He loathes the ‘vulgarity of today’, yet is so rich he owns a Polynesian island. François Nars, the founder of the eponymous cosmetics line, tells Jan Masters why he always prefers the unexpected
‘I’m not an easily depressed person,’ says the make-up magnate François Nars, as he sits, smartly suited, in the Soho Hotel in London. Indeed, as a famed make-up artist, acclaimed photographer and creator of the eponymous cosmetics line, he has plenty to feel cheery about. He managed to sell his company to Shiseido seven years ago while retaining creative directorship, a move that enabled him to buy his own island in the South Pacific.
And while guesstimates put him in his mid-forties (he is famously coy about his age), he appears much more boyish, what with that cherubic face and laughy-jokey manner. But as soon as we chat about nostalgia – how the glamour of the 1920s and 1930s and the colour of the 1970s have often inspired his work – it provokes a heartfelt outpouring of what depresses him about the here and now.
‘I hate the vulgarity of today – it’s something that kills me. Everything is overexposed. There is no mystery any more. There was a time when you would dream about, say, movie stars. Now, you virtually follow them into their bathroom when they’re going to the loo. People say to me, “Well, that’s the way it goes.” But I don’t know what went wrong,’ he muses. ‘It’s not that I’m easily shocked. It takes a lot to shock me. And wildness I like. But vulgarity shocks me. And there’s so much of it today. And it’s going to be hard to reverse it because it’s really taking over like mad. If you’re a very sensitive person, you can start to think, “Why bother any more?” But there are ways to still keep yourself happy. For instance, I focus on creative things like make-up.’
The focus on make-up started as a child in the South of France. Aged ten, Nars always had his nose in French Vogue, studying and sketching the brows and cheekbones of the models. After attending the Carita make-up school in Paris, his career rocketed, with a little spark introduced to the blue touch-paper by his Yves Saint Laurent-clad mother, who booked makeovers with celebrated visagistes of the day and, conveniently, introduced her son to them.
One of the visagistes, Olivier Echaudemaison (now Guerlain’s creative director), saw Nars’s potential and signed him up as an assistant, transporting him to make-up heaven at the prêt-a-porter shows, shading faces and rubbing shoulders with the models he knew from the magazines, girls such as Jerry Hall and Iman. It was the start of a career that took him in the 1980s to New York, where he became part of an elite corps of creatives collaborating with designers such as Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs.
Nars, an only child, is still close to his glamorous parents, who took not only an emotionally supportive and creative interest in his early career, but also a financial one when he formed his company. But despite the address book bulging with high-profile fashion names, he’s a very private man.
He is also a perfectionist (you don’t insist on overseeing the planting position of every single one of the 1,600 palm trees you’ve purchased for your island unless you have a bit of a thing about detail). And in 1994, after blending every base and slicking on every lipstick on the market, he decided to formulate his own.
The products – pure of pigment, lean of line and encased in black rubber (a touch of genius from the influential art director Fabien Baron) – turned out to be both functional and flauntable. There was confidence in their creation, a quality most easily appreciated in the now-classic product the Multiple, a chunky stick of cream-to-powder colour that could be used on eyes, cheeks and lips.
‘I never thought make-up was like brain surgery,’ Nars reflects. ‘I just wanted a line that made sense, using my 25 years of experience. I was never saying there was a whole message behind it. You can always romanticise these things and invent stuff – and some people do that well – but I’m very down-to-earth.’
Except there was a message in his advertisements, namely that it was time to acknowledge that beauty had many faces, that it didn’t have to be bland, or predictable, or fake. Which is why the Sudanese model Alek Wek and Karen Elson, with her Celtic colouring, were invited to front early campaigns.
For next spring’s ads he’s using Lydia Hearst, the daughter of Patty Hearst and the heiress to the Hearst media empire. ‘She’s not your typical beauty,’ says Nars. ‘She has a European face. We went for a Shanghai Express feel with a dark wig, and she played the role so well. And, as I never really feature blondes, I’ve just used [the American supermodel] Amy Wesson. She reminds me of Julie Christie. She has a strong nose. A blonde with character.’
Why has he always backed off from blondes? ‘I wanted to get away from the typical over-retouched, over-plasticised blonde with blue eyes. To find girls with freckles or the features of a Fellini actress. And to see the skin. To see they were human. I wanted to make women feel more confident so they could say, “OK, if I don’t look like those blonde, plastic girls, well, there’s still a place for me out there. I can survive.” It’s changing now. But I hope I’ve been a part of that process.’
Indeed, it’s partly down to his influence that these days it’s positively cool to possess a slightly ‘off’ brand of beauty. Yet at the time, as a would-be player in the cosmetics industry, it was a brave stance for Nars to take. Almost as brave as shooting the ads himself, a task he undertook even though he hadn’t worked as a photographer before.
The reason for that? ‘Very simple. We didn’t have the budget to hire somebody so I thought, “What the hell. Give me a camera.” It wasn’t easy and took a lot of work and concentration, but I was used to working with so many photographers – Avedon, Penn, Newton, Meisel. And many times Meisel would invite me to look in the camera and that helped a lot. ‘
He went on to produce the elegant photography book X-Ray, featuring more than 200 portraits of legendary somebodies and luminous nobodies baring their soul as much as their skin. He’d love to do another X-Ray. There are new faces to capture, such as Amy Winehouse’s. Maybe even do ‘a whole different thing’ with Pamela Anderson.
But, always a practical budgeter, he feels costs might prove prohibitive. So how did Mr Bottom Line come to buy an island, the ultimate rich person’s must-have? Was it always on his shopping-list?
‘Not at all. But when I visited Bora Bora for the millennium, with my parents and a couple of friends, I fell in love at first sight. There was an island for sale nearby, and it happened I was negotiating to sell the company. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have even thought about that kind of thing.’
Motu Tane – Project Nars – is one of the 118 islands of French Polynesia scattered like confetti over the turquoise waters of the South Pacific. Along with the interior designer Christian Liaigre and the landscape architect Pascal Cribier (who has worked at Versailles), he set about rebuilding the dwellings, taking an eco-friendly approach and erecting buildings in keeping with the houses in traditional Tahitian villages.
Nars now spends five to six months of the year working there. But he doesn’t see it as his private kingdom or a place to be reclusive – it’s set up to be ‘a really fun place for friends and family to come and stay’. (The rest of the time, when he’s in New York, it’s rented to those with cavernous pockets.) He’s also preparing a book of photography of Tahiti, which has already been five years in the shooting. ‘Black-and-white landscapes, still lives and portraits of Tahitians – from children to people who are 100 years old. People with great faces.’
To relax – if he needs help relaxing on a wave-lapped, breeze-caressed island, visited occasionally by garlanded, Gauguin-esque women strumming ukuleles – is to watch classic films shot in his own Polynesian backyard. His favourites? The Hurricane (1937) directed by John Ford, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) with Marlon Brando and, most of all, FW Murnau’s iconic silent film Tabu (1931).
‘It’s so gorgeous. And fascinating to see the old Bora Bora. Although, besides the hotel that’s been built, not much has changed.’ Something, no doubt, that suits him very well.
Each month, we will profile an amazing beauty star, if you are free to visit his island, in Bora Bora, please do so, we had the chance last year, to visit friends there for the day.
Ps. we loathe vulgarity at FRESHface too, so everything we do is real, and natural,
super- natural, not!! supernatural!!
There is no need for” universal beauty”, since we are humans and need to look only good on Earth for other humans.
Next month, Shu Uemura, Japanese make up artist.
No, this is not a blog about the heiress from Bel Air, it’s about one of my favourite cities.
