December conversation were quietly already on shelves — the Hourglass Ambient Lighting Powder we covered back in March took home a finishing-product win; the Living Proof Perfect Hair Day Dry Shampoo we covered in July took home a haircare win. The list was more useful than the cynical version of beauty awards typically suggests, and it set the path for what was going to land in every gift guide from then through New Year’s Eve.
What we’re watching for October
October is fragrance-launch month — the holiday gift-set fragrance pushes start in the second week, and the new launches that get a December gift-aisle endcap are decided in the first ten days of October. We were watching the deep, woody, warm-cinnamon fall fragrance category, which was setting up to be louder than the previous year. We were also tracking the Halloween-makeup conversation, which had quietly been getting more sophisticated and less novelty for several years. And we were waiting for the Charlotte Tilbury US launch news that nobody had announced yet but everyone in publishing assumed was coming. We will see you on the first Tuesday of October.