Pat McGrath on Crafting Louis Vuitton's New Makeup Line

Elle

2 days ago

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Pat McGrath can tell you, but she would rather show you: 'Start with the first question, my angel.' We are meeting about her first major beauty project since launching her eponymous brand, Pat McGrath Labs, 10 years ago. Her wide cheekbones and smooth hair—encircled with her signature black, bejeweled stretchy headband—fill the screen, and I don't need a Zoom pop-up to tell me that the queen of beauty has entered the conversation.
'How could I not?' she coyly says when I ask her why she agreed to become the creative director of cosmetics for La Beauté Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton's artistic director of women's collections, Nicolas Ghesquière, and McGrath have had a long creative relationship, which includes creating rainbow faces inspired in part by obscure 1980s sci-fi movies. True to the brand that she calls 'luxury in motion,' she ran into 'that candy store of color, texture, excellence, and luxury,' she says, her voice filled with glee.
La Beauté Louis Vuitton is McGrath's gift of freedom: The word comes up no less than four times in a YouTube video with Ghesquière, where they talk about the joy they both find in free expression. To give consumers that same happiness, McGrath has crafted a broad palette. The collection has eight eye shadow quartets, called LV Ombres; 10 shades of a sheer lip balm, called LV Baume; and, most incredibly, 55 shades of LV Rouge lip color in satin or velvety matte. Each La Beauté item has a magnetic case that snaps and swivels shut in a way that signals something pleasing, like a trunk clasp being locked. The black-and-gold packaging was designed by German furniture designer Konstantin Grcic and features beautiful flourishes, like the brand's signature four-point flower as an overlay for the compact.
This line might boast the greatest number of lipsticks ever created for a single brand all at once—55 shades in homage to the roman numeral LV. 'It's fabulous. And like we always say, you can never have enough lipsticks,' McGrath says. When you consider that she used to lug about 80 bags of makeup and beauty accessories to the world's fashion weeks—including some designated 'Sequins' and 'Basic Sequins'—it makes sense.
When I survey the lipstick shades laid out in a conference room in Vuitton's New York headquarters, months ahead of the closely guarded launch, there is an array of plums, oranges, pinks, roses, reds, and browns. To my untrained eye, each color varies only a half shade from the one before it (they have names that are important to Vuitton history, such as Monogram Rouge). But to McGrath, each one represents a possibility and a perfect dream color to someone who's been searching for it all their life and maybe didn't even know it. 'I want to make sure everybody is completely happy. It is not one nude that works for all. No.' McGrath spent four years 'really trying the lipsticks on everybody. That's how I work. It's physical.' When I uncap them, the room fills with a lovely rose, mimosa, and jasmine fragrance (the scent of the lipsticks), then raspberry and mint (the aroma for the balms). Both were created by Louis Vuitton master perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud.
McGrath has a sort of photographic memory for colors. She can see one once and earmark it for someone, whether it's a supermodel who sits in her chair or a stranger who walks in off the street into the new Vuitton boutique on 57th Street in New York. 'Wherever I am in the world, I'm looking for colors and ideas,' she says. In the way that you'd send memes to your friends via group chat late at night, McGrath's team sends shades. 'They send it to me at four in the morning and I send it back to them, and they're like, 'Oh, you're up.' Color is my obsession.'
A version of this story appears in the September 2025 issue of ELLE.
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