🇬🇧 "My goal is to never limit myself" - Under The Beauty Radar by nss G-Club
Interview with Luciano Chiarello, make-up artist from Milan
”I’m Luciano, born in Milan in 1985. My artistic streak has always been there: as a child I would spend my time creating objects out of nothing using cardboard, inventing shows, studying characters and taking care of every detail, from costumes to makeup. After attending art high school, I felt the need to explore this fascination with transformation. I didn’t know much about makeup from a technical point of view, but I decided to take the plunge and enrolled at BCM in Milan. It was love at first sight: there I discovered a wonderful world and started to play with it. What began as an experiment is now my job: I’m a professional make-up artist and I split my time between photo shoots, fashion show backstage and celebrities across Milan, Paris and London.”
This is the magical introduction to our new episode of Under the Beauty Radar, dedicated to Luciano Chiarello, a make-up artist without limits. We’ll let him speak and allow his words to tell and explain his practice, his inspirations, his art and his work. Enjoy the read!
Interview with Luciano Chiarello, Milan-based make-up artist
Describe your style in 3 words
Talking about myself always makes me a bit uncomfortable, but over time I’ve learned that it’s important to value your own talent and vision. If I had to sum up my approach to make-up in three words, I’d choose: thoughtful, colorful, creative. Thoughtful because I always try to carefully study the volumes of the face I’m working on, the colors and what I want to express with my make-up. Colorful because I then let creativity take over, and color is often the path I follow. It can be a single color or multiple shades combined or blended to create new ones. Creative because what I love about my style is that I never know where it will end up. I often start with an idea, but if something around me catches my attention - like a beam of light or a reflection falling on my model’s face - I change direction, and what I had planned transforms into something completely different.
Can you tell us about your professional journey?
My “baptism by fire” was on the set of a commercial with a famous football player, while I was still in school. From there, the make-up artist I was assisting introduced me to the industry. I worked my way up through commercials, music videos and theatre. Then came the Venice Film Festival: for three years I worked on international stars, learning the rules (and secrets) of the industry and the celebrity world. The real turning point, however, came with fashion. Working alongside a hairstylist, I joined an agency and started assisting a make-up artist: Topolino. I’ll always be grateful to him, it was an incredible learning experience. From there my path really took off as a professional. I worked on editorials and campaigns, also assisting backstage icons like Charlotte Tilbury, Aaron de Mey, Peter Philips and Lucia Pica (with her I was part of the core team for all Chanel shows, an unforgettable experience, and today we’re great friends).
I lived in Paris for three years, working in huge teams on incredible sets, before returning to Milan a year before lockdown. Here I met my current agency, Julian Watson. Today, alongside shoots, I work as a Key Artist for fashion shows of brands like N21, Alberta Ferretti, Ermanno Scervino, Luisa Spagnoli and Etro.
What inspires you? Is there anything unexpected in your references?
I’m an insatiable observer. Art, cinema and theatre are my foundations, but I often literally lose focus if something on the street catches my eye. People themselves are a huge source of inspiration: it’s enough to capture a detail, make it your own and reinterpret it. Something unexpected in my references? My moodboard is total chaos, full of contrasts. There was a period when I was obsessed with textures: among my references you could find rusty taps, peeling walls and industrial materials. Anything can translate into inspiration for a color or a texture on the face!
We met you backstage at fashion shows. How do you bring your creativity into that context and how does it meet the designer’s vision?
Backstage at a fashion show is pure teamwork. The real challenge is merging your creative vision with the needs of the designer and stylist. The process always starts with listening: what is the inspiration behind the collection? What kind of woman do we want to portray? Together we analyze key colors, fabrics, but also the location, lighting and casting. That’s when I step in. I develop a couple of looks that encapsulate the whole narrative, and then we move on to makeup tests. My goal is to never limit myself: I always try to introduce a bold, creative detail that makes a difference. At the same time, you need the clarity to understand when “less is more”: sometimes a nude makeup and perfectly clean skin have the same visual impact as a highly conceptual look, and they can be the key to making the collection work at its best.
How does your approach change from fashion show backstage to editorial makeup?
The initial approach is similar in terms of briefing and idea sharing, but the main difference is the adrenaline of the unexpected. For a show, you decide the makeup days in advance and have to ensure it’s replicated identically by your team on dozens of models, adapting it to each face and skin tone. On a photo shoot, instead, everything is live. You don’t test anything beforehand, and your creativity must be fast and reactive. If the concept allows it, you can create incredible things. In those cases, I always prepare a small moodboard before arriving on set and bring unusual materials with me, ready to pull a trick out of my sleeve.
What is your favorite, must-have product?
I have a real obsession with luminous, ultra-hydrated, flawless skin. Achieving that base would require too many products, but if you pair it with a beautiful red lipstick, you get - at least in my opinion - the essence of beauty in enhancing a woman’s face. So without a doubt, I’d say red lipstick.
Tell us about the craziest makeup you’ve ever created
In 20 years of career, I’ve done everything, but two projects really stuck with me. In London, for an editorial for T Magazine, the photographer wanted the effect of an unfinished sculpture: I covered the model from head to toe in white clay! Luckily she had fun, even though it required a lot of patience. Another very “crazy” project I did recently involved gluing mirror fragments onto the model’s face, creating the illusion of shattered glass. It was an extremely meticulous and time-consuming process. Again: all thanks to a very patient model!
What’s your relationship with beauty trends? Which do you like and which do you avoid?
It’s definitely a love-hate relationship. Social media is an amazing tool, but professionally speaking it often takes away originality. It repackages old techniques as “new” and makes creative thinking lazier: we’re used to having everything already done and seen, so our brains make less effort to create from scratch. Take the famous glass skin created by Pat McGrath for the Margiela show: incredible. But in my opinion, she shouldn’t have revealed how she did it! Keeping it secret would have pushed us to experiment, to search for our own way to achieve that effect. Instead, knowing everything immediately takes away some of the magic of the process. That said, of course I follow trends. Today, new languages are born there and you have to stay constantly updated, because questions about “new trends” are always around the corner. In the past, trends were dictated exclusively by the runway, and you had to wait for the next season to see what would be in style; today, social media has completely taken over that dynamic.