Gossip front woman Beth Ditto discovered makeup as the ultimate tool of self-expression through the punk-feminist Riot Grrrl movement. Now, with YouTube tutorials, Instagram influencers, and select spring shows encouraging women to reacquaint themselves with the transformational power of cosmetics, her boundary-pushing battle cry is gaining ground. Following turns on Marc Jacobs’s spring runway and in Alexander Wang’s fall DoSomething campaign, Ditto shares her thoughts on the enduring art of embellishment.
Some people can draw, some people can sew, but putting on makeup has always been my jam. I used to say that if things went off a cliff with singing, I’d go straight to cosmetology school! I think it comes from being a child of the eighties. I grew up in a dry county in Arkansas, and there were a lot of Church of Christ influences, which were strong enough that the local cable company stopped carrying MTV after only two years. My mom was a young rock mom, though, so there was always music in the house, and I have lasting images of Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson, of Madonna and Human League and Boy George—all these artists who looked as incredible and outrageous as they sounded. I used to spend hours drawing on the Madonna mole, and dyeing my hair with Kool-Aid mixed with some kind of creamy base, like Noxzema. (Turns out just pouring it over your head doesn’t work.) It was a wild time of pure pop culture. Video was new, and everything felt full of energy and experimental. In some ways, my visual sense is still a little stuck in this two-year MTV time capsule.
When I was in fourth grade, my mother ordered some navy and plum liquid felt-tip eyeliner pens from Avon—which was très fancy for us—and I’ve basically had to have my eyes done ever since. When I play a show, I put on MAC’s Liquidlast Liner in Point Black and center everything else around it. I can’t say enough good things about that product. It just doesn’t budge. I’m not the kind of singer who stays in one place, so it’s all about industrial-strength staying power for me. Onstage and in everyday life, I don’t wear a lot of foundation or blush, and I don’t get into all of the online tutorials about contouring, either.
But I do think it’s important that those videos are being made—that you can be in a small town in the middle of nowhere and find out how to do a perfect Cleopatra eye. There are so many incredible artists out there who are sharing their work online, from absolute, bow-down geniuses like Pat McGrath to mind-blowing Instagram wizards like Lyle Reimer. It all helps reinforce the idea that makeup is a tool for transformation, of really limitless self-reinvention that lets you try out identities and ideas. You can just wash off what doesn’t work and start over.
As a teenager, I fought this idea because I thought femininity, and that kind of femininity in particular, was giving in to the man. So I would put makeup on in secret and then take it all off before I left the house. I was going through my radical-feminist phase, which followed my Boy George phase (and my sixties, Patty Duke bouffant–and–cat’s eye phase). Then I discovered the Riot Grrrl movement, and that really changed everything for me. Girls were picking and choosing pieces of “female” fashion and twisting them: lipstick and baby doll dresses paired with dirty Converse and a skateboard; a cute pageboy haircut and a child’s barrette with hairy armpits and a guitar. I stopped seeing makeup, shaved legs, and dresses as the enemy. They aren’t imperatives of being female; they’re part of a costume that people of any gender can choose to wear or not. Artists I love, like Siouxsie Sioux and Patti Smith, have such radically different ways of embodying femininity, but they’re both amazing punk women. The true heart of feminism isn’t about meeting other people’s expectations around your body or your gender. It’s about putting on so much MAC Point Black and L’Oréal Voluminous Butterfly Mascara from the drugstore that it’s almost a joke if that’s what makes you feel comfortable.
To say that reactions to the way I look can be negative is an understatement. But for the most part I own it, and I always have. I’ve had a strong self-identity since I was fairly young because, being a big person, I had to learn early on that what people say about you, and how they treat you, really says more about them than it does about you. So I got good at staying ahead with punch lines, and I got bold about taking up space. That’s part of the reason I was overjoyed to be a part of Marc Jacobs’s spring show. I’m never one to shy away from attention, but what really spoke volumes when I teetered my way through the aisles of New York’s Ziegfeld Theater in François Nars’s clumpy, spidery lashes was seeing Kim Gordon and Bette Midler in the audience—two people who are both so important in their own genres, and who are so different, but also the same in that they’re not conventional. It gave me such a boost because I truly believe that beauty isn’t just about being beautiful. It’s about being interesting. I follow the runways, but I can be just as inspired by a kid at the mall, or an old picture, like Greta Garbo and her incredibly thin eyebrows, or Priscilla Presley, back in the day when she married Elvis. She had the best brows. I pluck mine so thin you can’t tell if I have any at all, which lets me draw them back on however I want. It’s the coolest look, I think. When I see someone with no eyebrows, all I see is how much more room they have for eye shadow.
That ability, to have a vision and stand by it, is why my makeup artist, Andrew Gallimore, and I got on like a house on fire when we met eight years ago in London. He was doing my makeup for a friend’s birthday party, and I knew I had met the man who would draw on my face forever. The party was Marie Antoinette–themed, and I sat right down and let this total stranger transform me into a flawless powdered doughnut. Then, right before we left for the party, we both blacked out our teeth with my tube of Point Black, and that sealed the deal for me. We’ve been inseparable ever since.
The reward of full-on makeup does come with some risk. Once, on tour in Germany, Andrew painted my eyes gold, and they started to burn like they’d been blasted with pepper spray in the middle of a live television show. They were running like faucets, and all I could do was put on a pair of shades. And there I was, wearing sunglasses indoors during an interview like some kind of rock caricature. But instead of feeling pretentious and obnoxious, I just decided to feel like a chic beatnik and not care what anybody else thought. I learned I couldn’t wear that kind of eye pigment again, but it didn’t stop me from experimenting. Because no-makeup makeup is not my thing. It’s not that I feel naked, or ugly with my natural brows, bare lids, and unpainted lips; I just don’t feel dressed. That’s the old Southern woman in me. Besides, I don’t believe in ugly anyway. I like to take words and filter them through context: Gaudy, plain, ugly—they all serve a purpose for painting a picture. It’s up to you to interpret them because beauty is relative.
Hair: Shay Ashual; Makeup: Aaron de Mey
Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves
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