Beauty Visionary: Meet the woman behind J.Crew’s bright lips and mussed hair | Hollywood yohana
J.Crew has launched many obsessions over the years: cashmere V-necks, brightly coloured capris and novelty ballet flats. But the fashion retailer, which began as a catalogue-only business in the eighties, has also been not so quietly causing a beauty revolution. Flip open the catalogues, or “Style Guides” as they’re now known, and you’ll find models with electro-pop lips, windblown hair and brushed-up brows, a signature look that went over well when the brand officially presented at New York Fashion Week for the first time with its Spring 2012 collection. Collaborations with indie makeup brands Face Stockholm and Lipstick Queen have led to sold-out collections of lipstick and nail polish (not even eBay-able anymore!), and beauty boldfaces such as Linda Rodin (she of the cult face oil Rodin Olio Lusso) star in the company’s latest ad campaign. All of which is to say: J.Crew is on a big beauty roll.
So who is the mastermind behind this cosmetic zeitgeist? While quirky-cool chairman and CEO Millard “Mickey” Drexler and famously fashionable creative director Jenna Lyons have been major forces fashion-wise, much of the beauty direction happens at the hands of Gayle Spannaus. J.Crew’s fashion director and head women’s stylist, she’s been with the brand for 17 years. While working at Glamour as an assistant stylist, she would fight to be first to get her hands on the J.Crew catalogues. “When I heard there was an opening for a casting director to be in charge of hiring all the models, photographers and hair and makeup artists, I took it,” she says.
Since her arrival in 1995, Spannaus has crusaded to modernize J.Crew’s bare-face beauty approach. “It was very ‘girl next door,’ no makeup,” she says. “Very natural and androgynous, but not in a Calvin Klein way.” Her first coup was shooting Amber Valletta with her husband and puppy on a beach in 1995. “Amber was the biggest deal and we got her. I proposed the idea and it was more money than we had ever spent on a model.” It was also the first step in moving the needle. “I had a very specific instinct for what the J.Crew girl should be,” Spannaus says. “She had to have an ease. That was very important. And there had to be eye contact, a confidence—because that’s the foundation—and friendliness. If you’re not nice, it’s a one-shot deal.” Under her direction, J.Crew’s cadre of models has grown to include such well-known faces as Arizona Muse, Liu Wen and Karmen Pedaru.
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